As I've mentioned recently, I'm trying to get more skillful with formal portraiture, and to that end yesterday I had another practice session with fellow Kyoto resident Stéphane Barbery.

友達と一緒のポートレート撮影の練習、第二回目。前回と比べて、今回は道具は兆レーバルアっプしましたけれども、能力はまだまだです。 上は友達に撮ってもらった今回の僕です。

We had a ton of new lighting equipment but very little experience on how to use it, so our main goal was to just try all kinds of lighting setups to see what worked and what didn't work. I'll write more on that later.

We also tried to see what worked on the human level... there's so much more behind a good result than technical skill... you have to [...]

Well, this is annoying... my MacBook keyboard has started to go flaky, with several keys no longer working... the "" key, the "" key, and the "” key. Don't see them? Dooh! I can't type them, silly! 🙂

One of the regrettable side effects of Apple's exceedingly-compact, dense designs is that repair/replacement of parts can be "challenging", to phrase it kindly, and the keyboard is a good example: a key is "repaired" by disassembling almost the entire main body and replacing the whole keyboard assembly.

I've got the "AppleCare" extended warranty so I can get it fixed plenty easily, nevertheless [...]
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The fall colors are probably already starting to appear in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but we won't begin to see them in Kyoto for another six weeks, so I'm dipping into the archives for a preview.

These shots are from a trip to south-western Kyoto's Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) last November. As the proximity-search feature of my blog shows, I've posted plenty from this area in the past, including three posts with photos from this particular trip:

So, there's nothing new here, but I like pretty pictures, so here we go...

Considering that I wrote "Mastering Regular Expressions", a generally well received book about computer-science pattern-matching technology, I thought I was quite familiar with them, but I've recently become aware of a dark side I'd not known about.

僕が書いた本（「詳説 正規表現」の英語版）は 岡村靖幸の新曲「ぶーしゃか」のビデオに見られます。 曲はめっちゃへん... ぼくの本とどんな関係かな。 (-:    へんな曲ですが、覚えやすいメロディーです。

Like any technology, they're not everyone's cup of tea, of course, but it seems that overexposure can cause severe..... something.... I'm not quite sure how to explain it, so as evidence I'll just present Yasuyuki Okamura's music video for his song "Buu shaka".

(Note: the song probably makes more sense if you don't understand Japanese.)

Well, I don't mean to make this blog all about clouds, despite my prior post showing a raincloud panorama, just like this one, but I guess that's Kyoto's weather of late. (It's also on my list to follow up on "Pregnant Cloud Over Kyoto" with a sequence of that cloud dumping its water.)

Anyway, this evening I went to the last day of the all-you-can-feast Beer/BBQ before they shut down forever, more or less repeating the performance chronicled in last week's "Diary of Gluttonous Excess: Last Night’s Visit to the Kyoto Avanshell BBQ Beer Garden".

It turns out, though, that [...]