Our summer visit to The States is running down, and we've been so busy with family stuff and summer homework that it's hard to squeeze out time to process my photos and to write a post.

Last week, Anthony played at a community pool with a friend, 10-year-old Michael, and his next-door neighbor, 9-year-old Kenny....

I thought this photo reminded me of the three-year-old Anthony "Hunk" photo, but now that I compare directly, it's not quite there, but I'll put the photo and link here anyway.

Since finally getting a real macro lens (a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5), my world has opened up to enjoying some of the smaller things in (and forms of) life. Sometimes, such as with the photo above, a complete lack of scale pretty much kills the "oh, tiny!" appeal, especially these days when the same shallow depth of field can be achieved with a tilt lens or the Brenizer method.

Zooming back a bit somehow helps establish the smallness of the scale...

... but without context, it's still lacking something. We like context, and search for it, and feel odd when we [...]

A big part of the experience of visiting my folks' in Ohio is feeding the birds on the back porch, and for me, trying to photograph them (such as reported with varying degrees of success here, here, here, and here). Usually I just run out for a quick picture, but the other day I sat down with a cup of coffee and a big lens and tried spending just a bit more effort on it...

I started out using the Voigtländer 125mm, but for the goldfinches on the feeder that I intended to concentrate on, it required me to be [...]

Continuing along from yesterday's post about kanji-study apps and the previous day's app review by a toddler, this post is just some cute (to me) pictures of the kids playing Air Hockey on the iPad.

We try not to let the kids do too much with computer games, but it was the day Josh and Jena were returning home, so wanted to indulge them a bit. They knew air hockey from previous real-life experiences, such as this from last week...

... and this from a year ago...

I think I'm going to have to get into iPad app development... I just can't find the flashcard-type app I know should exist: to help Japanese kids study kanji ("Chinese characters").

There are about 2,000 kanji that an educated Japanese uses on a daily basis, and Japanese kids start learning in first grade. The Japanese Ministry of Education sets out exactly which characters are learned in each of the first six years of grade school (currently 80 characters in first grade, 160 in second grade, and so on).

By the time kids start learning kanji in the middle of first [...]
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