I recently met Paul Barr and a pair of married friends of his for lunch, and we ended up taking the opportunity to visit the Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in north-west Kyoto for a quick couple photoshoot.

It's still on my list to do a proper blog post about the place (update: it's here), from my visit last week from which so far I've posted only one wigglegram, but it's a daunting prospect because the site is incomparably wonderful. Anyway, you'll see a bit of the site in these pictures today.

It was John and Ai's first visit, so initially we had them walk around to enjoy the place on their own, with Paul and I following to take candids. This didn't work out well because most of the shots were from the back, and without the ability to control position and pose, it was difficult to get a clean shot among the heavy (but not unpleasant) crowds.

But it was good in the sense that it left me with a number of specific ideas for location to return to later.

But it was also bad in the sense that without a constant interaction with them, it was too easy to get distracted by a pretty scene (such as these subtle pastel blossoms), and we eventually lost track of them.

The bench they were sitting on when I found them seemed nice, so I had them turn their back to the park and started some posed shots. Though I've been practicing portraiture lately, I still have little clue what to actually do. But I pretend I know what I'm doing (that is, I try to exude confidence) and try to be a bit silly to loosen them up, and the ball gets rolling.

I'd just met them that morning, so they were understandably not yet comfortable around me, nor did they have any idea what kind of pictures I could take, but they're really photogenic so I knew I just had to get them to forget the camera, even if for a moment at a time, and the pictures would take themselves.

One simple technique was to keep them laughing (“okay, now look into each other's eyes and pretend you're in love” works when you know they are indeed actually in love), combined by periods of quiet where they can “be alone” so to speak.

I reposed them on the bench and tried something more intimate, with the 85mm f/1.4...

I don't really like to show photos on the back of the camera because it's so small (and outside, so bright), but I wanted to let them know that we were getting good stuff of the likes they'd probably not seen before of themselves. This helps break the ice as well.

A quick Ai-only shot from the bench...

We then moved about the park to try the places I'd noted before. Here's Paul shooting at a lovely area normally packed with folks that, for a few moments here and there, was inexplicably (and most welcomly) empty...

We then moved to the bush with the aforementioned delicate pastel blossoms and Paul shot through it to them....

I tried the same shots, but Paul's result was better:

Then off to the next location...

By now they were pretty loosened up and comfortable with us pointing our big cameras at them, so I tried some simple straight-up portraits...

They both expressed a desire to do a kimono photoshoot sometime, so here's hoping that comes to pass!

Continued here...

Adobe has just released a free public beta for Lightroom 5.

Adobe's Lightroom blog has the announcement where you can see the list of new features, and also a list of resources (essentially other people writing about the release). In particular, Victoria Bampton's What's New post is always a good reference.

(Unfortunately, Adobe mistakenly schedule the release during my cherry-blossom season, so I've had no time to write up anything about it myself.)

The latest versions of my Lightroom plugins should work in Lightrooom 5.. Be sure to upgrade to the latest version of each plugin to work in Lr5

This is the most exciting Lightroom upgrade for me in many years, but perhaps surprisingly, my excitement is not due to any new image-editing feature (though the new healing brush is amazing), but because the new “Smart Previews” feature will allow me to have my entire multi-Terabyte photo library on my laptop.

I paid another visit today to the outstanding Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in north-western Kyoto, where the wigglegram (“3D photo”) I posted the other day was taken. Today's visit was to do some portraiture with some very photogenic friends, but first a quick post of a small cluster of blossoms (of the millions at the garden) that caught my eye.

To give a sense of context, here's Paul Barr at the same tree...

Continued here...

I made my first visit the other day to the Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in northwest of Kyoto, a few kilometers into the mountains beyond Kinkakuji (“the Golden Pavilion”). It was, without question, the most amazing place to see blossoms (cherry and others) that I'd ever been, by orders of magnitude. “Stunning”, “Awesome”, and other overused platitudes don't do it justice, at least when at the peak of season when I visited.

It's been a while since I've done a wigglegram, so even though I've not yet gone over the photos from the visit, I went ahead and grabbed out enough for a wigglegram.

On the left is Damien Douxchamps, who also appeared in the last wigglegram I posted (in “A Wigglegram from the Well-Named “Fallen Leaf Shrine” in Northern Kyoto”). At right is the venerable Paul Barr.

It's not for lack of desire that I haven't been posting more wigglegrams... I take the base photos used to make them fairly often, but because I still can't do it smoothly, it takes a lot of work in Lightroom or Photoshop to smooth out frame-by-frame jumpiness. I probably spent an hour aligning the 17 photos used in this wigglegram. If anyone knows of automatic alignment software, I'd love to hear about it... it seems to be the kind of thing that software could automate.

There are more wigglegrams on my wigglegram blog category.

Continued here...

It's been a busy few days since I posted “Weeping Cherry at Kyoto’s Ryouanji Temple (龍安寺)”. I came down with a cold, my wife performed in a local production of Swan Lake, and I recovered from my cold, in that unfortunate order. No time to even look at the photos from the other day beyond a quick glace at the top of the stack, so here are a few more from the start of that outing...

After all the buds and blossoms I posted last month (such as here, here, and here), I told myself I'd concentrate more on shots of folks enjoying the blossoms, rather than the blossoms themselves, and we saw that posts here, here, and here. But I couldn't help myself, so here we have some more blossom shots....

I passed a tourist going the other way that I had to return to ask for a portrait...

15 seconds from start to end, but having missed focus a bit, I could have used 20 seconds.

Moving into a small grove on the far west of the temple grounds, we found the landscaping crew at work...

I take it that they had just pruned the trees, and were now applying some kind of protective salve over the cuts.

This was the area with the gorgeous, towering weeping cherry. Here's a vertical version of the previous post's image...

It was a visual feast for the camera... I hope some of my shots came out. We'll see.

Continued here...