The other day I posted a tree/island silhouette that I took on our recent jaunt to Okinawa. The shot was taken in the rain under a gloomy overcast, near dusk. Because I was exposing for the silhouette, I could get by with a relatively undemanding exposure that I could have achieved even with my old D200...

I took the shot from a beach near the road, and while returning to the parking lot in the increasing rain, I noticed an Okinawan grave tucked away deep in a clump of trees, nestled in the darkness at the side of a hill....

Almost two years ago I created and released my autofocus test chart, for testing the autofocus accuracy of a camera/lens combination. Accompanied by a detailed discussion about how to test autofocus, and of issues that might crop up, it has garnered a lot of attention. My daily logs tell me that it's still one of my most popular posts.

About a year ago, I was contacted by Michael Tapes of Michael Tapes Design (makers of the popular WhiBal white-balance reference card). They were working on a device to allow much more accurate/repeatable testing than my chart allowed, and he wanted [...]

Here's a bit of insight that should not be too surprising...

"If your business model relies on charging for services that others are willing and able to do for free, it's probably time to find a new line of work."

It's not uncommon for professional photographers to have a policy, on principle, to never work for free, so a recent post by Strobist's David Hobby suggesting that occasionally working for free has benefits has stirred things up. The one-sentence summary of David's post is:

Use some of the down time this economy has created [...]

I accepted an invite the other day from my friend Shimada-san to visit the Nanzen'in temple/gardens located in a sequestered back corner of the large Nanzenji temple complex. It was my first visit to that sub-temple, and I'll post more about it later, but suffice to say that it was spectacular. I took a bazillion pictures, which I found totally missing when I got home and tried to load them onto my PC. The card was corrupt and Windows hung trying to read it. Yikes!

It's the first time I've had a problem like this in the 10+ years I've [...]

Well, after the once-in-a-lifetime Sunset last week, I've been hoping to cheat death and see a second one, and to do so from a better vantage point. I've taken to sprinting up to the Shogunzuka overlook if a nice sunset looks to be brewing. I've done it three times now, the first having been the day after, and the most recent today.

I arrived just in time to watch a fiery orange/red – seen above – disappear from over the mountains to the west.

Of course, as I've been complaining a lot about of late, the image doesn't really capture [...]