I think my computer senses that I'm about to ditch it because we came back from a short trip and I loaded new photos, but the graphics-card hardware acceleration doesn't seem to work anymore, turning my use of Lightroom from a zippy-responsive experience to a painful, laggy frustration.

So, no new photos for a while... I ended up ordering a Mac Pro, and currently have 8TB of disk sitting in a box by my desk waiting for the Mac to arrive.

So, today I'll post about a new addition to my blog that I quietly added a week ago, highlighted [...]

With his kind permission, I'm showing a few of his photos from that set. I've retained his original French captions.

The Jidai Matsuri (lit. Festival of Eras) celebrates Kyoto's more-than-1200-year history, with a long parade of groups in many different periods' period costumes. One great feature (for me) is that it runs right by my house, but a lamentable feature is that it runs right by my house.... in the city... with traffic lights and cars and utility wires and buildings and such. For the most part, photography is just not worth it. (The also-famous Aoi Matsuri runs right by [...]

Continuing the story about Anthony's turning-7 birthday party, once Anthony was home and through the "balloon gauntlet", we asked Fumie's folks to come over. Anthony and Fumie waited around the corner to ambush them with the balloons...

Anthony was more than happy to avail himself of the four different kinds of sprinkle toppings that Fumie had prepared...

One day last fall, Anthony came back from playing in the park with Fumie, carrying a hand full of stuff he'd found lying around the park. Fumie dumped it into a shallow bowl and sat it on a little table in the living room in front of a sun-facing window.

All season it sat there, and I loved it. I hope they do it again this year.

(If I had any guts, I'd try some of the amazing abstract-nature-macro photography that Dan Sroka makes look so easy and natural. Luckily I don't have a macro lens, so I don't need [...]

Adobe today released a public beta sneak-peek version of Lightroom 3. It's intended to show where Lightroom is going, and to allow us to play with it so that we can provide feedback about how we want it to get there.

It's a Beta

The beta release is not intended for real, heavy, day-to-day work.

This is "beta" in the pre-Google sense, where it really means that things are rough, lots of things aren't as smooth as they could be, and some things don't work at all. For example, the image-render pipeline has gotten a bunch of new stuff, [...]