The other day I posted the first photo above as one of my "What am I?" quizzes. The second photo shows the same view, but with a smaller aperture and the focus on the foreground.

Here's the view from the front:

I posed the quiz as being a simple one to anyone familiar with the Internet because all one had to do was click on the "nearby photos" link under the photo (as I have under almost all photos I post) to find out that I had previously blogged a post titled "A Bazillion Offering Statuettes at the Sanzen-in Temple", [...]

An old friend from my days toiling in the bit mines at Yahoo! Finance in California was passing through Kyoto on a tour of Japan, and we met up last night for a few hours.

We took a walk over to the Eikando temple to see their evening lightup. I was astounded to find that it wasn't jammed packed... I guess it's still early in the season. I've written about it before (here) from having visited just the outside -- you can enjoy quite a bit of the lightup from near the entrance without having to pay -- but last [...]

In my "Namiko Candid Bride Portrait" post the other day, I mentioned that I'd made a photo book for my brother-in-law Shogo's wedding, and showed a two-page spread of a photo of his bride that I was proud of. You can see in the last photo of that post a bit of the 80-page book I created. In this post, I'll talk about the workflow I use to create photo books with Lightroom, InDesign, and Blurb.

This workflow requires Lightroom 3. As for InDesign, I use CS5, but the same workflow should work with older versions of InDesign (at least [...]

FYI, I've updated my Photoshop Calendar-Template-Building Script page with pre-built calendar Photoshop files for 2011, for those who can't (or don't want to) run the script to build custom calendars. If you can run the script (should work in Photoshop CS2 or later), you can run it to build customized calendar pages that you can then drop your own photos into before printing.

(I built the calendar page show above just for this post... the image has been washed out a bit for the calendar page, but I'd probably wash it out even more for a real calendar, because I [...]

Today started off cold and rainy, forcing me to actually get some development done on my plugins, but it cleared up in the afternoon. I'd been out on a photographic fall-color central-Japan adventure every day so far this week (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu), and wanted to make it a full week-long marathon, so I headed out for a few hours in the afternoon.

These are two of the 426 photos I took today. The one above speaks for itself, but what's going on in the photo below?

Anyone who has taken Internet 101 or has the equivalent in real-life experience [...]