Fumie and I made a day trip up to Tokyo yesterday for a birthday party for singer Kousuke Atari (中孝介), whom we've seen in concert many times. It was attended by 85 of his closest friends fans.

We ran into a lady we met at his Roppongi Hills, Tokyo concert in January, whom Fumie had really clicked with, so after yesterday's event, we all stopped by a nearby cafe so that they could chat.

The cafe had a nice – although somewhat pretentious – atmosphere. One of the workers was a "non-Japanese looking" guy who greeted me in French, to [...]

I've mentioned recently how much I love the natural roofs of many temples and shrines, having noted it in recent posts about the Fushimi Inari Shrine and about the Kiyomizu Temple. The roof above, like the roofs cited in those posts, are made of many layers of thin sheets of what I assume is wood. Such a roof, over time, slowly breaks down and returns to nature.

Here's a relatively new one, as evidenced by the sharp shadows showing that the individual sheets of wood are still easily distinguishable as, well, individual sheets of wood....

It's not so new that [...]

The caption is just a silly reference to the "art" vs. "photography" discussion in my recent post about HDR. When I first looked this picture, I wondered why it was a blurry – it seemed mosaiced or pixelated, as if it hadn't been fully loaded from disk before display – and I waited for it to finish loading and to "snap" into focus. I eventually realized that it wasn't pixelated, but rather, it just had a lot of water drops that you (or, at least, I) don't notice at first.

It's a lotus flower. [UPDATE: Peter Barnes of Barnes Botany [...]

Last March, Fumie and I traveled to the city of Kanazawa to see Kousuke Atari in concert, and while photography is not allowed during the concert, Japan always offers plenty to enjoy in that respect. I've already posted about Kanazawa's Kenrokuen Gardens, and some hotel-lobby wedding-party shots I took.

Today, I'll post about the geometrically-rich entrance atrium of Kanazawa's JR (Japan Railway) station, one scene from which was the lead photo of my embarrassment of riches post some time ago.

The main feature when viewed from the front is a strongly modern (postmodern?) interpretation of a traditional Shinto shrine gate. [...]

I was feeling just dandy last Saturday morning while we awaited the airport shuttle to pick us up to start a five-day mini vacation to a somewhat tropical island in southern Japan, so I was more than a little dismayed when after hauling the luggage down to the van and settling into my seat that I suddenly realized that my cold – one that plagued me for a month but had, I thought, been over for the last week – had returned with the almost audible thud of a proverbial ton of bricks hitting me. I suddenly felt miserable, and [...]