Archive for the 'Pretty Photos' Category

Posts including photos that I think are particularly pretty, usually about nature.

Another Informal Location-Logger Test, Including Google Latitude

This is sort of a followup to January's "Informal GPS Logger Test: iPhone 4s GPS is Shockingly Good" post about GPS and GLONASS loggers. We took a drive today in the mountains, and I took the opportunity for another informal test of location-logging technologies

Garmin eTrex 20 GPS + GLONASS dedicated logger.

Dual® XGPS150 GPS-only bluetooth logger, recorded on an iPad with the Guru Maps app.

Apple iPhone 4s (GPS + GLONASS) recorded via the GeoTagr app, which for some reason the company sent me for free out of the blue the other day (probably hoping for a [...]


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A Dual Photo Ying-and-Yang-ish “What am I?” Quiz

I don't normally have two photos on one of my "What am I?" quizzes, but then, I don't normally have two quizzes going at once. This one is even more obvious than the currently-outstanding "An Oh-So-Obvious "What am I?" Quiz" from a few days ago, at least if, like that one, you look at the image metadata, but these two snaps are perhaps good for a few moments of perplexity.

I also don't normally put industrial grunge for a desktop background, but I'm giving it a try with that top image, for a different vibe.

Anyway, what are these images [...]


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Some Desktop Backgrounds from Kyoto’s Koumyou-in Temple

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 [...]


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Hidden Gems in Lightroom 4.1; Hidden Gems in Lightroom Plugin Development

(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, [...]


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Asking Your Opinion on The Size of Photos on My Blog

You may have noticed that the images were a bit smaller in my previous post about Fumie's pointe shoes, compared to the sizes I normally use (such as in the post before that, full of, uncharacteristically, shots of me).

For years, I've followed a basic pattern on my blog for landscape-orientation photos -- those wider than tall -- giving them a basic width of 690 pixels, but yesterday's were a bit smaller at 600 pixels wide. For portrait-oriented images -- those taller than wide -- I have traditionally gone with 700 pixels tall, but yesterday limited it to 500 pixels [...]


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