I'm trying a new look for my blog....

It's a look that I hope is more suitable for the photo-heavy content I tend to produce, and lighter and simpler overall.

I've been working on it for the last month or so. Having not really grasped the essential nature of how to use CSS (style sheets) for a long time, my years of content developed a hodge-podge of style markups that changed over time as both my knowledge of CSS and my sense of aesthetics changed.

It was a monumental task to go over all the older posts to [...]

We just back from a five-day trip to Amami-Ooshima (an island in the south of Japan). While waiting for 858 photos I took to process, I thought I'd post our 2007 Christmas / 2008 New Year's card (nengajou – 年賀状). It features a photo we took with a tripod here in Kyoto, and the family picture that Anthony was commissioned to draw.

For reference, here is a link to last year's and the year before's, and a short introduction to Japanese New Year's Cards that I wrote a couple of years ago.

In a recent post about silly extreme macro photography, I commented that some of the small-aperture f/22 shots weren't good for much except illustrating that I need to clean my image sensor. Just as a small light source like a flashlight casts a sharper shadow than, say, a large light source like a picture window, a small aperture lens setting highlights any dust on the camera's sensor by allowing it to cast a sharper shadow on the sensor's photosites, yielding noticeable spots in the resulting picture. Some of my silly macro shots had blotchy dust spots on them.

I clean [...]
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As I mentioned yesterday, five-year-old Anthony's first present unwrapping set a pattern that we saw a number of times throughout the morning....

For whatever reason, the present from Grandma and Grandpa generated a powerful pose instead. I don't think he really knew what it was, but the picture of a helicopter was likely sufficient to trigger the celebration.

The helicopter thing has a central hub with the helicopter connected by a rod, so that the helicopter can go around and around, and up and down in conjunction with how much power is applied. It actually takes a fair amount of [...]