I posted a bit the other day (here and here) about catching the tail end of the Jidai Matsuri (時代祭, "Festival of the Ages"). Here are some more from early on in what I shot. (Having just returned from a long-weekend trip, I'm pretty much behind on everything.)

When I first got out there, the parade had stalled for some reason, so I got a long opportunity to photograph the mounted archer seen above and in the second link, and having not failed to immediately notice my not-so-subtle 300mm f/2, he pranced a bit for the camera, which I really [...]

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Kyoto friend Zak Braverman was asked by his friend, pottery artisan Koji Kamada, to take photos of some recent pieces. Knowing I'm into photography, and of late trying to up my game on artificial lighting, Zak kindly invited me along.

I prepared everything I imagined I would need for, well, what I imagined I would be shooting, but upon arrival I quickly realized that my imagination differed significantly from reality, and we were totally unprepared. Specifically, I was unprepared for 1) the need for dark backgrounds instead of white, and 2) pottery that had direct reflections, like a mirror.

We [...]

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I did something yesterday that I'd never done: I went out shooting with two camera bodies.

I often go out shooting with one body and many lenses, changing lenses upwards of 70 times on a long and interesting outing, and this works well for what I like to do, but when I added the Nikon D4 to my Nikon D700 at the start of the summer, I specifically thought it might be nice to have two bodies when out among the festive crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, one body with the huge Nikkor 300mm f/2, and another with a [...]

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Busy day today... caught the fringe of two famous Kyoto festivals. In the afternoon was Jidai Matsuri (時代祭 -- "Festival of the Ages"), more or less a re-enactment parade representing the many periods Kyoto's long history. I caught the tail end of the procession as it made its way past my place.

(I'll post more another day, I'm sure, but in the meantime, for a different take on the genre, check out Stéphane Barbery's photos from three years ago, and from today.)

In the evening was the Kurama Fire Festival, which involves a lot of fire being heaved and hoed [...]

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I've just released a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom:

→  Jeffrey's "Data Explorer" Lightroom Plugin  ←

It lets you group photos by metadata (e.g. "what lenses did I use with these photos?") just like Lightroom's built in Library Grid Filter, but the plugin supports many more criteria. As of its initial release, the plugin provides 109 ways to slice and dice your photos, including things such as "Which photos have how much crop?" and "What photos are hidden within collapsed stacks?" and "What audio frame rates are seen in my videos?".

Plus 106 more.

I started writing it a couple [...]

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