I have no idea why I like this shot, but I did at first glance, and I still do, so here it is. It's one of the first shots I took on a visit to the most fabulous Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) in southern Kyoto last year, with Paul Barr. (As an aside, Paul is likely at this very moment on a flight from The States to make another visit this year, but that's a post for next week).

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in "Kyoto Fall-Color Preview With Impact: Impressionism in Lightroom", I found thousands of photos [...]

Wow, what an ordeal. It started a month or so ago when I decided to put some of my photos on my iPad and iPhone, and found that it was harder to do well than I would have thought. A lot harder.

A month later, finally, and I have a good workflow. It turns out that I ended up writing a new Lightroom plugin ("Crop for iPad", which I've just released), and updated two others, geoencoding support and my Tree Publisher. All just to get reasonable copies of my photos on my iPad and iPhone.

I wrote up my experiences [...]

Here are a few final photos from the Ikebana show that I talked about the other day. As I wrote then, the works are just lined up on folding tables right in front of unappealing backdrops, so it's not a great situation for photography....

... under mixed lighting...

... in a crowd...

Nevertheless, here are some shots showing a variety of ikebana works and details. Not all are my cup of tea, but I like many of them....

Looking over photos from the Ikebana show I mentioned yesterday, I came across this shot with not a single thing in focus, but somehow I really like its mood. The closest edge is the least out of focus, but everything being out of focus makes the whole thing seem dreamy. I tend to be partial to the "sliver of focus" effect (as seen here, here, here, and here), but this takes it even further by having the "in focus" part not even in focus. It's almost like a painting.

This has only a little post processing, in Lightroom. I set [...]

In one sense, photographing an ikebana display can be like shooting fish in a barrel or hunting game in a zoo... everything is sitting right before you just waiting for you to point and click, but on the other hand, having to choose what to photograph -- how to frame it, from what angle... how to expose it, where to focus it, and how thin or thick to set the depth of field -- raises things to a whole new artistic challenge. Offer the same floral arrangement in the same situation to 10 good photographers, and I'd guess you'd come [...]