High-school friend Ray was the second portraiture-practice session I did while visiting my folks over the new-year break, the first having been a family friend. I like the results from the first session, but I didn't like that I was still so awkward/skill-less on how to conduct, on a person-to-person level, the portraiture session. Technical skill with the camera accounts for maybe 10% of what's needed... the rest is all in how you interact with the person.

Shoving a lens in someone's face and saying "smile" may work fine if the someone is a professional model, but it sure makes [...]

This post is just a bunch of ultra-thin-depth-of-field shots taken with a Nikkor 300mm f/2 lens, at its maximum f/2 aperture. These all date back to 2011, after I first got the lens.

I have a category on my blog of articles with photos taken with this lens, but I'm prompted to post a collection like this after not being all that happy with the super-thin-depth-of-field shots that I shared the other day in "Kyoto's Souren-ji Temple at f/1.2". Many of the shots on today's post aren't all that great either, but some are nice, as were the 300mm/f2 shots [...]

In "Kyoto's Souren-ji Temple at f/1.2" the other day, I shared some ultra-thin-depth-of-field shots taken with a 50mm f/1.2 lens. A thin depth of field can be distracting, or it can make for a great effect -- one that I'm quite partial to -- but I didn't think the shots on that post were all that strong... just odd/different (and colorful).

So, for today's post, I was thinking to share some better examples, but I ran out of time to do the writeup I wanted, so instead I'll just share a couple of cute shots that happen to have a [...]

This is a followup to "An f/1.2 + f/5.6 Pair" from two months ago, from an outing introduced the prior day in "A Few Pretty Pictures from Kyoto’s Middle-of-Nowhere Sourenji Temple". I'd left off with the promise to show a few more f/1.2 shots, so here we finally are.

Nothing here is really that compelling, or even makes good use of the ultra shallow depth of field that f/1.2 affords. Whatever might be notable is more due to "strangeness" than "interest", but it's a bit off the beaten path so I'm posting them.

This kind of shot is cliché, but [...]

I mentioned the other day in "Massive Support Column at Nara's Todai-ji Temple" about a recent photo trip to Nara, an hour's train ride south of Kyoto. I made the trip with Kyoto photographer friend Aeron, who besides being a great photographer is also seriously photogenic (I mean, really, just look at that smile), so along the way I took the opportunity to try some very impromptu portraits.

And when I say "impromptu", I don't mean something like these from five years ago where I spent 15 minutes, or these from six months ago whee I spent a couple of [...]