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Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 18mm — ¹/20 sec, f/7.1, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cheers!

I had a small but tasty get-together the other day with some friends, including recent graduates of the school I wrote about the other day in “Kyoto Butsugen College of Massage”.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 20mm — ¹/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Small Get-Together

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14mm — ¹/25 sec, f/7.1, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Dig In
shrimp

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/125 sec, f/1.4, ISO 1800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Willfully Ignoring The Photographer

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/125 sec, f/1.4, ISO 1800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Just Kidding

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/125 sec, f/1.4, ISO 2000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Tempura Portrait

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/125 sec, f/1.4, ISO 1800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Person Portrait

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/125 sec, f/1.4, ISO 4500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Chillin'

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/125 sec, f/1.4, ISO 4000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Rapt Attention
to some story or another
photo by Paul Barr

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/80 sec, f/1.4, ISO 560 — map & image data — nearby photos
Another Food Portrait
dessert

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/80 sec, f/1.4, ISO 900 — map & image data — nearby photos
Tiramisu Arrives

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 4000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Tiramisu

This was at Uroko (鱗), a restaurant near the corner of Shijo/Kawaramachi in Kyoto, that I really like for their 蛇の目焼き (janomeyaki) grilled chicken, which is utterly out-of-this-world tasty. The food and drink seemed to never stop all night, but the price was quite reasonable. Highly recommended. The restaurant is here.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14mm — ¹/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Checking Out My Portfolio
on my iPad

I knew my crop-for-iPad plugin for Lightroom would come in handy sometime.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/250 sec, f/1.4, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Engrossed in Conversation

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Bar Glasses

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/200 sec, f/1.4, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Layers

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/160 sec, f/1.4, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Roughhousing
photo op

The recent grads were from a tight-knit class, so after three years together were like one big family. It was a fun evening.

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I don't understand Apple's newly-announced dividend, nor the coverage I've seen so far, which seems to equate the dividend with “free money”, manna from heaven, as if two fundamental facts didn't exist:

1. taking money from the company and giving to the stock holders reduces the value of the stock by exactly that amount, and
2. for most stock holders, the dividend is a taxable event.

The end result is that most stock holders wind up with less because every quarter you must pay a tax on the mere act of owning the stock, a tax that you never had to pay before.

Why on earth would Apple do this to its shareholders?

Some folks like to have a steady income, sure, but such folks have always had the option to sell a few shares when they needed it, as they needed it, so the tax ramifications of ownership were always within each individual shareholder's control. Now it's not.

It's rare, but some companies offer a “shares in lieu of dividend” option such that you get additional shares instead of a cash dividend, which makes it a non-taxable event, and so a non-loss event. Unfortunately, Apple does not plan to offer this. (I know this because I sent an inquiry to their investor relations 20 minutes after the announcement, and surprisingly received a personal reply not long after.)

Today's announcement makes for a huge windfall for the IRS and other tax-collecting agencies around the world, and therefore, indirectly for much of the (first-)world's population.... most everyone except for Apple shareholders who foot the bill.

Basically, Apple just introduced a tax on being an Apple shareholder.
Why on earth would Apple do this?

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Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
Funky Runners
straight out of Lightroom
featuring gracefully-fuzzy 鈴木 康之 and 河本 哲

So I was going through the photos from last weekend's Kyoto Marathon （京都マラソン２０１２) and came across an out-of-focus shot that I'd normally just delete, but it had some kind of odd sense of space about it that I found somehow appealing, and wondered whether I couldn't use some funky processing to turn the lack of focus into an asset.

I don't know whether I succeeded, but the result is what you see above, something that vaguely reminded me of my memory of some Leroy Neiman Olympic paintings.

I don't use develop presets very often, but I saved the extreme develop settings used in this photo as a new preset, which I named “Funky Runners”. While there, I noticed the few other presets I had accumulated over the years, and gave them a try with this photo.

The most recent one was “Creamy Autumn Wow” from “Kyoto Fall-Color Preview With Impact: Impressionism in Lightroom”, but the result with this subject was less impactful than the name implies:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
With the “Creamy Autumn Wow” Preset
not really doing it for me

I also tried the first Lightroom develop preset I ever made, one that attempted to match the at-the-time-vogue look of Dave Hill's work, as seen here and here (the former from a post exactly four years ago today, on the annual Kyoto Higashiyama “Hanatoro” lightup event in my neighborhood, which is again going on this week, but sadly, I've had no time to visit).

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
With the “Dave Hill Look” Preset
also not doing it for me

These misses just go to show that not all presets are appropriate for all images (though with the extreme nature of these, you wouldn't be faulted for thinking that they're not appropriate for any images, but I like their effects from time to time, in extreme moderation).

One of the “time to time” situations is the photo of mounted archer printed and framed in my office (as seen in “Dabbling in Some Fine-Art Printing for My Office”). The preset I used for that, named unoriginally as “Funky Archer”, produced this:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
With the “Funky Archer” Preset

Again, not interesting.

