I have been slammed with a cold since yesterday, so today just a short post with some pics from the underground world around Osaka Train Station that I took after my trip to the Nikon Service Center last week (to have my D700 checked... they said it's my memory card, and to have the rubber grip on my D200 replaced).

One of the underground passages near the station had this pleasant waterfall wall...

I haven't done much since returning to Japan a week ago. Tired from the trip... overwhelmed with work (that I don't even get paid for)... and spending an inordinate time at the doctor for some acute back problems. It's been a long week.

But I was feeling okay last night, so after Mass in downtown Kyoto, I thought I'd give my new Nikon D700's legendary low-light performance a spin, combining it with the fastest lens that I could get my hands on (that is, one that lets in the most light), the same Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 that I borrowed from [...]

45 minutes before our arrival at Kansai International on our 13+ hour fight to Japan, my GPS unit told me that we were passing by Mt. Fuji. It was supposed to be 30 miles away, straight out the window on the right-hand side of the plane (port? starboard? I dunno, I speak English and use "right" and "left". I also use "get off the plane" rather than "deplane").

We were flying at seven and a half miles up (about 40,000 ft), and so if the weather had cooperated, the view of a 30-mile-away Mt. Fuji would have been a glorious. [...]

Prior to last week's visit to Vancouver and Whistler, I'd been enjoying the dynamic clouds during my trip to Ohio for the summer. (I posted some sorta' pretty cloud pictures here, here, and here.)

I'm back in Ohio now for another week or so, but the weather has been cold and drizzly, so I'm not getting any of the wonderful cloudscapes we had before. Still, I have plenty of pictures from before the Canada trip. The ones on this post are from a 10-minute walk with the camera down by the lake, one afternoon three weeks ago...

I love [...]

Fumie's Grandmother, Kine Imai, passed away at the end of April. This past weekend was the second part of the funeral, the kotsuiri – 骨入 – the "placing of the bones".

A month or so ago, as part of the main funeral, the body was cremated such that there were still some rather large chunks of bone remaining. A typical Japanese (Buddhist) funeral includes a ceremony where family members use chopsticks to pluck certain bone fragments with symbolic meaning from the ashes, placing them into a small pot (as shown here), and we all did this, including five-year-old Anthony. It's [...]