I'm currently at airport hotel in Osaka (which I've recommended before) so I can make an early flight out in the morning, for an unfortunately-sudden family-emergency trip to America. Having arrived here with plenty of time, I'll go ahead follow up on this weekend's "Watching My First Cyclocross Bike Race".

Today's pictures concentrate on the Mud Bath during the practice before the races.

A common pattern was for the rider to enter fast and powerful, with the apparent intention to just brute force his way through the mud. This would have been fine except that the mud was sufficiently deep [...]

I've just released a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom called Bag-o-Goodies. It's a (currently small) collection of little tools that don't merit their own plugin.

One tool lets you compare the shot-taken time between two pictures, such as these shots from yesterday's Kansai Cyclocross races...

... or this set showing the gap between Andy and Antti when they passed me on their final lap...

... or this set of first-shots from my first "real" camera (a Nikon D200) and my current "real" camera (a Nikon D4)....

Anyway, there are only three little tools now, but now that I have the [...]

Today was the last race of the local cyclocross-racing season, and I took the opportunity to see some friends race. Cyclocross bicycle racing is sort of like mini-obstacle-course bicycle racing, with a few laps on a relatively short course going over steep embankments, through mud and sand, over barriers, etc. It rained quit a bit a few days ago, so the course had plenty of photogenic mud.

I literally have not yet seen all the photos I took, but I wanted share a few so as to share the gist of the day.

There are races throughout the day for [...]

This post is a short followup to last month's "The Scourge (or Beauty) of “Snap To Road” with iPhone Location-Tracking Apps", in which I explained how an attempt by Apple to make the iPhone location services more relevant for car navigation can end up destroying the accuracy for other uses such as geoencoding or fitness tracking. When enabled, the user's location is "snapped" to the center of the nearest road; internally Apple calls it "Map Matching"; I call it "Snap to Road".

In the screenshot of Google Earth seen above, the red line, recorded with the "Snap to Road" feature [...]

The old Kyoto Theater Hall near my house reopened today after some years of renovation, emerging as "ROHM Theater Kyoto" (ロームシアター京都). ROHM is a semiconductor company based here in Kyoto, last mentioned on my blog more than 10 years ago, before I got into photography or even blogging that much, on this post about their annual Christmas lights at their company headquarters. They must have paid a boatload of money to someone to get branding rights for this renovated concert/theater complex.

I have a vague recollection of seeing some kind of performance at the original theater 25 years ago, when [...]