I popped up to Kyoto's Shogunzuka Overlook (将軍塚) today for the first time since March, hoping for a nice sunset.

As you can see above, I didn't get it.

However, due to my blog's proximity search feature, we can follow the “nearby photos” link under the photo to see other shots from Shogunzuka that I've posted over the years, including:

I added the proximity-search feature to my blog several years ago, and I use it often in various ways because proximity search can be extremely useful, but my blog proximity search is obviously limited to photos I've actually published on my blog. My full catalog of photos in Adobe Lightroom is much, much bigger.

Over the years I've written a bazillion (~45) plugins for Lightroom that supports a photographer in all kinds of helpful ways, but one of the first (already five years ago!) was my Lightroom catalog Proximity Search plugin.

To take advantage of proximity search, your photos have to be geoencoded to begin with (that is, each photo must be associated with latitude/longitude coordinates of where it was shot). At the time I first released the plugin, there was no way to geoencode photos within Lightroom, so one had to somehow take care of it before importing photos into your catalog. It was a pain.

But, while working on that plugin I figured out a tricky way to build another plugin that allows you to geoencode within Lightroom, and my Geoencoding Support plugin was released a couple of weeks later; it remained the only way to geoencode within Lightroom until Adobe introduced the Map Module last year. (My Geoencoding Support plugin is all the more useful now that Lightroom supports location editing, because it extends the usefulness of location information far beyond what Lightroom provides.)

Anyway, I was happy that I could do a proximity search on my photos, but the unfortunate reality was that Lightroom's catalog interface for plugins was simply too slow, creating a high barrier to use: I'd use it sparingly, only when it was worth the several-minute wait for a result.

Still, even today it's better than what Lightroom itself now supplies, at least on my machine. If I set Lightroom's Map Module to an area I'm interested in, then switch to Library and select “All Photographs”, then go back to Map to see which ones show up, Lightroom completely locks up for eight minutes. Locks up. Eight minutes. Painful.

(I hear that Lightroom is faster in this respect on Windows; someone who tested my catalog said the lockup was only two minutes there.)

I don't understand why plugin access to the Lightroom catalog is so slow, but to gain some insight I tried accessing the Lightroom-catalog SQLite database directly. The results? The same search that locked up Lightroom for eight minutes took 0.6 seconds.

Even though the very first Lightroom-related article on my blog was a post in 2006 about accessing the Lightroom database directly, I've purposefully stayed away from doing so within my plugins as a matter of principle, keeping instead to the official plugin infrastructure.

But come on, an 800-fold speedup is just too much to pass up, especially for a feature that blooms in usefulness when you can use it on the spur of the moment with little friction. So for the first time in my plugin-development life, I did an end around Lightroom's interface, adding a “Fast Full-Catalog Proximity Search” plugin-extra feature to my Proximity Search and Geoencoding Support plugins last week. This is the fast search that I mentioned on my previous post.

The search is nominally invoked from the “File > Plugin Extras > Geoencoding Support > Fast Full-Catalog Proximity Search” menu, but on my system I mapped it to a keyboard shortcut, so while looking at an image that's geoencoded, a quick tap brings up this dialog:

Upon activation, the plugin goes outside of Lightroom to grab the data, then import just those results back in, creating a collection with them. It took just a few seconds to isolate the 548 photos from that general area over the years.

(Update: in modern versions, it works on Windows as well.)
One bummer about the workaround that achieves this: it doesn't work on Windows, nor on Lr4 or earlier, so in those situations the “Fast Full-Catalog Proximity Search” plugin-extra item reverts to the slower, official, much-less-compelling method. )-:

Still, if you're using Lr5 on a Mac and find this useful, please let Adobe know; perhaps they'll add this kind of thing directly into Lightroom.

I've tried getting this post done every day since “Little Pink Flowers” 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 days ago, but I keep getting caught up with Lightroom plugin work. I guess the balance between plugins and blog varies over time, with “blog” on the short end these days.

Anyway, the “Little Pink Flowers” post was from an outing a couple of weeks ago when I showed a visitor a bit around some of the fringe countryside areas of Kyoto. Our first stop was the Nishimura Stonecarver's garden, an amazing place that has its own category on my blog...

