More than two years in the works, Adobe has finally released Lightroom 3. You can download a 30-day trial from Adobe's Lightroom product page.

There are plenty of places you can find all kinds of info about what's new, including:

Victoria Bampton's "What's New in Lightroom 3" post. Victoria's what's-new posts are always the most definitive authority on the subject.

Wade Heninger has a robust "Lightroom Tuesday" post with a huge summary of links.

If you're peeking here at my blog, perhaps you're interested in what this means for my plugins, so that's what this post is about....

First of [...]

I'm so buried with work that I haven't even read email for a few days, but took a few minutes to check out Hayaku: A Time Lapse Journey Through Japan, a short but intensively beautiful video by Brad Kremer, and was so glad I did... it's a stunning video, even if you have no particular interest in Japan.

You can watch it at normal quality right here, but I'd recommend viewing the high-def version at Vimeo, in full screen....

As beautiful as it is at face value, it's 100× more so if you consider the effort and technical skill that [...]

As I mentioned in the previous post, on Friday we went to KidZania, a wonderful place covered in these many posts.

Unlike the first time, which was crammed full of families at absolute capacity, this time was on a school day that Anthony had off, and there were only about half the kids (capacity is 800 kids, and there were about 400, we were told). The breathing room made it much more enjoyable, especially for the parents because you could move easily when you wanted, and sit when you wanted. For the kids, there was a lot less waiting... often, [...]

(All these photos are through multiple layers of glass from outside the studio, so sorry about the quality.)

Anthony did a solo radio show today for "Funky 802" (FM802, a popular Osaka pop radio station). It was his first time on the radio, and though he started a bit rough, he quickly warmed up to it.

( Either that, or we went to KidZania for the day. )

Continued here...

Well, it's not "Three Generations" quite in the same way as this shot or this one, but you get the idea.

As you can tell by my lean posting schedule of late, I'm buried with work on my Lightroom plugins, hoping Lr3 doesn't come out before I'm ready. But I had the opportunity to use an amazing lens today, and took it for a short stroll near my place.

The lens -- an all-manual Cosina Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 -- is a full 100% macro, something I'd never used before. I got close with the 64% macro of the Sigma Bigma [...]