(The photos on this post, from my first visit earlier today to the small but elegant Koumyou-in Temple (光明院) in eastern Kyoto, have nothing to do with the prose of the post. They're just pretty pictures.)

The Problem

Historically in Lightroom, when uploading one's photos to an online service such as Facebook, Flickr, etc., one sees a little progress bar in the upper left that chunks along with each picture, such as the one shown at right. With my plugins, the progress bar makes two steps for each image, one after Lightroom has rendered the copy to be uploaded, [...]

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I'm happy to have the later sixth edition because, according to "Treaty Limits" on page xiii of the first edition, which talks about where foreigners are allowed to go in Japan, it's noted that Kyoto is off limits:

" Kiôto... which city is not to be approached nearer than 10 ri (25 miles) "

However, in the cloth-bound sixth-edition I have from 20 years later, there's plenty about Kyoto and its temples and shrines and palaces and attractions that I look forward to diving into. The book's 600 pages covers "the whole empire from Yezo to Formosa", and then there's [...]
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You may have noticed that the images were a bit smaller in my previous post about Fumie's pointe shoes, compared to the sizes I normally use (such as in the post before that, full of, uncharacteristically, shots of me).

For years, I've followed a basic pattern on my blog for landscape-orientation photos -- those wider than tall -- giving them a basic width of 690 pixels, but yesterday's were a bit smaller at 600 pixels wide. For portrait-oriented images -- those taller than wide -- I have traditionally gone with 700 pixels tall, but yesterday limited it to 500 pixels [...]

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Fumie was excited today to get a new pair of pointe shoes (ballet "toe shoes"), having ordered a special custom pair from Tokyo ballet shop Avignon, with the part directly above the toes (the "vamp") shorter than normal.

She's been looking for a pair of pointe shoes that really suits her feet for years, and recently found a pair from Avignon that showed promise, but the vamp was a bit too tall for her preference. Avignon is one of the few places in Japan that will build to order, so with great hope she asked for a pair with the [...]

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So, as I mentioned this morning, we had a nice view of the annular eclipse today. I'd never seen one (nor have I ever seen a total eclipse, except on TV). Here are a few more pictures.

That picture above illustrates in one way just how bright the sun is... I was using stacked filters to cut all but 1/3,200th of the light, leaving everything dark except the sun, which was still completely blown out. I wonder what the dynamic range is during one of these things, between the surface of the moon and the surface of the sun.

Notice [...]

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