Facebook engineer Ryan Mack and his wife Nadia and their blissfully-sleeping two-year-old took time from their 10-year-anniversary Japan trip to join me for dinner at Uroko (鱗) in downtown Kyoto the other night.

Ryan has sometimes provided help or insight on navigating the complexities of Facebook's third-party app API, which I must use for my Export-to-Facebook plugin for Adobe Lightroom, so I was happy to finally meet him in person. Meeting Nadia was a wonderful bonus, though I didn't really get to meet his son, who slept the whole time we were together. (Jetlag sometimes giveth, I guess.)

It's just [...]

Today was the 2015 Kyoto City Marathon. Just as when I blogged about the 2012 Kyoto City Marathon, I went out with the Nikkor 300mm f/2, but new this time is that I intended to try to photograph two acquaintances who had told me their intended pace and sent photos of what they were wearing.

To help increase my luck in picking out two faces from 16,000 runners, I set up a bit past the halfway point just before a turnaround, so runners were going both directions in front of me. If I suddenly noticed a friend going by one [...]

In part 1 about last weekend's cycling into the mountains north of Kyoto, I ended the story 23km into the journey at the top of the Hanase Pass (花背峠). At 769m it would be the highest point of the trip (a trip that started and ended at an elevation of about 60m).

With a nice downhill to look forward to, I didn't linger long at the pass. After a minute-and-a-half's rest and a selfie, I carried on.

I couldn't let myself build up much speed because the road was quite snowy/icy, so I dragged on the rear brake most of [...]

Having had my first "real" bike ride two weeks ago, a 55km ride up into the mountains and back, and found it to be not challenging at all, I wanted to try something certain to challenge myself, so I put together a plan to do a 100km loop with intense mountain sequences that far exceeded what I'd done before.

Since then it's been quite cold with occasional snow, so it wasn't until this past Saturday that I could give it a try.

The important parts of my outfit are by Under Armour, a maker whose products I've liked more and [...]

New (to me) friends Eric and Gigi, seen the other day in "Unexpectedly Snowy Photoshoot at the Joshokoji Temple", wanted to pick up a kimono before returning to San Francisco, and I got to tag along.

A friend brought them to a small shop in central Kyoto named W'Atelier ENYA (縁家)...

First was Gigi's turn, and she quickly zeroed in on one to try...

I don't know why kimono need to be so complex, but even most Japanese don't know how to put one on themselves.

Gigi tried various kimono....

Gigi's first instinct was apparently correct, because she had to [...]