A scant fifteen seconds from the front door of Pierre Nadeau's Swordsmith deep in the rural mountains of Japan's Wakayama Prefecture is a sweeping view of "Aragishima" (commonly written あらぎ島, but sometimes 蘭島), a set of terraced rice paddies shaved from a hill almost completely encompased by the sweep of an almost-full-circle river bend.

The paddies weren't in their most photogenic state when I visited earlier this month, and the weather/lighting situation while I was there didn't help. These photos were taken over the course of a couple of days, so the lighting among them is all over the map. [...]

Having finally obtained a manual for the lens I got last week, I've learned a few things. One, it seems that it actually has a built-in slide-out lens hood in addition to the big detachable hood I'd been using. You're supposed to deploy both.

Also, for some reason, it says that proper focus can't be achieved without a filter installed in the filter holder. It can be simple optically-inert glass, but you've got to have something. I don't know how it could matter, but I'll trust the maker on this. Unfortunately, the only filter holder it came with is for [...]

So, as evidenced by "Street Photography (Sort of) In Roppongi Hills" and its followups (parts two and three), I got a new lens last week. Some have asked to see a photo of me with it, so it's fortuitous that Kyoto friend Stéphane Barbery (he of the oft-different artistic sense and some killer Festival of the Ages shots, among much other) actually got a photo of me where I don't think I look horrible. He had been laughing at me for using the new lens, a circa 1983 Nikon 300mm f/2 ("Nikkor ED 300mm f/2 IF"), without a tripod, and [...]

This post follows parts one and two, of some pseudo street photography with the Nikkor 300mm f/2 lens. I used a monopod for these photos, taken in and around Kyoto Station.

I really like the architecture of Kyoto Station, and it likely lends itself to being exploited by a 300mm f/2 lens, but I didn't do it justice and all these photos are fairly boring. But this is a "story" blog, not a "photo" blog, so I'll continue the story of my first day with this lens...

I had hopes that the effect would be interesting, of focusing on someone [...]

This is a continuation of "Street Photography (Sort of) In Roppongi Hills", about some random street photography I did with a 300mm f/2 lens.

It's a huge lens, but not because it has such a great amount of "zoom". The Sigma "Bigma" goes to 500mm (and with a 2× TC, to 1,000mm), but because it's "fast"... it has a huge front element that just drinks in huge amounts of light. It makes the Bigma, which I thought was big, look like a cute little infant.

Because of its size, it's a conspicuous lens that attracts copious amounts of attention, though [...]