Looking over photos from the Ikebana show I mentioned yesterday, I came across this shot with not a single thing in focus, but somehow I really like its mood. The closest edge is the least out of focus, but everything being out of focus makes the whole thing seem dreamy. I tend to be partial to the "sliver of focus" effect (as seen here, here, here, and here), but this takes it even further by having the "in focus" part not even in focus. It's almost like a painting.

This has only a little post processing, in Lightroom. I set [...]

In one sense, photographing an ikebana display can be like shooting fish in a barrel or hunting game in a zoo... everything is sitting right before you just waiting for you to point and click, but on the other hand, having to choose what to photograph -- how to frame it, from what angle... how to expose it, where to focus it, and how thin or thick to set the depth of field -- raises things to a whole new artistic challenge. Offer the same floral arrangement in the same situation to 10 good photographers, and I'd guess you'd come [...]

As I mentioned the other day in "More From the Rice Harvest", I made a quick trip back on Monday to the farming villages that I'd visited the week before to offer prints to the nice farmer lady I'd had the pleasure to chat with.

On the way there, I went through the tiny village with the wind-damaged rice crop seen here. All that rice had now been harvested...

I was shocked at how the color of the spider lilies had changed. Just a week earlier, they were deeply powerful red (as seen here), but now they were starting to [...]

The final post on my old Yahoo! manager's visit to Kyoto (part 1, part 2). On his last full day in Kyoto we visited the Arashiyama area on the far western edge of the city, and rented small battery-assisted bicycles. We didn't really need the battery assist, but it was nice. 🙂

The sign above (showing a crude illustration of the kamikaze one-way one-man submarine) used to be accompanied by a large marble monument with an engraved photograph, and if I recall, one of the actual subs. An odd thing to find by the side of the street. Now the [...]

As I wrote last week, my former manager at Yahoo!, Mike Bennett, visited town. After seeing his girlfriend and her family off in Tokyo, he returned to Kyoto for a couple of days of touristy stuff with me.

I took the opportunity to try out a slightly-broken Nikkor 50m f/1.2 that I'd picked up on Yahoo! Auctions (which is the eBay of Japan). Even after I add the cost to repair the heavy aperture ring and slight rattle of unknown origin, it'll have been cheaper than buying a new one, but truth be told I bought it because I'd confused [...]