This post is sort of a continuation of “Hoverfly and Hydrangea”, from a trip last month with Aeron to the gardens of the Heian Shrine (平安神宮) in eastern Kyoto.

The light was really not very good (mostly quite harsh), and I was enjoying the conversation with Aeron more than I was paying attention to the photography, but I thought I'd share a few more pictures anyway.

Some of the trees in the garden had wonderfully “interesting”, twisted shapes, though I had no idea what to do with them camera wise. As I said, the light was often really harsh, which seemed in this case to call for some contrasty B&W treatments.

Moving to another, lower-slung tree with a similarly-interesting shape...

Of course, I can't stop playing with things to interactively illustrate photography stuff, such as recent presentations of the effect of aperture on a cherry-blossom scene, or the effect of shutter speed on flowing water. Here's a pair of shots showing the effect of a polarizer filter (偏光フィルタ):

With Polarizer 偏光フィルタ有り   -   Without Polarizer　偏光フィルタ無し

mouseover a button to see that image

Wow, what a huge difference.

But really, neither is any good.. the “with” shot is just too flat without at least some reflections, much like some of the food shots in the first post I did like this back in 2008, “A Few Polarization-Filter Examples”.

In this case, I actually did take a sequence of shots as I spun the filter, to see the various intermediate results, but the results are too jumpy/choppy... I need to find a place where I can use a tripod, and take care with my shots.

I also did a similar polarization comparison in 2011 (“Heading Out To Photograph The Fall Foliage? Don’t Forget The Polarizer Filter”) and in 2012 (“Polarizer Examples With the Moss and Ferns of Kyoto’s Gioji Temple”).

Anyway, back to the garden, I found exactly one instance of this kind of yellow flower...

I generally don't like signage (it spoils the natural environment), but the signage here was thoughtfully done, though the need for the sign above doesn't speak well about the lower limits of Japanese intelligence / courtesy / common sense.

We'd gone to see the irises, which I'd heard earlier were really great, but we were too late and they were completely gone. Only a few water lily remained...

Apparently the gardens used to be open until 6:30pm, but with the change to 6:00pm, the sign was “updated” with an attempt to scratch off the “:30” part.

Continued here...

I've long been a grateful user of Dropbox for keeping files in sync across my computers, but in the spirit of due diligence, I'm giving a new service called “Copy” a try.

One nice feature is that when you share a folder with others, you get “charged” for only part of the space against your quota.... if you share a folder with one other user, you each are charged for half the space actually used. If you share a folder with 10 others, you're each charged with only 10% of the space. That's nice.

If you'd like to give them a try and sign up via their home page, you'll get the standard 15GB of free storage space.

Of course, you know this is coming: if you sign up via this link we both get 5GB extra. 😉

This is a followup to my “Subtle · Pastel · Tranquil” post the other day, where I posed desktop-background versions of this cherry-blossom picture (blossoms at Kyoto's Ryouanji Temple (龍安寺), from a trip last spring covered earlier here and here):

Apparently I really liked the scene because I took shots at various apertures, and seemed to do an okay job keeping the camera steady (it was all handheld with a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 macro), so I went ahead today and put together the animatable display above.

Of course, this is along the lines of what I did a couple of weeks ago for shutter speed in “The Effect of Shutter Speed on the Appearance of Flowing Water”, though this time it's not quite as interesting.

It's also somewhat related to the Wigglegrams I've been doing (such as these) in that it uses the same wiggle-the-mouse presentation technology under the hood.)

Anyway, I'll have use my copious free time to pull out the tripod and do some proper tests on various scenes, perhaps with an even wider (e.g. f/1.4) lens...

(Update: though not created with a tripod, I did make somewhat of a better example here)

Ryouanji cherry-blossom posts are continued here...

I've finally released the first version of a my “Export to ipernity” Lightroom plugin. It works in Lr5 and Lr4, and supports both Export and Publish.

The folks at ipernity were kind enough to handle the API updates I needed to fit their service into a Lightroom framework... it was so much more pleasant an experience than some others I've had.

The plugin joins 40 others on my Lightroom Goodies page...

Jeffrey's “Export to ipernity” Lightroom Plugin

I've more plugins in the pipeline coming soon, but I suppose I should divert a bit of attention back to my blog, which I normally like to post to daily, but lately a post a week is lucky for me... )-:

It's been stressful for me lately, so I'm posting something tranquil to make me feel better.

On an entirely unrelated subject, here's a protip for folks living in a foreign country: when it comes time to renew your visa (your permission to reside in the country), don't forget; they don't like it when you forget.

(Japan didn't like it when I forget, but they kindly granted me “special permission” to stay, so I don't have to remember again for another three years, but wow, what a colossal paperwork headache I created for myself.)

Continued here...