I continue to be busy getting my Lightroom Plugins ready for the next release of Lightroom 4 (the real thing if not another beta)... I just don't seem to have the energy to much else, but I hate not posting every day, much less every week(!)

So for something easy to post today, I just went through my photos from a couple of outings last November to pick a few pretty pictures, and ended up deciding to make them all fodder for my desktop-background category. Most have some fairly aggressive processing to make them punchy.

Not much prose with these [...]

It's been a while since I last posted about the traditional Japanese archery event that I attended last month. I left off a while ago with "Traditional Japanese Archery: More Ladies, Part 2", and you can see all the posts about the event via any of the "nearby photos" link under each picture.

The main event was for 2,200 twenty-year-olds, but when they were done a couple dozen instructors got to shoot, so I'll post from that group today. I'm still buried updating my plugins for Adobe Lightroom 4, so mostly just pictures today...

Among the photos on "Intense Burn Begins", my most recent post about the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine earlier this month, was Ripples, showing a thin slice of focus in the tumultuous heated hair near the burning pyre. This post is a bunch more of the same, just 'cause I think it's interesting.

What follows are pairs of images, a crop hilighting something interesting, and the full frame it's from. In many of these the full frame is a throw-away shot, but I include it for context.

Continued here...

Continuing with posts about the Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine (Kyoto, Japan) earlier this month, following on from "Attack (and Repulsion) of the Evil Spirits" and "Beans of Good Fortune", we move on to the bonfire event.

I covered the same event four years ago in "Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine", so this year I was concerned less about documenting the event in photos than to see what kind of interesting shots I might get.

In the event, two bonfires are set alight, and the bundles of sticks are thrown in one by one. Each stick [...]

Still busy working on Lightroom plugins, so just a short post today on the next phase of the Setsubun festival last week at the Heian Shrine. After demons representing the ills of the past year were banished, the next step was wishing good forutune for the next year with another bean-centric event. I posted about it three years ago in "Setsubun Mamemaki: Throwing of the Beans", so from this year just a few pictures to catch the vibe....

Continued here...