As I mentioned the other day, I'm interested in upping my people-photography skills, and after watching some Peter Hurley videos I realize that the barrier I face is not technical skill with the camera, but people skills with people.

Knowing what to do is quite different than actually being able to do it, but that's where practice comes in.

So I was out with some friends at a roof-top beer garden the other day and struck up a conversation with the guy at the next table, Bill, a private chef from Boston in town to learn Japanese cooking. We had [...]

In my previous post, which continued on from "Discovery On The Way to The Waterfall", we got as far as the shrine gate seen above, not knowing that just beyond it was a wonderful waterfall.

Not knowing there was a wonderful waterfall meant that we weren't prepared for a wonderful waterfall, so the shots on this post are lacking, but okay considering the circumstances.

There were some large rocks far enough away that the mist wasn't too bad, so I tried to set the camera up on them for a longer shot, while Nicolas apparently made good use of the [...]

As I mentioned yesterday in "Discovery On The Way to The Waterfall", Kyoto biologist Nicolas Joannin sort of likes bugs, so I find myself snapping pictures of the little devils when I'm out with him.

The image above is a crop from this shot:

Warning: this post has pictures of bugs. Don't scroll if you're squeamish. (I'm quite squeamish about bugs, so nothing too wild on this post.)

We were at the Gioji Temple (as I've been posting about, starting with "Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Gioji Temple"), and when we weren't [...]

Last week my blog had a slight bit of drama that illuminated a bit how some of the big tech news sites work internally.

It started when I was reading my normal news sites and came across a surreal article on PetaPixel, a large photography-related news site that I follow daily. The article was surreal because it was claimed to be written by me (though it most certainly wasn't), using one of my photos to illustrate a point about browser color management. The subject of the short article was related to a sub-topic covered in my 2006 writeup "Introduction to [...]

The other day I posted my first attempt at a waterfall shot, in "A Snapshot From Today's Hike: Kuuya-taki Waterfall in Western Kyoto". I'd made an unplaned visit with Nicolas Joannin after the visit to the Gioji Temple that I've been posting about lately.

We discovered the waterfall in the same way that I discover a lot of thing, by following a small mountain road that I'd seen on a map and wondered why it was there. After a while of narrow deep-mountain winding sometimes-rough roads not unlike these I wrote about last year, we came to a small turnoff [...]