While at the Shimyouin Temple the other day, I intended to ask permission to take a portrait of the priest and his wife. To prepare, I asked Paul Barr to stand in for a quick test shot in the dim entry room, with soft light splashing in through the door from the gloomy downpour outside.

When I got home, instead of deleting the test shot I started to play with it a bit in Lightroom, and found a fairly powerful image emerge as I pushed it toward a hard-edged black & white (heavy on the blacks, contrast, and clarity).

It [...]

For a while I was posting installments in the story about my brother-in-law's wedding last month, with the most recent installment being "Shogo and Namiko's Wedding: Reception, Part V (Entertainment)" three weeks ago. I stopped putting up new posts midstream because I suddenly had the idea to make a photo book of their wedding as a gift, and so dedicated a lot of time to it, and also because I wanted to hold back the rest of the photos until I could present the book.

The photo above is probably the best photo I've ever taken, except using "photo" and [...]

I was suddenly struck today by a profound realization that Anthony's "young man" factor has started to encroach on his cuteness as a kid. Until today, I would see his mental and social advances (such as taking the city bus to school all by himself a year ago) as a cute kid doing big-boy things, which makes the kid in him all the more cute.

Today we had an event where he dressed a bit nicer than normal, after which we went to a park for lunch, and I kept doing double takes at how good he looked. Yes he's [...]

As I mentioned the other day, today Anthony had his first shichi-go-san event, an important milestone in Japanese culture for kids aged six, four and two. The event's name means "seven, five, three", and represent the ages when you add a year to account for their time in the womb.

The Heian Shrine near our place is very popular for this, and last year I would sometimes just hang out around the shrine during and photograph the kids, the results of which I've posted in "Kids in Kimono: Cute Enough to Eat", "More Kids in Kimono: Still Cute", and one [...]

Having just returned from a trip Stateside with Anthony, I'm reminded that I neglected to post these photos before leaving. Before the trip, I had posted about Curious George's new passport; these are from the same photo session in early July, where I took the photo for Anthony's new Japanese passport. (We'd renewed his American passport last year.)

Anthony was hamming it up, as you can see, but we eventually got one for his passport. Even in the one directly above, he's still smiling too much for a Japanese passport, so we had to tone it down.

Until you actually [...]