Today was another busy day leaving little room for a blog post (on the plus side, I cleaned my room, but on the other hand, so to speak, Anthony fractured a finger while playing ball at school), so like yesterday, I'm taking it easy, this time with a few simple images from the Shouseien Temple (渉成園), which we first saw the other day in "First Peek at the Shouseien Temple in Downtown Kyoto".

I'm normally good about getting an "establishing shot" that shows the context for some detail or other that I want to share, but I seem to have [...]

Back again to the mossy temple visit from "Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Gioji Temple", with an orange followup counterpart to the "Gioji Temple Photo Shoot: Nicolas’s White Little Mushrooms" post.

The temple's entrance gate is covered by a little roof of bamboo and decaying moss-covered wood. For context, here's a photo of the roof with Nicolas under it (photographing a spider):

The bamboo on the roof makes a grid of squares... the mushrooms of today's post are in the lower-rightmost square:

Once Nicolas was done, I moved in with my all-time favorite lens, the [...]

This one is very much a matter of taste, but I came across this rendition of a fall-foliage scene while futzing in Lightroom as I tested my Lightroom plugins. I often need to make an image look completely different than before, so I can tell at a glance when it arrives at an upload destination I'm working on, and in doing this I usually just slam a develop slider one way or the other to its limit. I tend to not pay attention to which slider I grab, or what the result is, but sometimes the result does grab my [...]

I mentioned the other day in a post about a minor heart episode that a local restaurant, Togiya, serves Prucia, a plum wine (umeshu -- 梅酒) from France. I'd never seen a plum wine from outside Japan.

Well, in the store the other day to pick up some of the fiesta-in-a-bottle Sangria Peñasol that I mentioned in last month's "A Bunch Of Blurry Pictures of Folks Pouring Wine", to my surprise I came across a bottle of Prucia on the shelf. In the name of research and public service, I brought it home with me.

I've shown great restraint in [...]

I have some confidence behind the camera, but none in front of it, and that's pretty hypocritical of me if I want others to be comfortable in front of my lens, so I've decided to do something about it.

In particular, the various videos by master headshot photographer Peter Hurley, such as this two-hour seminar (kindly sponsored by B&H Photo) have got me interested in doing more portraiture.

I'm pretty confident shooting things like flowers and mossy temples and pseudo-candid family stuff and the occasional passing planet or kick-ass lady archer, but real formalish portraits are a different, alien world. [...]