I attended the wedding of an old friend yesterday; Kevin and Yoko tied the knot on the 68th floor of Yokohama's Landmark Tower, the tallest building in Japan. They appeared on my Impromptu Portraits in the Park post last year not long after they got engaged, as well as in followups here, here, and here.

Kevin is one of those guys who looks better and better with age, but really, you almost didn't notice him or anything else when Yoko was present. "Spectacular" just doesn't do her or that dress justice.

Kevin's selection for the engagement ring – seen out [...]

Continuing from Part 1 and Part 2 about our visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社).....

A short climb from the pretty lake mentioned in Part 1, you come, surprisingly, across a couple of small buildings, one a restaurant, straddling the path:

We stopped for a juice, and to chat with the lady. She was 86, and the fourth generation of her family to own/run the little restaurant. The shrine owns the land, but for whatever reason, the family has these buildings. The building across the path was her house; she had been born there.

I found out later, from [...]

Here are a few more pics from the early part of my visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) with Anthony yesterday....

I tend to take pictures of them whenever I see them (all the time), so I'm surprised that they've appeared on my blog only three times in the past, in posts about Arashiyama, Giouji Temple, and Konpukuji Temple (update: and Miyajima).

Part of yesterday's Elaborate Sub-Shrine facing the pretty lake....

I really liked the rack of gate offerings, as (I think) they made for some great imagery.

The real gates weren't so bad themselves, of course; with paths [...]

On the way home from the park the other day, Anthony and I stopped by the Hotel Okura to pick up a birthday cake for Fumie's mom. Kyoto's Hotel Okura has a first-floor restaurant with excellent (although extremely expensive) food and cake that's part of our Christmas-Eve Tradition.

Not wanting to leave my camera outside in my bicycle basket, I had it with me, and couldn't help but take a picture of the lovely puffy flowers in the lobby. They're all fairly long hand-held exposures, but seem to have turned out okay.

Photo metadata has evolved a mix of seemingly comparable ways to label a photo. Lightroom allows you to enter a "Title", a "Caption", and a "Headline", among others, so which should you use when you upload your images to an online photo-hosting service? That depends, of course, on how what fields you've entered into Lightroom, what you've entered into them, and your goal for the label.

My plugins for Adobe Lightroom that allow you to export photos to online photo-hosting services (for:  Zenfolio   -   SmugMug   -   Flickr   -   Picasa Web ) allow for a [...]