You may have noticed that the images were a bit smaller in my previous post about Fumie's pointe shoes, compared to the sizes I normally use (such as in the post before that, full of, uncharacteristically, shots of me).

For years, I've followed a basic pattern on my blog for landscape-orientation photos -- those wider than tall -- giving them a basic width of 690 pixels, but yesterday's were a bit smaller at 600 pixels wide. For portrait-oriented images -- those taller than wide -- I have traditionally gone with 700 pixels tall, but yesterday limited it to 500 pixels [...]

Fumie was excited today to get a new pair of pointe shoes (ballet "toe shoes"), having ordered a special custom pair from Tokyo ballet shop Avignon, with the part directly above the toes (the "vamp") shorter than normal.

She's been looking for a pair of pointe shoes that really suits her feet for years, and recently found a pair from Avignon that showed promise, but the vamp was a bit too tall for her preference. Avignon is one of the few places in Japan that will build to order, so with great hope she asked for a pair with the [...]

I lost the last two days of my life to a cold that started coming on while writing the previous post. Starting to feel better today, a light and airy subject like flowers helps to brighten the mood.

I have the opposite of a green thumb... I kill every plant I touch, it seems, regardless of whether it's potted or vased. When I get cut flowers from the florist (e.g. for Mother's Day, etc.) I sometimes get that expensive liquid you add to the vase water that's supposed to extend the life of the flowers, but it has never seemed [...]

Back during the Lightroom 2 days (circa early 2009), I spent some intense weeks writing a really great plugin, allowing a user to create custom image metadata fields on the fly. If a user suddenly decides that he wants an extra metadata field to describe the weather for a shot, or the flash setup, or a model's name, or whatever, just a few clicks in a plugin dialog and voilà, it would appear with the standard image metadata alongside each photo. I really wanted this for my own use, and I knew lots of folks would be jazzed about it [...]

So, as I mentioned this morning, we had a nice view of the annular eclipse today. I'd never seen one (nor have I ever seen a total eclipse, except on TV). Here are a few more pictures.

That picture above illustrates in one way just how bright the sun is... I was using stacked filters to cut all but 1/3,200th of the light, leaving everything dark except the sun, which was still completely blown out. I wonder what the dynamic range is during one of these things, between the surface of the moon and the surface of the sun.

Notice [...]