I had the most amazing day of photographic and gastronomic discovery today, so much so that a month's worth of blog posts won't do it justice. During the day I took off to the mountains of western Kyoto with a friend, and in the evening met other friends for an all-you-can eat (all-you-can-drink!) BBQ buffet. A truly wonderful day.

I barely had time to glance at some of the photos from the mountains before having to run off to the BBQ, but the colors above caught my eye. It has no post processing except white balance (which I set via [...]

Here are a few shots from the Koumyou-in Temple in Kyoto (光明寺, 京都) taken on the same outing as the photos accompanying my Lightroom 4.1 post the other day.

One of the verandas consisted of a single plank of pine more than a yard wide (94cm by my foot-measuring estimation). I'd never seen anything like it; I assume that all the trees big enough to allow this big a plank were harvested long ago.

I talked to a lady that I took to be the owner of the place, who said that the temple building itself was not all that [...]

(The photos on this post, from my first visit earlier today to the small but elegant Koumyou-in Temple (光明院) in eastern Kyoto, have nothing to do with the prose of the post. They're just pretty pictures.)

The Problem

Historically in Lightroom, when uploading one's photos to an online service such as Facebook, Flickr, etc., one sees a little progress bar in the upper left that chunks along with each picture, such as the one shown at right. With my plugins, the progress bar makes two steps for each image, one after Lightroom has rendered the copy to be uploaded, [...]

This post is about a new camera-bag solution I'm trying, and so far like, involving an unconventional use of a Think Tank Photo Retrospective® Lens Changer 3 shoulder bag. You can see it at my side in the photos above.

I usually bring just a few lenses when I'm out with the camera, often a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 and a pair of Nikkor f/1.4 primes (24mm and 50mm). My normal bag is the v1 version of the Think Tank Photo Speed Racer, a nice bag with a silly name, and it's not bad with how I shoot, but I was [...]

First there was the walk to lunch ("On The Way To Lunch: Eastern-Kyoto Stroll"), then lunch ("Delicious Yuba Lunch at Junsei"), and now the walk home...

We came across an ultra-fluffy yaezakura cherry that comes out late (a variety seen five years ago on my blog in "10 Gallons of Blossoms on a 5-Gallon Branch"). It seemed all the more fluffy set off by the new-growth green of the trees around it...

It was a pleasant day in a pleasant area...

One property we came by had a bunch of trees that seemed to glow in an unearthly way [...]