Lighting a scene to photograph in a pleasing way is either a matter of luck, or the combination of two skills: knowing the physics of light (that is, knowing the results you'll get from lighting decisions), and having the creative sense to use that knowledge toward an aesthetically-pleasing end.

For my part, I generally go with the "luck" option, but that's about to change.

I've recently started reading  Light -- Science & Magic:  An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, and the first chapters have made me positively giddy with expectation.

As I lamented once before, good photographers apparently make bad writers [...]

Well, I'm not sure "650× magnification" is exactly the right way to say it because there are so many ways to lie with numbers. The area of the bill shown is about 8mm by 5.3mm, or about 0.066 square inches. With an average LCD display at 86 DPI, the image above appears at about 8 × 5.4 inches, or about 43 square inches (although how big it appears for you depends on the physical size of your monitor, your monitor's dot pitch, your desktop size, and perhaps some browser settings).

So, from the actual area of 0.066 square inches to [...]

In the park with Anthony today, I brushed up against a plant that left my arm plastered with seed pods that apparently became molecularly bonded to my shirt and skin. They were exceedingly difficult to remove. When I was actually able to pry one away, it stuck just as well to my fingers. I could feel it grabbing onto my fingerprints.

If I could then somehow flick it with enough force to propel it away from my finger, it would generally manage to land on my pant leg, which started the whole process over.

I'm not sure I've totally eradicated [...]

I've long known the old adage "if it's out of the frame (or can be cropped out), it doesn't exist." Well, at least I've known the concept – the photographic equivalent of "out of sight, out of mind" – and so if they aren't an adage, they should be.

As I mentioned in one of my Kyoto fall-color previews a couple of weeks ago, that's one of the great challenges in photographing much of the beauty in Kyoto: to not photograph what is not beautiful that often intrudes into an otherwise photogenic scene (such as utility poles and wires). Out [...]

I tried my hand at product photography for the first time today, for a Kyoto charity that takes the wonderful silk fabrics from old kimonos and turns them into stylish garments. Ladies in small, rural villages in various south-east Asian countries (Laos, Cambodia, etc.) who have been trained by the charity actually do the sewing, by hand or on pedal-powered sewing-machines provided by the charity. The whole point is to provide people in these small villages a way to earn a living without having to leave their village/family behind.

The charity's name is "Reborn", which I'd guess refers both to [...]