The photo above is a repeat of the first photo in yesterday's post. They're some cherry blossoms that were overhanging our car in the parking lot of a restaurant on Awaji Island. The image has some strange artifacts that I'm at a loss to explain, so thought I'd ask whether anyone understands their source.

Here are two full-resolution crops – one from near the center, and another from left of center – that show some odd haloes around some items, but not around others...

Clicking on any of these images brings up the full-resoltion 4,256 × 2,832 pixel image.

These [...]

For the last month or so I've been working on a new Lightroom plugin that allows one to edit metadata-viewer presets (that is, to adjust to their liking the list of photo-info items that Lightroom displays; an in-Lightroom version of the web-based preset editor that I built a couple of years ago).

What the plugin does is simple, but building the UI (user interaction) has proven to be the most difficult among all the plugins I've done, by far. It's been driving me batty.

So, I'm shoving it out as a beta before it drives me completely crazy. Here it [...]
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So, I've still got my cold, although it's finally starting to get better. Hence, fairly light posts lately, and this one is no exception. It's a collection of photos from the same April 5th stroll last year that produced Cherry-Blossom Full Bloom Hits Kyoto and Cherry-Blossom Joie de Vivre in Kyoto, as well as the "darker-side" post, The Hanami was Nice, But.... It was a fruitful day, so here are a few more pictures that will serve as a Cherry-Blossom Preview.

The area near my place is glorious during cherry-blossom season, but the ugly cinderblock wall often spoiled photos, so [...]

I've got a horrible cold at the moment, but my days of misery have been punctuated by news of two glorious events. Yesterday there was news of my niece Titi's birth, and today there was an email from Katz Eye Optics that they now have a model available for the D700. Woohoo! I couldn't type fast enough to order one.

I've long complained about the stock focus screen on the D700, particularly in conjunction with low-light photography.

Since getting a Katz Eye for my D200, I've found it to be indispensable. I got so used to it that the first [...]
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On my way to see Anthony's first ski experience earlier in the month, I stopped by the Shirohige Shrine on the waters of Lake Biwa, in Takashima Japan, to take a few pictures. I posted a "washed out" picture of the shrine's main gate in the middle of the water that I'll repeat here:

I really like the washed-out effect in this shot, even though it's the exact opposite of what I generally try to get. I usually try to get the sunburst streaming in, like in these shots from my blog archive: Kouri Island (Okinawa) and Midwest America (Ohio) [...]