The tone curve is one of the ways that Adobe Lightroom offers to adjust an image. It's basically a "brightness map" that normally indicates "dim parts of the image are shown as black, bright parts are show as white, and things in between are shown proportionally somewhere along the line between the two". The screenshot below highlights Lightroom's default tone curve, which is mostly a straight line (that is, "proportional") from dark to bright...

The idea of a tone curve is general to photo-editing applications; if you're not sure of what one is, you might take a look at this [...]

The weather has been miserable lately -- cold and rainy, with possible snow tomorrow -- but the cherry blossoms have started blooming already, a week earlier than normal. You can see the normal season for the trees near my place in the month-long cherry-blossom time-lapse from a few years ago. It stopped drizzling for a bit late this afternoon, so I went out for a picture.

My main intent this afternoon was to try to get something that highlighted that one tree had absolutely no blossoms yet, while the trees next to it were well on their way. (You can [...]

So in the post a week ago about our visit to the palm reserve on the last day of our short trip to the southern-Japan island of Ishigaki last May, I ended up with a photo of a small tree-climbing lizard.

Here's a slightly larger tree-climbing lizard...

Even stranger was the location, a long series of underground limestone caves whose only representation above ground was a set of covered stairs descending down from a small parking lot. (There's an entertainment complex some distance away where you buy tickets.)

The area you could walk ended under a gaping hole in the [...]

Anthony finished first grade on Friday, capping a year of very big events in a little boy's life. The picture above includes self portraits of his teacher and of all the kids in his class.

Can you guess which is his?

The Japanese school year runs from April to March, and so it was a year ago that he graduated from kindergarten in a big ceremony with lots of pomp and circumstance. Then in April he started first grade, and soon was taking the city bus on his own to school in the morning, and home in the afternoon. Unlike [...]

Today was Fumie's birthday, and her folks were kind enough to host dinner and cake. Dinner was huge, so mercifully the cake was small, though I think the same number of calories as a jumbo "party size" were somehow packed in nevertheless. The frosting was actually rich, creamy cream... sweet, but not overpoweringly so like most frosting. It was excellent.

Happy birthday, honey.