So I went out to the second (of three) Gion Festival festival-in-the-streets evenings as I did yesterday, but this time I neglected to adjust the camera settings, and I left them at what Anthony uses for his stop-motion Lego play. That means that instead of shooting raw as I normally do, which allows for the highest quality results, I ended up shooting in the smallest, lowest-quality JPEGs the camera could do. What a huge mistake.

It's all the more depressing because I must have given my contact info to at least a dozen people, to contact me for copies of [...]

This is the season for the Gion Matsuri festival, and tonight was the first of three evenings when a lot of streets around Shijo Karasuma are closed off for pedestrian traffic. The streets fill with folks (and photographers) enjoying a festive atmosphere..

I was shocked to see the photo above when I came home and checked out my pictures, because it makes it look much more crowded than it actually was. I hear that tomorrow and the next evening will be so crowded that it'll be difficult to move, but this evening was nothing but pleasant.

People come out for [...]

On the way to Pierre Nadeau's sword smithy in May, we came across the photogenic Zaobashi Bridge (蔵王橋) in the rural mountains of Aridagawacho City, in Wakayama Prefecture.

It's a short (160m) bare suspension bridge made of steel... steel grid plates that form the surface of the bridge, bolted on top of simple steel I-beams suspended with steel cables to even bigger steel cables draped over two steel towers. It makes it quite easy to see how all the parts conspire against gravity. It's also photogenic. The people in the photo above were the only ones to stop by while [...]

While at the Shimyouin Temple the other day, I intended to ask permission to take a portrait of the priest and his wife. To prepare, I asked Paul Barr to stand in for a quick test shot in the dim entry room, with soft light splashing in through the door from the gloomy downpour outside.

When I got home, instead of deleting the test shot I started to play with it a bit in Lightroom, and found a fairly powerful image emerge as I pushed it toward a hard-edged black & white (heavy on the blacks, contrast, and clarity).

It [...]

Well, it's not quite Mt. Everest, and not even as high as the mountain we visited in Ehime Prefecture last month, but the view made it feel like it was. Pierre Nadeau, the Japanese swordsmith I visited earlier this month, stopped off to show us this view on the way to lunch.

My imperfect Japanese can sometimes make for comical situations. I heard that we were going for lunch and that I should follow in my car. It was quite a long drive, but I wasn't surprised because someone had said we were going to "Oishiikougen", which I understood as, [...]