It was a nice day, so I stepped out for a short stroll with the camera. Many cherry trees have lots of stems and few blossoms, like in the photo below, but some still have large complements of blossoms. With the photo above, I put the sun behind the blossoms and tried to expose for the blossoms, but the result wasn't particularly good, but on a whim I cranked up the exposure in Lightroom, and the result has a nice dreamy glow, as if I had applied the Funky Joy touch-up as I did here.

Part of the effect could [...]

If you shoot with a Nikon D3, D700, or D300, and use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop, you'll want to know about the "Camera v3" beta camera-calibration profiles described in this Adobe-forum thread. (The actual profiles are in this ZIP file.)

This is important because in some cases, the standard "Camera" profiles that come with Lightroom ACR fail miserably for these three cameras. For example, consider this crop from the photo above:

Those mottled magenta splotches are not on the flower; they're a bug in Lightroom's camera profiles for the D3/D700/D300.

(The rest of this post is written from a Lightroom [...]

Here are some more pictures from the first two stops during our essentially all-day drive at the start of our short but photographically-satisfying trip to Imabari City (Ehime Prefecture, Japan) at the start of the month. It was a trip which included an attraction so thrilling, the Towel Museum :-), that a single post couldn't contain its full measure of win: part 1, part 2.

Many of the photos on today's post are variations of pics seen on "On The Road to Imabari", which I had prepared in haste that first night from the hotel.

I couldn't decide which view [...]

Lately, I've really been enjoying the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5's ultra-thin depth of field in a macro setting to "creamify" flowers and such, leaving only very specific areas in sharp focus, with the rest melting away into a creamy mix of softness. The Voiglander's bokeh is spectacular. I posted something along these lines the other day in "On The Road to Imabari", and have several more examples from the last week that I'd like to post, but I'm afraid of overdoing it, so I'll parcel them out from time to time.

The king of this style of photography is Daniel Sroka [...]

What a week it's been. I took more photos today than in the first three months of the year combined, and this is after a ramp-up in activity at the start of the month due to the cherry blossoms and then a highly photogenic three day family trip followed by a fun photographically-friendly play date for Anthony. Suffice to say I've built up a new backlog on top of my old one, but it's sure a nice problem to have.

So today I went to the preschool/kindergarten entrance ceremony for my friend Britto's boy, to snap some photos..... he's an [...]