I've pushed out a couple of new plugins recently....

Bulk Develop Settings allows you to pragmatically calculate and apply luminance noise reduction based upon a photo's ISO setting, and on any exposure boost done in post processing. Lightroom has a way to set the default noise reduction based upon the camera and ISO, but you have to set it individually for each ISO, but for me that involves many dozens of different ISO values, even for just one camera model. It's too ungainly to be of use, so I made this plugin.

Order Prints Locally allows you to upload photos to LifePics and then have them printed at a local shop for pickup (in many cases within an hour). LifePics partners with tens of thousands of retailers around the world, though the bulk of them are in the US and Canada. You can search in the plugin via US/Canadian postal code, or worldwide latitude/longitude.

I had a wonderful day today exploring some temples I'd never been to right here in Kyoto, about which I'll write more soon (here), but I thought I'd put this one up today. It's looking down a circular well at the Souken'in Temple (part of the Daitokuji temple complex) whose opening is framed by a box made of large stone slabs. It's more than 400 years old.

Peering in over the edge, it was pitch black with a small dab of light at the bottom (the reflection of the opening), so I guessed the depth, then focused at something about that far away to set the focus, then pointed the camera down and braced it against the edge, and took the four-second exposure.

It still came out very dark, so I brightened it up in Lightroom.

I think I could do a much better photo if I just took an extra minute to think about it, but this temple is rarely open to the public, so I doubt I'll get another chance any time soon.

Anyway, it's interesting to see down into it, and to wonder how it was built all those years ago.

I had been out and about with Stéphane Barbery, who also did a similar shot, though he did a much better job technically, and went a different direction artistically. I like it.

Continued here...

There was a short event at the Heian Shrine the other day that involved some 600 tai chi practitioners from around the country, doing a short routine at the shrine to, as it was told to me, show the gods their performance in the hope that it would please them.

Now that I think about it, I don't know of any other shrine that has a courtyard large enough to handle numbers like this.... it's a lot of people, so first they had to get them all in...

The young girl in kimono has probably just come from a shichi-go-san event, which fill a shrine's autumn weekends with cute kids in kimono (including my own kid last year).

Sigh. At least they didn't decide to wander in through the group!

I was forced to abandon wide-angle shots, so went in for the zoom...

After the five-minute routine was done, they filed out and that was that.

I wonder whether there are any other shrines in Japan with courtyards this big? The owners of the shrine use it for all kinds of things, such as music and art performances, a large Setsubun event, which itself includes an intense burn of tens of thousands of wooden wish offerings. Then, of course, there are the innumerable portraits taken, such as my family portrait last year, lots of kids in kimono, and the weddings that fill the weekends.

But my favorite photo here in the courtyard has just one person in it.

Two weeks ago I visited an ikebana (flower arranging) exhibition and posted some pictures of arrangements done by kids (aged about three to eight). Today I'll follow up with shots of a few of the many (100+?) other arrangements.

I wrote in that post two weeks ago the problems with photography at the event.... the backgrounds, the lighting, the positioning... all were elements that I couldn't control, and all were horrible from a photography point of view.

I'm about as uncultured a clod as you'll find, but even I could tell that the whole concept of an ikebana exhibition seems to go against everything that ikebana seems to be about. Here's a great example:

The light-hearted bicycle thing is not part of your average ikebana display, but the “out of place” here is that this arrangement would be at home in the small garden off a quaint little country cafe, not here naked on a cloth-covered card table bathed in a mixture of fluorescent and incandescent lights, sandwiched between two other arrangements as different from it as can be, yet equally out of place themselves.

Trying to enjoy these arrangements the way ikebana are meant to be experienced is like trying to listen to a fine string quartet in a seedy grunge bar.... while 10 other bands blare 10 other kinds of music at the same time.

I didn't notice this at all when I came to the same exhibition three years ago, so I felt slightly more cultured having noticed the discord this time. I ran into an acquaintance who is rather high up in the ikebana world and mentioned my feelings, and she looked at me as if she had no clue what I was saying. This is likely because she had no clue what I was saying (my Japanese is not always the best), or it might be because I was way off base.

Thinking about it now, it could be that anyone with sense knows that these are meant to be viewed while the mind is in the proper spot appropriate for each piece, or that they're here not to be “enjoyed” at all, but rather, they're gathered all together in one place to demonstrate techniques and trends among the practitioners.

I dunno.

Anyway, I tried to capture what I could, and tended to find the best balance by getting in sort of close...

Here's another pair:

There was an area with a strong Jakartian theme, bringing in some feathers....

My Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 macro couldn't resist the feathers, but with the plane of focus thinner than the thickness of the feather and my inability to use a tripod or brace against anything, it was really difficult to hit focus while just hovering. (Most of my concentration was directed at not touching anything!) The only thing really in focus in the next shot are the stripes toward the left of the frame...

Some arrangements were huge floor displays, difficult to find clear among the teeming crowd...

I particularly liked this one arrangement...

There was a similar piece further down the table...

... but I preferred the first one because it matched the environment I imagined for it better than the second matched the environment I imagined for it. (This, of course, is more of a statement about my imagination than about the relative merits of the two pieces.)

The second piece certainly did have a nice flower, though...

Here's a piece by someone way high up that I liked a lot, but looks like nothing in this wide shot....

But my lens liked the detail... here are two views of the same little area:

It's difficult to tell without context, but the mushrooms were huge for being matsutake, comparable to those I mention in “Feasting Like Indulgent Royalty on Matsutake Mushrooms”. They would have cost hundreds of dollars.

There was another table of “junior” entries, by older kids than those that appeared in the previous post...

The rest of this post is a collection of random one-off shots illustrating some of the other arrangements...

Having been engulfed with a big project, I'm sort of surprised to see the week has evaporated and that it's been so long since my previous post. I'm back to reality because Anthony turned 8 yesterday....

Adding it to the present (LEGO™) from his Aunt Namiko and Uncle Shogo (who got married three weeks ago), the result was a triple-crown of LEGO™ birthday joy...

Before eating I took a snapshot of the group...

Namiko and Shogo brought the “HAPPY” used at their wedding reception to add to the festive décor.

Oddly, Anthony wasn't particularly hungry and so soon excused himself to actually start playing with the presents....

Eventually it was time for cake, which Fumie had decorated with a running Star Wars® clone trooper...

He'd been complaining that he was full (and so shouldn't bother with the cake, but instead keep playing with his presents), but we insisted, and as we were preparing it, he commented mostly to himself “wow, just looking at it makes me feel hungry”. Duh!

I usually try to get a shot like this, though there's less emphasis as he gets older, and for the last couple of years I've not put much thought or preparation into it, preferring to enjoy the moment rather than photograph it. Here are the comparable shots from when he turned 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Then it was back to the LEGO, in a scene we've seen quite often in our house:

He kept saying that it was the best birthday ever, without even knowing that my folks had sent a present that we were holding back to give him something to open the next day....