The photo immediately above is the Mt. Daimonji “大" visible from much of Kyoto. For comparison, this next shot was taken from about the same place, at 24 mm (as opposed to the 1,000mm of the picture above), from my Discovering Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida post a year ago...

Yesterday I offered some samples of Sigma's new "Bigma" 50-500mm superzoom with the 2× teleconverter attached, turning it into a 100-1,000mm f/9-f/13 zoom that also works as an almost 1-to-1 macro. I noted that first impressions were that using the teleconverter ("TC") lowers the optical quality considerably, and today's equally-informal tests support [...]

This is a continuation of yesterday's post about Sigma's updated "Bigma" 50-500mm Super-tele Zoom, mostly to show more samples. Clicking through on the thumbnails brings up full-resolution versions.

I horribly missed focus on this one, as I have on many of these. The depth of focus is pretty thin at 500mm, so I was sometimes trying "C" continuous) focus mode on moving subjects, something that I have little experience or confidence with, so I accept all blame for the missed-focus shots.

Missed the focus on the one above as well, by just a bit. Adding a smidgen of extra sharpening [...]

Holy cow, six days without a blog post... I think that's the longest dry spell since 2005. I'm just too busy with LR3 preparations, sorry.

I'm still too busy to post properly, so going to my archives for some low-hanging fruit. This shot is from the last day of our short New Year's trip. In the thumbnail view above it's a picture of a bridge over a river, but view it full size and it becomes something much greater.

It joins a few other photos from the trip that got their own post, including "Theme For Our New Year's Trip", [...]

In my most recent post about our short four-day New Year excursion a few hours' north of Kyoto by car, I ended with our having left Gokayama village (五箇山) after lunch, heading a bit further south to Shirakawago Village (白川郷).

The two villages are both world-heritage sites, famed for their quaint and interesting gasshou zukuri style of construction (built without nails or screws). Shirakawago is by far the more famous, and it suffers for it: it's a tourist attraction that happens to have some quaint buildings. Gokayama, on the other hand, felt like a small village that we just happened [...]

This cold I've had for the last week and a half seems to be getting a bit better, but it's been a killer, flip-flopping me between sleeping all day due to lack of energy, and wanting to sleep all day but not being able to due to insomnia. A few days ago I was an absolute zombie from having not slept for two days, but got enough of a second wind that I decided to try to get out a bit into Nature, to see whether that would refresh me a bit.

I brought the Zoom H4n high-quality audio recorder [...]