A scant fifteen seconds from the front door of Pierre Nadeau's Swordsmith deep in the rural mountains of Japan's Wakayama Prefecture is a sweeping view of "Aragishima" (commonly written あらぎ島, but sometimes 蘭島), a set of terraced rice paddies shaved from a hill almost completely encompased by the sweep of an almost-full-circle river bend.

The paddies weren't in their most photogenic state when I visited earlier this month, and the weather/lighting situation while I was there didn't help. These photos were taken over the course of a couple of days, so the lighting among them is all over the map. [...]

So, last week with "Revisiting Imabari's Colorful Towel Museum" I was wrapping up a series of posts (part: one and two) about the oddly-interesting Towel Museum in Imabari, Japan, and I ended with a shot of the flowers on our table at the museum's cafe.

For context, here's our table...

... and here's the little shot-glass of flowers on the table...

But the little unassuming collection of flowers becomes great fodder for exploration with the creamy goodness of the Cosina Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5, so while waiting for our food, I took a few minutes to try different compositions. I was [...]

Moderating blog comments -- the triage to weed out spam and such before making submitted comments visible to the public -- can get complicated. Obvious spam is easy (delete it), as are obviously on-topic relevant personal comments without links (approve it). But there's a lot in between.

In particular, if there's a link you have to consider where it goes, and the commenter's purpose for including the link. On one end of the spectrum, spammers will just copy the text of a previously-approved comment and add a link to a site they're spamming for. Or someone will write something that [...]
View full post »

Having finally obtained a manual for the lens I got last week, I've learned a few things. One, it seems that it actually has a built-in slide-out lens hood in addition to the big detachable hood I'd been using. You're supposed to deploy both.

Also, for some reason, it says that proper focus can't be achieved without a filter installed in the filter holder. It can be simple optically-inert glass, but you've got to have something. I don't know how it could matter, but I'll trust the maker on this. Unfortunately, the only filter holder it came with is for [...]

So, as evidenced by "Street Photography (Sort of) In Roppongi Hills" and its followups (parts two and three), I got a new lens last week. Some have asked to see a photo of me with it, so it's fortuitous that Kyoto friend Stéphane Barbery (he of the oft-different artistic sense and some killer Festival of the Ages shots, among much other) actually got a photo of me where I don't think I look horrible. He had been laughing at me for using the new lens, a circa 1983 Nikon 300mm f/2 ("Nikkor ED 300mm f/2 IF"), without a tripod, and [...]