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...

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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 [...]

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As I wrote in yesterday's post about the doggy funeral, we had lunch at a great cafe. In the southern part of Shiga Prefecture, perhaps an hour's drive from Kyoto, is a private business called Sunainosato (寿長生の郷), which consists of a restaurant, a cafe, and a confectionery, all on 50 acres of wonderfully wooded land in the countryside.

The grounds are open as if it were a public park, and they're very nice.

The little drop-off shelter near the parking lot illustrates the simple, understated class of the entire site.

From there, one enters a small orchard that has more [...]

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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 [...]

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The trip we came back from yesterday could be summed up with one word: Snow. The first day (a travel day) was clear and bright.... and that was pretty much the last of the sun we saw for the rest of the trip. This was my first photo on Day 2.

Posts with photos from this trip:

Back Home After a Short Trip First Taste of Snow on Our New Year’s Trip Driving Snow Some Kind of Snow & Face Picture Introduction to a Snowy Gokayama Village Japan’s Deep-Rooted Ethos of Fire Prevention Rosy Cheeks Shutter Speed’s Effect on Falling [...]
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