I've been doing a lot of portraiture practice lately, so I finally made a portraiture-practice category on my blog. This post is likely the last for a while, a few shots from last week with Paul Barr and Stéphane Barbery.

上は私、カメラと一寸近くすきるし、目は開けすぎ。結果は面白いだと思いますが、一寸気持ち悪いかもしれない。どう思いますか。以下の写真と比べる。

The photos on this post of me, such as the one above, were taken by Paul Barr, and post processed by me (mostly with Paul looking over my shoulder).

I think the one above has some interesting (yet perhaps disconcerting) character, for a couple of reasons. First there's the distortion caused by the close proximity of the lens to [...]

More portraiture practice with Paul Barr, slightly less impromptu than those portraits we did three weeks ago, but with similar results. These are from the same day last week that he shot me.

In the shots of me that Paul took, some folks liked the last shot but not the first, which is perhaps a little odd because it's the same photo with a different crop. Maybe it's because the tighter crop gets rid of the silly turtleneck. Anyway, here's a tighter crop of the first shot above, but also with a few processing differences...

I don't feel that I [...]

A few random pretty pictures from various outings last year. If you're interested in the context for the shot, or other pictures from the same area, see the "nearby photos" link under for photos and posts from the same location.

More portraiture practice, today for the first time with Paul Barr behind the camera. I did some very impromptu portraiture practice with Paul the other day, but today he tried it with me.

When Paul stopped by, I happened to be wearing a long-sleeve Uniqlo shirt that I'd picked up yesterday so that I had something longsleeve that actually fit. It's cold outside in Kyoto these days, but I didn't want to wear my normal bright yellow winter coat, so grabbed a black leather jacket, and when I realized just how pretentious the combination looked, also grabbed some reading glasses [...]

A couple of years ago I borrowed a friend's little camera with a very fast lens, a Voigtländer Nokton 25mm, which sports a rare f/0.95 aperture. I took a few snaps of some weeds with it as tests, but I didn't care for the electric viewfinder (I like the real optical viewfinder I'm used to), so quickly returned it.

I couldn't load the photos into Lightroom at the time because it couldn't handle the sub-f/1 lens, but I submitted a bug report and somewhere along the way it was fixed, so I could eventually load the images with metadata intact.