Then we made a brief stop at the Tanukitanisan Fudouin Temple (狸谷山不動院) where I snapped a photo of a carving on a sub-temple for “everyday life”...

Then we popped up to Ohara and the Sanzen'in Temple (三千院). At one point inside a little boy came around the corner and saw me (and likely that I looked obviously different from people he normally sees) and just stood there looking at me, taking me in. I snapped a shot.

After several seconds he apparently decided that I was neither a threat nor a source of treats, and proceeded to go on his way.

Later in the garden I noticed these stone faces rising from the moss...

I'd never noticed them before, but in looking around now I found many. I'll have to go back when the light is better to try photographing them all.

This next picture was taken quickly when I noticed a group of three young-at-heart ladies in their 70s or 80s were forming a human chain to allow one on the end to reach over a pond to touch a stream of water coming from a bamboo pipe....

I'm not sure what the deal is with the water and having to reach out over the pond, but it's a thing at the temple.

Anyway, in picking photos to include on this blog post I realized that I neglected to get an “establishing shot” that shows the wider context of the pond, but I knew I'd taken such a shot during a previous visit. Lightroom provides numerous ways to find photos, in this case all would be slow.

Several days of plugin development later, I came up with an extremely fast way to search my 130,000-photo catalog for nearby photos, and voila, here are a couple from 2010:

As a bonus, I found some that I'd posted in 2011 but forgotten about.

On the way out of the temple you pass under a low-hanging branch that seems to have interesting leaves... after taking this shot the other day...

I realized that I'd done the same thing a few years ago, slightly later in the season...

I'm not sure that the leaf pictures are particularly compelling, but the ability to instantaneously see photos from other times, taken in the same immediate area, makes me a bit giddy. I guess I'm just geeky that way.

We then took a drive on little-used roads through the deep mountains north of Kyoto, stopping by a little village...

Elsewhere in the village we came across an old couple harvesting rice, by hand, with just a sickle and hard work...

Most of the rice has been flattened, likely by wind gusts during the typhoon the other day.

I've written about the rice harvest various times in the past, including here, here, and here.

Over the years I've published about 50 plugins for Lightroom, and of the 40ish that are still actively maintained, as of today I've put out a combined total of 2,800 updates.

I provide an RSS feed for updates and so I normally write here only about the release of new plugins, but today I pushed out a new release for my Folder Watch plugin that made me reflect on just how much the plugins grow over time.

Folder Watch originally grew out of a request from a Lightroom friend for better automatic importing, such as one might want when shooting tethered (especially since Lightroom didn't support any kind of tethering at the time, in the spring of 2009). The first version could scan a folder for new images, import them, and optionally have some simple metadata like the title set. That was it.

Now, four and a half years later, with advances in Lightroom and what it allows a plugin to do, Folder Watch offers fully-automated end-to-end processing — import, develop, export — if you like.

Here's what the configuration looks like at the moment:

The last item on the list — the ability to have an automatic import trigger a publish operation — is one of today's addition. Combined with, for example, an export-to-Facebook plugin, you can create fully-automatic camera-to-Facebook processing.

It'd be nice if the plugin supported all the options that Lightroom's normal import supports, but Lightroom offers no such hooks for this. That's often the most limiting factor in all my plugin development... what hooks Lightroom does and doesn't offer. (My stress and time are next on the list of limiting factors.)

Another addition today is the ability to write dynamic values to the title and caption fields, via the template tokes my plugins support. This includes the ability to use the special {LUA=...} token to execute arbitrary code.

Folder Watch is certainly not my most popular plugin, but I spent several days working on the various enhancements anyway, because it's fun and I enjoy it. I hope someone finds it useful.

The Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 macro lens certainly does love itself some tiny flowers, and in this regard I can only encourage it. I found these dainty pink things yesterday in a garden at the Sanzen-in Temple (三千院) in Ohara, a mountain suburb of Kyoto.

The flowers looked quite different depending on what angle you viewed them, and on what stage they were in life.

“Typhoon #18” for 2013 rolled by this morning, bringing lots of rain and the once-every year-or-so high water in the Kamo River. This post is essentially a repeat of the high-water posts from 2010 and last year, except this time there was significant flooding elsewhere in Kyoto.

