Today was the Daimonji Festival in Kyoto, where big mountainside bonfires are lit in the evening. Normally I'm visiting my folks during the summer, so this was the first time in years for me to see it, and the first time since I became particularly interested in photography.

It's not particularly photogenic, unless, I suppose, you could get up closer to the fires. (For a look at where the fires are lit, see "Daimonji’s Hidoko Fire Pits")

The snapshot above was done handheld with little forethought; with a bit more effort I'm sure I could have gotten something more worthy, [...]

When I bought my laptop (an Apple MacBook Pro) several years ago, I powered it on for a few seconds to make sure it at least booted, then shut it down and replaced the stock 500GB drive with a 1TB drive of my own, then installed the OS.

It worked great, but after a few years the machine started to feel sluggish, as if I was suddenly using Windows. The disk I'd put in was big, but also slow (5,200RPM), so maybe I'd reclaim some speed by using an SSD (solid-state disk)? When I realized that I could replace the [...]

Dipping into the several metric tons of pixels that I want to post but have yet to barely even look at myself, a short trip back to late April, to a visit to the Joshoko-ji Temple (常照皇寺, more properly transliterated in English as "Joushoukou-ji") with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin. It was an amazing place, though the harsh sunlight of the hot spring day made for photographic challenges.

I did post just a few shots the day after the trip, in "Pretty As a Peach Blossom", and some time later some shots that happened to be from that outing to [...]

I wrote in yesterday's post about great T-Shirts for Kyoto's hot summer, but took advantage of an even better situation today when I made a visit to the Kuuya-taki Waterfall (空也滝) in western Kyoto. It was my third visit, and I've posted about it at length before, such as "Finally Reaching the Kuuya-taki Waterfall in Western Kyoto" last month.

Anthony and I went with some friends from France, Anne and Yoshi, and 10-year-old Nao. I have much I want to post, but lacking energy this evening I'll put just a few shots.

There was much less water than when I [...]

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in "Going Max Cliché While Learning About Off-Camera Flash", I've recently gotten into fairly good shape, having lost more weight than I knew I needed to. It feels great, but means all my clothes have become extra frumpy. They were frumpy to begin with, and only got worse as I lost weight.

私は背が高いので、日本では服の買い物はあんまり出来ませんけれども、ユニクロの「ドライカラーＶネックＴ」は最近の僕にぴったり。濡れたらすぐ乾くて気持ち良い、京都の暑い夏のおすすめです。

At 192cm (~6'4") I can't easily buy clothes in Japan -- even short-sleeve shirts generally don't fit quite right -- but I found a T-shirt that I really like, and it's become my new summer uniform.

It's the Uniqlo [...]