For a while I was posting installments in the story about my brother-in-law's wedding last month, with the most recent installment being "Shogo and Namiko's Wedding: Reception, Part V (Entertainment)" three weeks ago. I stopped putting up new posts midstream because I suddenly had the idea to make a photo book of their wedding as a gift, and so dedicated a lot of time to it, and also because I wanted to hold back the rest of the photos until I could present the book.

The photo above is probably the best photo I've ever taken, except using "photo" and [...]

Two weeks ago I visited an ikebana (flower arranging) exhibition and posted some pictures of arrangements done by kids (aged about three to eight). Today I'll follow up with shots of a few of the many (100+?) other arrangements.

I wrote in that post two weeks ago the problems with photography at the event.... the backgrounds, the lighting, the positioning... all were elements that I couldn't control, and all were horrible from a photography point of view.

I'm about as uncultured a clod as you'll find, but even I could tell that the whole concept of an ikebana exhibition seems [...]

Earlier in the year I wrote a few posts about a restaurant/cafe with large private grounds called Sunainosato (寿長生の郷) in Shiga prefecture, about an hour's drive from Kyoto. The expansive grounds are open to the public, and are quite pretty.

A photo of an actual jump did appear on the previous post in this series, and I like it a lot even though his head's cut off.

Also, this was about the time that I got the photo featured in "Anthony Growing Up: the Tipping Point"

After lunch it was time to explore more of the grounds...

This is a long post. The executive summary is:

The verb "to scale" in computer science refers to a solution's ability to handle dramatically increasing demands. Filtering spam by personally inspecting each message, for example, works fine if you get only a few each day, but reaches its limits when you get hundreds a day, and becomes totally unworkable if you got thousands. Personal inspection just doesn't scale to those kinds of numbers, which is why in real life we need a totally different approach, such as automatic filtering as a first line of defense.

When I first started writing [...]

Since finally getting a real macro lens (a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5), my world has opened up to enjoying some of the smaller things in (and forms of) life. Sometimes, such as with the photo above, a complete lack of scale pretty much kills the "oh, tiny!" appeal, especially these days when the same shallow depth of field can be achieved with a tilt lens or the Brenizer method.

Zooming back a bit somehow helps establish the smallness of the scale...

... but without context, it's still lacking something. We like context, and search for it, and feel odd when we [...]