Sensationalist headlines are always a problem in American media, but now I'm seeing it in Japan as well. As I write this, Kyoto has partly cloudy skies and chirping birds, but Tokyo 400km to my east is getting absolutely shellacked by powerful Typhoon #26 of the season.

Yet, it was with surprise that I saw this headline on the Japan Times (major English daily in Japan) web site:

This "largest in a decade" surprised me, so I immediately switched to back to current data about the typhoon, screen captured here for posterity:

The [...]

I paid a visit today to the Shouren'in Temple (青蓮院) in Eastern Kyoto for a repeat of the Ikebana (生花; flower-arranging) event that last year produced all these posts:

Today's visit won't produce so much, but this post is a first run at some of the shots I took...

The light was really harsh today; somehow, it was better last year.

I popped up to Kyoto's Shogunzuka Overlook (将軍塚) today for the first time since March, hoping for a nice sunset.

As you can see above, I didn't get it.

However, due to my blog's proximity search feature, we can follow the "nearby photos" link under the photo to see other shots from Shogunzuka that I've posted over the years, including:

I added the proximity-search feature to my blog several years ago, and I use it often in various ways because proximity search can be extremely useful, but my blog proximity search is obviously limited to photos I've actually published on [...]

I've tried getting this post done every day since "Little Pink Flowers" 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 days ago, but I keep getting caught up with Lightroom plugin work. I guess the balance between plugins and blog varies over time, with "blog" on the short end these days.

Anyway, the "Little Pink Flowers" post was from an outing a couple of weeks ago when I showed a visitor a bit around some of the fringe countryside areas of Kyoto. Our first stop was the Nishimura Stonecarver's garden, an amazing place that has its own category on my blog...

Over the years I've published about 50 plugins for Lightroom, and of the 40ish that are still actively maintained, as of today I've put out a combined total of 2,800 updates.

I provide an RSS feed for updates and so I normally write here only about the release of new plugins, but today I pushed out a new release for my Folder Watch plugin that made me reflect on just how much the plugins grow over time.

Folder Watch originally grew out of a request from a Lightroom friend for better automatic importing, such as one might want when shooting [...]