As I mentioned the other day, I'm interested in upping my people-photography skills, and after watching some Peter Hurley videos I realize that the barrier I face is not technical skill with the camera, but people skills with people.

Knowing what to do is quite different than actually being able to do it, but that's where practice comes in.

So I was out with some friends at a roof-top beer garden the other day and struck up a conversation with the guy at the next table, Bill, a private chef from Boston in town to learn Japanese cooking. We had [...]

The other day I posted my first attempt at a waterfall shot, in "A Snapshot From Today's Hike: Kuuya-taki Waterfall in Western Kyoto". I'd made an unplaned visit with Nicolas Joannin after the visit to the Gioji Temple that I've been posting about lately.

We discovered the waterfall in the same way that I discover a lot of thing, by following a small mountain road that I'd seen on a map and wondered why it was there. After a while of narrow deep-mountain winding sometimes-rough roads not unlike these I wrote about last year, we came to a small turnoff [...]

Back again to the mossy temple visit from "Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Gioji Temple", with an orange followup counterpart to the "Gioji Temple Photo Shoot: Nicolas’s White Little Mushrooms" post.

The temple's entrance gate is covered by a little roof of bamboo and decaying moss-covered wood. For context, here's a photo of the roof with Nicolas under it (photographing a spider):

The bamboo on the roof makes a grid of squares... the mushrooms of today's post are in the lower-rightmost square:

Once Nicolas was done, I moved in with my all-time favorite lens, the [...]

This one is very much a matter of taste, but I came across this rendition of a fall-foliage scene while futzing in Lightroom as I tested my Lightroom plugins. I often need to make an image look completely different than before, so I can tell at a glance when it arrives at an upload destination I'm working on, and in doing this I usually just slam a develop slider one way or the other to its limit. I tend to not pay attention to which slider I grab, or what the result is, but sometimes the result does grab my [...]

I mentioned the other day in a post about a minor heart episode that a local restaurant, Togiya, serves Prucia, a plum wine (umeshu -- 梅酒) from France. I'd never seen a plum wine from outside Japan.

Well, in the store the other day to pick up some of the fiesta-in-a-bottle Sangria Peñasol that I mentioned in last month's "A Bunch Of Blurry Pictures of Folks Pouring Wine", to my surprise I came across a bottle of Prucia on the shelf. In the name of research and public service, I brought it home with me.

I've shown great restraint in [...]