It's been a while since one of my "What am I?" quizzes, so I thought I'd throw this one up. Like this quiz and this one, it's got some long thin things in it, but it's not related to either previous post.

It's also not related to music.

So, what do we have here?

I complain sometimes about how stressful my plugin development can get, and the time surrounding a major plugin event like we've had this week all the more so, but I shouldn't complain. I found myself in somewhat of an absurdly happy situation today, and thought that life wasn't all that bad. 🙂

I was enjoying a long, leisurely soak in my deep Japanese bath, up to my neck in steaming hot water, playing a game on my iPad against my boy who was using my iPhone in the living room, as we voice-chatted and shot spitballs and rubber-bands at each [...]

Taking a break from the craziness that ensued for me yesterday when Lightroom 4 was released, I thought I'd pick up from last month's "Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine: Intense Burn Begins".

Once the blaze was going in earnest, they started throwing bundles of wooden slats into the fire, each slat with someone's wish for good health or the like written on it...

The heat for the fire-poker guy must have been almost unbearable. It was very very hot, even for me upwind 20 meters (two highway-bus lengths) away. But he could never retreat.

As I wrote about in [...]

After a two-month public beta, Adobe has just released Lightroom 4.0.

It's not a free upgrade, but with the price now cut in half (upgrades are now $80), it's an easy decision.*  There's a lot new if you're coming from Lr3, the most important likely being the new rendering engine. Laura Shoe has a post and video about what's new here, and Victoria Bampton's always exhaustive "what's new" list is here.

* At just $80 for the upgrade, even from Lr1, it's an easy decision, but Adobe usually comps me a free copy, which is very nice, so if [...]

I continue to be busy getting my Lightroom Plugins ready for the next release of Lightroom 4 (the real thing if not another beta)... I just don't seem to have the energy to much else, but I hate not posting every day, much less every week(!)

So for something easy to post today, I just went through my photos from a couple of outings last November to pick a few pretty pictures, and ended up deciding to make them all fodder for my desktop-background category. Most have some fairly aggressive processing to make them punchy.

Not much prose with these [...]