While taking long exposure night shots of Itsukushima Shrine's Gate (厳島神社、宮島) in Miyajima, the brilliant illumination was turned off, and the area became quite dark. I thought I'd give it a try with the lights off, but as you can see above, my one attempt came out completely dark. Since it was late, I didn't want to spend the time trying again for a more reasonable exposure, so we packed up and returned to the hotel.

When I got home and loaded all the images into Lightroom, I intended to delete this one along with all the other rejects. More [...]

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Nikon is hosting a series of hands-on preview events across Japan for its recently-announced D3 and D300 cameras. Today, Zak and Shimada-san joined me for a trip to attend the event in Osaka, which started today and runs through the weekend.

I thought it'd be nice to head down in style, so after some excellent ramen on the 10th floor of Kyoto Station, we took the fastest class of bullet train (Nozomi #17) which made the trip in just 14 minutes, hitting 253 km/h (157mph), according to my GPS unit. I thought the maximum speed would be faster (the new [...]

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I've just pushed a major new version of my Photoshop calendar-template-building script, which creates the components of a calendar as a many-layered PhotoShop document, that can then be changed and tweaked, have photos added, etc.

The version history shows lots of new things since the previous version:

Can now create calendars in 58 languages. Added ability to display week numbers. Added ability to change annotation font name/size/color/opacity. Added ability to force linebreaks in annotation text. Added import/include/<context> support to annotation file. Annotation filename specifications with "YYYY" auto-convert to the calendar's target year. Can now include the year in an annotation's [...]
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When programming scripts for Photoshop, you sometimes need to know Photoshop's internal name for a font. That name almost always differs from the name presented in the drop-down list of fonts. For example, the internal name for the Arial font is "ArialMT."

A simple way to find out the internal name of a font is to create a text layer using the font, then invoking this Show Font Name.jsx script from within Photoshop. When executed, an alert will pop up showing the internal name of the font.

If you don't know how to install a Photoshop jsx file, mimic the [...]
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