Continuing the long story started in "Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them" and continued in part two, this is the third of what looks to be a four-part series about a photoshoot Paul Barr and I did with a mutual friend, Yuko, at the Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto.

It was a first in many respects for all of us. We had a fun time.

All those photos and all that silliness makes one thirsty, so we stopped at a cafe for coffee. (There are numerous private houses on the shrine grounds that [...]

Picking up from yesterday's "Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them", the rambling story of a photo shoot of first-time model Yuko by clueless photographers (Paul Barr and me), yesterday ended with Yuko sitting in the shade in front of a lake on the grounds of the dazzling Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto...

When it was my turn, I shot a few different looks before I realized that I wasn't really getting any of the background...

The shallow depth of field, which I normally like a lot, made the background completely irrelevant, losing out [...]

The quick portrait of Zak Braverman I did the other day reminded me that I hadn't written yet about a photoshoot Paul Barr and I did in April, of a mutual friend, Yuko.

I've been trying to get better with portraiture for about a year, but my limited experience so far has been mostly with guys. Last April I did do a photoshoot with a photogenic married couple, including some nice shots of the wife; with that under my belt, a few days later Paul and I met Yuko at the dazzling Fushimi Inari Shrine in eastern Kyoto.

Yuko has [...]

Zak needed a headshot for some kind of online profile related to his shakuhachi-flute playing, so I met up with him for five minutes yesterday morning at a coffee shop for a quick shoot.

The lighting was horrible -- mixed fluorescent, LED, incandescent, and daylight -- so we should have moved elsewhere, but time was short so we went with it. (I lost quite a bit of time on the way because I found someone's wallet in the middle of the street, and it took a while to find a police box that was manned, and then there's paperwork involved [...]

I play and experiment a lot when I'm out with the camera, slowly trying to add bits of experience of what "works" and what doesn't. The photo above, from a trip a year ago to one of my favorite hidden gems of Kyoto, the Gioji Temple, is one of a series of five shots that I took at different apertures, to get different levels of blur in the background.

I often know exactly what I want in a result and how to get it, but sometimes I just can't predict what aperture will give a pleasing result, so I do [...]