With his kind permission, I'm showing a few of his photos from that set. I've retained his original French captions.

The Jidai Matsuri (lit. Festival of Eras) celebrates Kyoto's more-than-1200-year history, with a long parade of groups in many different periods' period costumes. One great feature (for me) is that it runs right by my house, but a lamentable feature is that it runs right by my house.... in the city... with traffic lights and cars and utility wires and buildings and such. For the most part, photography is just not worth it. (The also-famous Aoi Matsuri runs right by [...]

Adobe today released a public beta sneak-peek version of Lightroom 3. It's intended to show where Lightroom is going, and to allow us to play with it so that we can provide feedback about how we want it to get there.

It's a Beta

The beta release is not intended for real, heavy, day-to-day work.

This is "beta" in the pre-Google sense, where it really means that things are rough, lots of things aren't as smooth as they could be, and some things don't work at all. For example, the image-render pipeline has gotten a bunch of new stuff, [...]

Having been busy with travel and sickness and offline projects for so many months, I think the geek in me was itching to produce something new, so to add to yesterday's new plugin for Adobe Lightroom, today I add another: Extended Search.

Due to Lightroom infrastructure limitations, the search interface is not as smooth as it could be, and there's a nasty bug in Lightroom that sometimes rears its head to make things a bit frustrated, so be sure to read the details on the plugin's page while giving it a try.

Because I have so much free time (NOT!), I've turned copious amounts of it into a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom that provides the simple but useful function of telling you what focal lengths your images were shot at.

It's like a stripped down version of ExposurePlot, but integrated into the Lightroom catalog.

Currently the plugin does only 35mm-equivalent focal-length plotting, but I've named it the more generic "data plot" to allow for future expansion.

You can see the version history and download the latest at the plugin's home page.

Another photo from yesterday's Shichi-go-san event with Anthony. Anthony gestures to his grandfather with his ougi (folding fan).

I thought I'd give this one a try in B&W, which is a much more difficult proposition than you might expect if you've never done it. In Adobe Lightroom you can adjust all kinds of parameters for how the conversion from color is done, completely changing the character of the result in wild swings with a flick of a slider. Even while remaining in the grayscale world, the creative opportunities are endless... and if you are not guided by an innate sense [...]