Last February, Fumie's friend Ma-chan (at left, above) came to Kyoto for the wedding reception of one of her coworkers. The wedding itself was held in the Heian Shrine, and likely limited to only the most immediate family -- it's the reception later on that Ma-chan and other friends would attend.

So, while her friend was at the private ceremony, Ma-chan walked around the public areas of the shrine with Fumie and Anthony, with me and my still-new D200 trailing behind. I posted this picture of the lanterns that evening, but it wasn't until today, 10 months [...]

View full post »

A commenter on my previous post asked about how I make the borders on the images I post. I'll talk a bit about that here.

At first I thought that it was wasteful of screen real-estate to add a border. When printing a picture to hang on the wall, I don't add borders, but I do use colored matting to compliment the picture. That's what I've got in mind when adding borders to images that I post.

The real skill involved -- skill that I don't have much of -- is deciding what to do. How to [...]

View full post »

Having looked back to cherry-blossom time in a recent post, this time I'll look forward to the upcoming fall by revisiting some photos I took last fall.

The picture above is the backyard of someone's house, visible from a trail leading up Daimonji Mountain (see this post for more on Daimonji). The following picture shows the front gate of the same house:

The path is on a slope leading up the mountain, which is why the wall shrinks to nothing on the far right. It's from there that the first picture looking into the backyard was taken.

If you step [...]

View full post »

I know it's not the season for cherry blossoms (except in the Southern Hemisphere?), but I'm finally getting around to processing photos from last spring and ran across two blossom photos that make fantastic desktop backgrounds. They perhaps don't look like much in the small versions shown here, but follow the links to the large sizes for gorgeous, delicious desktop-worthy images.

Here's the first one:

Standard: 1600 × 1200        Widescreen:    1280 × 800    -   1440 × 900    -   1680 × 1050    -   1920 × 1200    -   2560 × 1600

The 1,600×1,200 size is appropriate [...]

View full post »

We just got back from a weekend trip to Portland, Oregon. We went for no special reason – we just wanted to give it a try. The trip included a drive out to near Mt. Hood. I took this picture of Fumie while in a rowboat on Lost Lake.

The peak of the mountain is 10 miles (16.2 km) behind her, rising 2,462 meters (one and a half miles) above the lake.

We spent an hour and a half out in the boat, and had a very pleasant time.

The image is geoencoded, so you can [...]

View full post »