Lightroom 5 has been released... see the announcement at Adobe.

There's a bunch of new stuff.... a good place to start your own investigation is Victoria Bampton's "What's New in Lightroom 5" and "What's New in Lightroom 5.0 Beta" articles. Also, Sean over at Lightroom Blog is keeping a list of tutorial/review links.

The most exciting new things for me are "Smart Previews" (I can work with my entire 130k library of images on my disk-starved laptop), "Upright" perspective correction in Develop, where I can easily correct for my bad habit of not holding the camera level, and the new [...]

I mentioned in my previous post that we'd taken a quick weekend trip to Nagasaki, Japan mostly to try different foods, as it has the longest history in Japan of integration with the outside world. Along these lines, we stopped by a Hamamatsu location to try their shippoku cuisine (長崎市、浜松の卓袱料理).

The place seemed fairly upscale, but it's a chain of about 100 restaurants owned by the same company that does "Ringer Hut" fast food (named after a 19th-century Nagasaki merchant from England).

The shippoku cuisine is (said to be) heavily influenced by the long Chinese presence in Nagasaki, but frankly, [...]

We spent a rainy weekend in Nagasaki (長崎). Nagasaki, Japan is most famous internationally for its place in mid-20th-century history, but for hundreds of years it was most famous as the only foreign gateway into Japan, and as such it has a unique and colorful old-world international vibe along the twisty streets sewn over its steep hillsides. It has particularly strong Dutch, Portuguese, and Chinese influences.

Mostly went for the food, which was often a blend of Japanese and some other culture's cuisine.

Unlike Kyoto's purposefully-laid-out gridwork of streets (which is quite rare in Japan), Nagasaki's streets have developed organically [...]

A final post to round out Part 1 and Part 2 about this year's Aoi Matsuri festival (葵祭), at the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park last week, which is a parade of period costumes from a millennium or so ago.

As the parade participants were marshaling before the start, others were going about their business...

This particular rope was such a pain. When i took this picture the parade had already ended and the rope would soon be dismantled, but during and before the parade, the rope separated the crowd from the parade participants, and if the rope had been equally [...]

This is the third and final post about my climb of Kyoto's Mt. Hiei (比叡山) the other day (Part 1 - Part 2). At the end of Part 2 I'd had a rest at a lovely lookout point near the top. Before heading up the last bit to complete the trip, I ventured into the hillside of azaleas (つつじヶ丘)...

Disappointment with photography normally comes to me when I get home to look at my shots, but in this case I felt disappointed the moment I brought the camera up to my eye. The hillside was engulfing with exceedingly vibrant color [...]