If I'd had my iPhone with me while sleeping, I would have been awoken at 5am by the emergency alerts from Kyoto Prefecture and Kyoto City, warning of heavy rain. I'd never seen one of these before.

When growing up in Ohio, the National Weather Service would issues different level alerts for tornados and storms: first a low-level “watch”, then if the danger became immediate, a “warning”. Warnings were rare.

Japan had the same two levels of warnings until a third, higher-than-“immediate danger” level was added this summer:「特別警報」(“Special Warning”). This would be reserved for calamities — rain, wind, snow, tsunami, volcanic ash, etc. — that might happen once in a generation.

The first ever such alert was issued this morning, for all of Kyoto Prefecture, as seen at right.

What particularly caught my eye (when I noticed this on my phone five hours later) was the almost conversational sentence: “It's possible you've never experienced heavy rain like this in your life”.

Having grown up in Ohio, I like a good storm; I'm bummed I missed it. Now I know what all the sirens I vaguely heard through my sleep were.

Here's what the rain radar looked like at the time of the alert.

Frankly, the radar looked much worse (much more red) a couple of weeks ago when the last typhoon came near, but for whatever reason the high water and flooding never materialized then.

Anyway, it takes the water a couple of hours after the heaviest rain to accumulate from the mountains to the river near me, but I didn't pop out to take a look until five hours later, so the water had already receded considerably.....

You can see all the debris that had accumulated against the stone fence toward the right, showing how high the water had been.

The bridge in the background is the Sanjo Bridge. To illustrate what the river looks like normally, this next photo, from “Terrace Dining Over Kyoto's Kamo River”, shows the same scene a couple of years ago from the opposite direction, from that bridge looking toward where I am now.

To further illustrate, here's a shot from even further down, looking back at both bridges, from “Skipping Rocks with Kenny” back in 2011....

Back to today...

Having recently posted “The Effect of Shutter Speed on the Appearance of Flowing Water”, I tried a few shots at different speeds to create a sense of flow, but in this case the “angriness” of the water seems more pertinent than “smooth flow”, so it turns out that a relatively short 1/13th second shot seems most appropriate:

As a result of the typhoon, the bullet train line was shut down, as were most of the expressways in this part of the country. Today was the last of a three-day weekend, so everyone who was going to be traveling on the highways got diverted into the city and follow their car navigation systems looking for a way west out of the city, and there are only two: Route 1 and Sanjo Street, and the latter, at least, was a parking lot:

When I decided to take a pop out to the river with the camera this morning, I knew things were a bigger deal than I'd first thought when I came out of the garage and saw the traffic on my street. Normally it's pretty quiet, but due to its particular circumstances, it quickly becomes a parking lot itself when the expressways are shut down. Today was the second time I'd seen this in ten years.

Luckily I travel by scooter, so traffic was not an issue. 🙂

The stone fence here did not fare as well as the one seen in “Debris” above, buckling under the weight of the flow. The inscription on the fence says “1994”.

I don't know that this is much better, but here's a short video I shot at the same time. Warning: sound of rushing water is loud.

The cameras in the center of the shot above, above “Book Off” on the north-west corner of Sanjo Kawabata, are for the Kyoto Prefectural water-management system. You can (normally) see a recent shot of the river on their site, such as these:

a couple of days ago 二日前

this afternoon 今日の午後

Unfortunately, the “this afternoon” shot, from when the water had receded quite a bit, was the only image I could get since 9pm last night. When there's lots of rain, the Kyoto Prefectural water-management web site becomes utterly inaccessible. I don't know what my tax yen is going toward.... it's like having insurance except when you're in an accident.

Even the little river by my place, whose level is normally well controlled because it's an offshoot from a canal, was running a bit high and was a completely-opaque brown:

But none of this was “flooding”, but other parts of Kyoto certainly saw flooding for the first time in many years. Here's a video showing the famous Togetsukyo bridge (渡月橋) in Arashiyama this morning.

The water was lapping over the bridge. For reference, here's a shot from “A Few More Shots of That Amazing Rainbow” showing what the incredibly wide river basin looks like normally...