Some random desktop backgrounds in my photo library from the past year. I used these as practice with the new render engine in Lightroom 4, which I like but am not completely used to yet.

Often, a photo here is from some trip or event that I already blogged about; the "nearby photos" link under each image brings you to related posts.

Taking a break from the craziness that ensued for me yesterday when Lightroom 4 was released, I thought I'd pick up from last month's "Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine: Intense Burn Begins".

Once the blaze was going in earnest, they started throwing bundles of wooden slats into the fire, each slat with someone's wish for good health or the like written on it...

The heat for the fire-poker guy must have been almost unbearable. It was very very hot, even for me upwind 20 meters (two highway-bus lengths) away. But he could never retreat.

As I wrote about in [...]

I continue to be busy getting my Lightroom Plugins ready for the next release of Lightroom 4 (the real thing if not another beta)... I just don't seem to have the energy to much else, but I hate not posting every day, much less every week(!)

So for something easy to post today, I just went through my photos from a couple of outings last November to pick a few pretty pictures, and ended up deciding to make them all fodder for my desktop-background category. Most have some fairly aggressive processing to make them punchy.

Not much prose with these [...]

It's been a while since I last posted about the traditional Japanese archery event that I attended last month. I left off a while ago with "Traditional Japanese Archery: More Ladies, Part 2", and you can see all the posts about the event via any of the "nearby photos" link under each picture.

The main event was for 2,200 twenty-year-olds, but when they were done a couple dozen instructors got to shoot, so I'll post from that group today. I'm still buried updating my plugins for Adobe Lightroom 4, so mostly just pictures today...

Among the photos on "Intense Burn Begins", my most recent post about the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine earlier this month, was Ripples, showing a thin slice of focus in the tumultuous heated hair near the burning pyre. This post is a bunch more of the same, just 'cause I think it's interesting.

What follows are pairs of images, a crop hilighting something interesting, and the full frame it's from. In many of these the full frame is a throw-away shot, but I include it for context.

Continued here...