Continuing the long story started in "Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them" and continued in part two, this is the third of what looks to be a four-part series about a photoshoot Paul Barr and I did with a mutual friend, Yuko, at the Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto.

It was a first in many respects for all of us. We had a fun time.

All those photos and all that silliness makes one thirsty, so we stopped at a cafe for coffee. (There are numerous private houses on the shrine grounds that [...]

Picking up from yesterday's "Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them", the rambling story of a photo shoot of first-time model Yuko by clueless photographers (Paul Barr and me), yesterday ended with Yuko sitting in the shade in front of a lake on the grounds of the dazzling Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto...

When it was my turn, I shot a few different looks before I realized that I wasn't really getting any of the background...

The shallow depth of field, which I normally like a lot, made the background completely irrelevant, losing out [...]

The quick portrait of Zak Braverman I did the other day reminded me that I hadn't written yet about a photoshoot Paul Barr and I did in April, of a mutual friend, Yuko.

I've been trying to get better with portraiture for about a year, but my limited experience so far has been mostly with guys. Last April I did do a photoshoot with a photogenic married couple, including some nice shots of the wife; with that under my belt, a few days later Paul and I met Yuko at the dazzling Fushimi Inari Shrine in eastern Kyoto.

Yuko has [...]

I play and experiment a lot when I'm out with the camera, slowly trying to add bits of experience of what "works" and what doesn't. The photo above, from a trip a year ago to one of my favorite hidden gems of Kyoto, the Gioji Temple, is one of a series of five shots that I took at different apertures, to get different levels of blur in the background.

I often know exactly what I want in a result and how to get it, but sometimes I just can't predict what aperture will give a pleasing result, so I do [...]

I mentioned in my previous post that we'd taken a quick weekend trip to Nagasaki, Japan mostly to try different foods, as it has the longest history in Japan of integration with the outside world. Along these lines, we stopped by a Hamamatsu location to try their shippoku cuisine (長崎市、浜松の卓袱料理).

The place seemed fairly upscale, but it's a chain of about 100 restaurants owned by the same company that does "Ringer Hut" fast food (named after a 19th-century Nagasaki merchant from England).

The shippoku cuisine is (said to be) heavily influenced by the long Chinese presence in Nagasaki, but frankly, [...]