While on a bike ride the other day, we stopped to watch a bit of hubbub as 15+ people doing a photo shoot for a catalog spent the better part of half an hour for just one shot.

Of course, Anthony doesn't care that they had a Nikon D3 or how they did the lighting, etc., so he was soon off to investigate more important things...

He eventually noticed the ones I was photographing, and he came over and got it (that's the first photo above). He also had one that hadn't yet turned fluffy, and was surprised and interested [...]

Yesterday's picture of a water lily was taken during a dark, rainy day at the City of Kusatsu's ("Water Forest") park. The name in Japanese is mizu no mori (水の森). They have outside gardens with all kinds of water plants, a large greenhouse ("Lotus Hall"), a movie theater, and restaurant. It costs $3 for adults.

It was raining while we where there, which is perhaps appropriate for a "water forest".

One thing I'll never understand is the apparent need in Japanese culture to make allowance for the fact that a smoker might not want to go for more than three [...]

The caption is just a silly reference to the "art" vs. "photography" discussion in my recent post about HDR. When I first looked this picture, I wondered why it was a blurry – it seemed mosaiced or pixelated, as if it hadn't been fully loaded from disk before display – and I waited for it to finish loading and to "snap" into focus. I eventually realized that it wasn't pixelated, but rather, it just had a lot of water drops that you (or, at least, I) don't notice at first.

It's a lotus flower. [UPDATE: Peter Barnes of Barnes Botany [...]

I wrote the other day about some hiking in the hills of eastern Kyoto, finishing up that story noting that a trail we took came out at the back of a "sorta' famous spot", which if you looked at any of the map links, you realized was the Kiyomizu Temple.

This internationally-known cultural attraction is less than 1.2 miles from my house, but I've only been to it a few times, most recently just to photograph the front during one of Kyoto's evening light-up events (with the first photo on that post being the entrance area of Kiyomizu Temple). I [...]

I posted earlier today about Kanazawa Station (Kanazawa, Japan) and how it does a wonderful job of mixing traditional Japanese with modern lines.

As I mentioned, the entire space is visually, geometrically rich, so I definitely had fun trying to capture interesting angles. The abstract results were sometimes enhanced (I perhaps fool myself by thinking) with some creative post-processing in Adobe Lightroom, to add a bit of an edge.

Clearly, this is not my area, photographically speaking, but (photographically speaking) it was quite fun. I just wish that I hadn't been so rushed for time.