It was fairly warm in Kyoto today – 36°C (98°F) in the shade – but the humidity was uncharacteristically low, so it was fairly pleasant if you were in the shade. At least, I think so... I never left the air-conditioning of the house! 🙂

I did notice from the living-room window a guy fishing in the little river. He was there for hours.

I also noticed the cherry tomatoes that Anthony and Mommy planted in a pot on the veranda were moving along...

Someone found a cool way to walk the dog...

We took the opportunity to enjoy a [...]

The first thing I noticed upon arrival during our visit to the Kamo no Shirabe cafe in Shiga last month were the flowers that separated the parking spaces from the walkway. It had been sprinkling, so they were photogenicly wet, and they were so vividly colored that they seemed to glow in the overcast light.

I got fooled again by a syrphid fly (AKA hoverfly), a fly beneficial to gardens (it eats pest insects) whose primary means of defense is to look like a bee or a wasp. It was just about a year ago that I first learned of [...]

The caption is just a silly reference to the "art" vs. "photography" discussion in my recent post about HDR. When I first looked this picture, I wondered why it was a blurry – it seemed mosaiced or pixelated, as if it hadn't been fully loaded from disk before display – and I waited for it to finish loading and to "snap" into focus. I eventually realized that it wasn't pixelated, but rather, it just had a lot of water drops that you (or, at least, I) don't notice at first.

It's a lotus flower. [UPDATE: Peter Barnes of Barnes Botany [...]

I posted earlier today about Kanazawa Station (Kanazawa, Japan) and how it does a wonderful job of mixing traditional Japanese with modern lines.

As I mentioned, the entire space is visually, geometrically rich, so I definitely had fun trying to capture interesting angles. The abstract results were sometimes enhanced (I perhaps fool myself by thinking) with some creative post-processing in Adobe Lightroom, to add a bit of an edge.

Clearly, this is not my area, photographically speaking, but (photographically speaking) it was quite fun. I just wish that I hadn't been so rushed for time.

Fumie's Grandmother, Kine Imai, passed away at the end of April. This past weekend was the second part of the funeral, the kotsuiri – 骨入 – the "placing of the bones".

A month or so ago, as part of the main funeral, the body was cremated such that there were still some rather large chunks of bone remaining. A typical Japanese (Buddhist) funeral includes a ceremony where family members use chopsticks to pluck certain bone fragments with symbolic meaning from the ashes, placing them into a small pot (as shown here), and we all did this, including five-year-old Anthony. It's [...]