I went to the tooshiya archery event for the first time, held annually at the Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto today. The official name of the event is 「第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会」. Mostly it's for ranked archers who have turned 20 years old this past year (and there were 2,132 that took part today), but this was one of a couple dozen instructors who got to shoot, and who ended up placing.

Having hauled a massive lens around all day, I got home to find that I was more exhausted than I ever recall. After an hour's power nap and a hot bath, [...]

In the comments of a recent post about GPS receivers, it was suggested that the GPS receiver in the iPhone was useful for keeping tracklogs. I had bad experiences with iPhone location services when I tested in 2009, but perhaps my test wasn't good, or perhaps the old iPhone 3 wasn't good, so I thought I'd give it another try.

So, the other day I took three GPS receivers with me while I did some errands. As I'm apt to do lately, I walked.

This post is a comparison of the resulting tracklogs.

The three devices I took along on [...]

A bit more than a year and a half after releasing Lightroom 3, Adobe today has released (the first?) public beta for Lightroom 4.

Lightroom 4 has lots of new big-ticket goodies, including a book module, map module (with geoencoding!), soft proofing, more video support, and a new render engine that takes the dramatic improvements in raw image conversion seen in the Lr2→Lr3 to the next leap. There are also many small improvements sprinkled about.

Adobe's Lightroom-Journal announcement gives some details, but for a comprehensive list of changes, see Victoria Bampton's always-excellent "What's [...]
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This year has gotten off slowly for me, having woken up January 1st with a cold and all, but with "Inspired Artistic Temple Shot" and its followup, "Simple Temple Sliding Wall", I seem to have a black-and-white theme going, so I'll continue that today with a post about charcoal, from last year's visit to Japanese swordsmith Pierre Nadaeu (the swords are Japanese; Pierre is Canadian).

All the photos on today's post are shown in full color, but the subject matter's lack of chromatic variety makes them feel more monochrome than not.

A swordsmith can use various things to heat the [...]

Now that Nikon has announced its next flagship pro SLR, the Nikon D4, with much flowery prose but few hard details, discussion and debate and speculation and flames and praise have filled camera circles.

This post is long, but here's the two-sentence summary for the "tl;dr" crowd:

As with most any technology release (hardware or software), folks tend to frame their personal whims and desires as "absolutely required!", while features that they don't personally care about become unneeded fluff. Photographers who don't care about video, for example, lament the assumed cost of all the new video features.

This is [...]
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