Zak kindly offered to loan me his Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 for a while, so I took a walk down to the Starbucks on Sanjo (eastern Kyoto, Japan) for the pickup.

f/1.2 is an extremely big aperture. I've written about the shallow depth of field you get at large apertures (small "f" numbers), such as on this Sigma 30mm f/1.4 post, but this f/1.2 aperture is a new experience for me. Focusing on anything relatively near with the aperture at f/1.2 results in a paper-thin field that's in focus, but even then, the focus is "soft" due to spherical aberration and [...]

The roads of southern Japan's Amami Islands used to be lined with walls built from dead coral, but now only a few such remnants of the past remain. During our trip to Amami, we visited the most western village on Kakeroma-jima (the island outlined in purple on this map) and found some of the old walls. Some were quite tall, perhaps two meters.

The five sticks seen leaning against the walls in the image above are an example of what one often saw while driving around Kakeroma-jima: long sticks placed at frequent intervals along the road. It turns out that [...]

The Heian Shrine (a huge shrine in eastern Kyoto) had Setsubun events today (Wikipedia on "Setsubun"). The main event associated with Setsubun is mamemaki – 豆撒き, literally "bean scattering" – which involves throwing dried beans at demons while yelling "demons out! Good fortune in!"

As you might expect of any event that involves the throwing of beans, kids love it.

Kids love it unless they think the demons are real...

The demons eventually headed up toward the main building of the shrine, where unbeknownst to them, beans awaited.

The parent in me was surprised at how few children attended the [...]

As I wrote before, it was often windy and rainy during our New-Year's trip to Amami, in southern Japan, but the weather was quite dynamic and squall might be immediately followed by brilliant sunshine.

Within 10 minutes of each of these photos being taken, it was raining.

Japan's Bullet Trains – shinkansen – are justifiably world famous for their speed and amazing punctuality. I've had occasion to ride them several times in the last month or so, once to visit a friend, and twice for concerts, so I thought I'd share a few images, mostly of the (rather unremarkable) view inside.

The model of train shown in these pictures a "Type 700", which is the most recent model, but old enough that Anthony already has a toy version (the solid yellow one seen in the Playrail Train Set post earlier this month). Even better, Anthony's is a [...]