I moved to Japan in 1989, and the person who met me at the airport in Tokyo was Krish Kulkarni, a graduate student at Tokyo University, and the twin brother of Ram Kulkarni, my best friend at my own graduate school in America. I had most recently met both of them a year ago in Tokyo, and last week met Krish and his family as they vacationed in Japan.

Climbing Mt. Fuji was high on the list for Krish's 19-year-old son Vishnu, and they kindly invited me along.

Krish's back was bothering him, and despite a massage in Kyoto from [...]

Lightroom 7.2 introduced an entirely new version of its "Auto Tone" feature, a one-click adjustment of photo brightness and contrast to hopefully-pleasing results. The prior version of Auto Tone used what might be called a "stupid, brute force" method that merely adjusted tone ranges to try find a numeric balance. It wasn't very useful.

The new Auto Tone, however, is fantastic, being powered by an artificial-intelligence engine trained with thousands of hand-tweaked photos from highly-regarded artists. It does a sufficiently-good job that I now use it as part of my new-photo workflow, to give me a better starting point for [...]

I've remained friends with the family of one of Anthony's preschool classmates, and even though they haven't been in school together for nine years, we still keep in close touch. The other day I did a quick photoshoot of the family's two girls, Monet and May, who should now be about 15 and 13 years old, respectively.

I'm sort of rusty with the camera, so wasn't sure what to expect, but the moment I took the first photo, I knew that the girls would do all the work and I could just press the button; no photographer skill required when [...]

I came across these photos in my archive, from our trip to Horseshoe Bend in 2015, and thought I'd post them.

For the most part the view in this area tended to look like this:

So, these two girls isolated in front of the view made for a nice shot...

I thought the scene was sufficiently photogenic that I chatted with them a bit, and later sent copies.

I popped out early this morning to visit the Eisho-in temple (栄摂院、京都市), first seen on my blog a week ago in "A Few Views of Kyoto’s Spectacular Eisho-in Temple". It really does pack a visual punch for such a small place, and I had it completely to myself the whole time I was there.

Continued here...