I was suddenly struck today by a profound realization that Anthony's "young man" factor has started to encroach on his cuteness as a kid. Until today, I would see his mental and social advances (such as taking the city bus to school all by himself a year ago) as a cute kid doing big-boy things, which makes the kid in him all the more cute.

Today we had an event where he dressed a bit nicer than normal, after which we went to a park for lunch, and I kept doing double takes at how good he looked. Yes he's [...]

It's been an absolutely horrible cherry-blossom season in Kyoto, with constant cold and rain (and snow!). Today was still cold and windy, but at least it was finally sunny, so the tourists were out in force.

Most had cameras...

Some people had better equipment than others. The overall winner was clearly this group:

It is, of course, the same movie shoot that I posted about the other day, for the film 「マザーウォーター」 ("Mother Water", whatever that means), which has been filming in Kyoto for the last week. (At least that was the plan before the horrible weather.) I thought [...]

Considering the wild, freaky presentations I've been posting recently, I thought I'd lead off today with something quiet and simple.

I had stepped out earlier this evening to check out a movie shoot going on near my place, and snapped the shot above on the spur of the moment. It was well after sunset, so the sky was a deep, rich blue, and the main gate of the Heian Shrine a deep, rich orange, and the reflections in the water a mix of rich colors (blue from the sky, green from the street lights). All and all it was "rich", [...]

A few days ago in "Kyoto Cherry Blossoms Off to a Cold, Wet Start" I lamented that it was still cold and wet and windy, even though the cherry trees had started to blossom early, and speculated that it might even snow the next day. It didn't, but it's snowing right now, fully doubling the number of days I've seen snow in this part of Kyoto this year.

[Update] A few hours later and the snow has really picked up, falling in big fluffy clumps. It's nothing on the order of magnitude of the snow we saw in Shirakawago in [...]

So, in my previous post, "Stupid Tone-Curve Tricks", I presented a few odd tone-curve presets for Lightroom that were of marginal utility. In this post, I present additional presets that are even more useless, if that's at all possible. (If you're not familiar with tone curves in Lightroom 3 beta 2, the aforementioned previous post has an introduction and useful links.)

In the presentations below, mouseover the little tone-curve squares under each screenshot to bring up an example of the preset to the screenshot. All the screenshots for a particular section are loaded upon first mouseover in that section, so [...]