I know I could get “interesting” (though perhaps not “good”) with something from my tone-curve posts from a couple of years ago, either “Stupid Tone-Curve Tricks: A Half Dozen Develop Presets for Lightroom” or “Gettin’ Freaky With Lightroom Tone-Curve Presets”. There's much fodder in there for craziness, and not much for anything else, so I just picked one (“Notch Medium 8”) and then futzed with various brightness settings to come up with:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
“Notch Medium 8”
at least it's not boring

From the same posts...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
“Cliff Highlights 2”

Somewhere in the fun waste of time I spent on this last night (a needed diversion from plugin-related work, the crush of which has not yet subsided in the two weeks since Lightroom 4 was released) I apparently futzed around with a black-and-white version, because I found this in my catalog this morning:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
One Stab at a B&W

And finally, here's the original:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
Original
maybe some potential?

I've posted about “extreme” processing in Lightroom a few times over the years. Besides the various links referenced above, ones that come to mind include:

• Funky Joy With Adobe Lightroom
• Context for the Bamboo-and-Leaf Photo, and Some Crazy Post-Processing
• One More From Last Year’s Eikando Temple Fall Colors
• Freaky Raw Processing: From Sunset to Moonrise with Adobe Lightroom
• Serendipitous Fun with Adobe Lightroom
• Camo Duck in Black and White
• A Few Stylized Shots from Bunny Island
• Stark Tree
• Freaky “Artsy” Sharpening with Lightroom 1.1
• Two Sides of the Same Photo

Yet even after all that, it never ceases to amaze me just how much artistic latitude Lightroom affords... obviously way more than I can handle, but I find it fun.... in moderation.

If you've got Lightroom 4 and would like to see what you can come up with, here's “JF7_108110.dng”, a raw version of the original. I'd love to see whether anything good can come of this photo, or whether my first instinct to delete it was right.

Continued here...

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Some random desktop backgrounds in my photo library from the past year. I used these as practice with the new render engine in Lightroom 4, which I like but am not completely used to yet.

Often, a photo here is from some trip or event that I already blogged about; the “nearby photos” link under each image brings you to related posts.

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/320 sec, f/2.5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Wheat

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Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/800 sec, f/2.5, ISO 560 — map & image data — nearby photos
In a Garden

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Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Fluffy End
of the wheat

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Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Pierre Nadeau

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Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/1600 sec, f/2.5, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos

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Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/1250 sec, f/5.6, ISO 1400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Palm Tree Husk

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Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14mm — ¹/125 sec, f/13, ISO 5000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Mountain Ravine

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/1000 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Gion Matsuri Shinkousa

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/320 sec, f/2, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Festive Mood

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/500 sec, f/4, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
“No Fishing”

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Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/500 sec, f/7.1, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos

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Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/6400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos

Vertical Desktop-Background Versions
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Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/400 sec, f/5.6, ISO 5600 — map & image data — nearby photos

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Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 5600 — map & image data — nearby photos

Desktop-Background Versions
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Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
#3, #4, #5 At The Moment
谷口 幸治,   今田 淳,   小泉 淳
they ended up finishing 4th, and 5th, and 10th respectively

So picking up from my previous post about the Kyoto Marathon （京都マラソン２０１２), once the runners started arriving, I practiced taking photos. The depth of field with this lens is so incredibly thin that it's only luck that I got anything, but like hitting the lottery to get something so close like the next shot:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Amazing Luck
with the focus
石川 佳彦 — 12th place — 2:31:35

It was odd for me to see the “OMRON” on each runner's number bib. They're a large international electronics company headquartered in Kyoto; I worked for them for eight years when I was fresh out of grad school back in the late 80s.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/5000 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cool Shades
竹中 泰知 — 9th place — 2:31:08

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 220 — map & image data — nearby photos
More Focus Luck

The challenge of photography was wearing off a bit, so I started to concentrate on “interesting” looking runners, usually due to brightly-colored outfits...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/4000 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cool Running
吉原 一幸 — 39th place — 2:38:10

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Warm
木本 進 — 127th place — 2:46:56

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 highly cropped — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 220 — map & image data — nearby photos
Beautiful Puppy

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Likes Orange
木村 克己 — 268th place — 2:53:58

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Headsweats

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 220 — map & image data — nearby photos
Steady Stream

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Those Shades Again
石戸 秀暢 — 392nd place — 2:57:38

I wonder whether each runner got a pair of these sunglasses, or something, because pretty much every pair I noticed was from the same maker, variations on the same theme. And on an unrelated note, the guy above reminds me strongly of Seth Godin, and not just because he's bald.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Soccer Practice
just a pleasant Sunday-afternoon scene

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Tasty Rulebreaker
冨田 博司 — 531st place — 2:59:55

The race rules specifically prohibited what appears to be this kind of running advertisement, but perhaps it was overlooked because the cheese-puff-like snack involved in this case is tasty.

I took this next photo likely because of the guy's shoe/sock combo, but I include it here because he ended up being the last runner to break three hours:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/3200 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sub-Three
川嶋 健 — 534th place — 2:59:57

I eventually started to make my way home, and came across a group of youngsters practicing a dance number on a small field next to the course...

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Dance Practice

An overpass afforded a different view...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/4000 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Separated

Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/4000 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
view looking north

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2000 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sports Drink
view looking south

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2000 sec, f/2, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Course Bends
the race course leaves the river and crosses that bridge just behind the spectators lining it

And just behind the sports-drink area...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 300mm f/2 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Don't Bother Me, Kid
I'm watchin' the race

Continued here...