A neighborhood restaurant featured in an earlier blog post suffered a fire yesterday when the cook took the wrong approach in cleaning the vent ducting above the stove. (Note to other cooks: using fire to burn away accumulated grime in vertical ducting works very well only if you consider the rest of the building to be "accumulated grime".)

The fire explains why helicopters were hovering directly over our place for a while yesterday. (Hovering helicopters are apparently not good news in Japan. The last time helicopters were buzzing around, two weeks ago, it was due to a keeper at the [...]

Yesterday's picture of a water lily was taken during a dark, rainy day at the City of Kusatsu's ("Water Forest") park. The name in Japanese is mizu no mori (水の森). They have outside gardens with all kinds of water plants, a large greenhouse ("Lotus Hall"), a movie theater, and restaurant. It costs $3 for adults.

It was raining while we where there, which is perhaps appropriate for a "water forest".

One thing I'll never understand is the apparent need in Japanese culture to make allowance for the fact that a smoker might not want to go for more than three [...]

The caption is just a silly reference to the "art" vs. "photography" discussion in my recent post about HDR. When I first looked this picture, I wondered why it was a blurry – it seemed mosaiced or pixelated, as if it hadn't been fully loaded from disk before display – and I waited for it to finish loading and to "snap" into focus. I eventually realized that it wasn't pixelated, but rather, it just had a lot of water drops that you (or, at least, I) don't notice at first.

It's a lotus flower. [UPDATE: Peter Barnes of Barnes Botany [...]

In my running set of posts about my visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine in south-east Kyoto, I showed the paths lined with thousands of gates that the shrine is famous for, but I ended the most recent installment – Fushimi Inari Shrine: Foxes, Treasure, and More with the teaser that there was so much more than just the gates.

We didn't have a map, so we took what turned out to be a side path that later looped back to the main path....

It was great luck to take this side path, because in doing so we discovered a [...]

High-dynamic-range – HDR – is an image-processing technique that's been gaining popularity over the last few years. HDR can be used to create some amazing, impactful, stunning images. For some eye-popping examples, see this page, which is just one page of many that are linked from this HDR roundup.

I haven't created anything amazing with HDR, but I utilized HDR in whipping this image together, just for this post...

HDR attempts to overcome a limitation of current camera technology... a limitation that disallows a camera from picking up fine detail in the dark shadows and bright highlights of a scene [...]