New (to me) friends Eric and Gigi, seen the other day in “Unexpectedly Snowy Photoshoot at the Joshokoji Temple”, wanted to pick up a kimono before returning to San Francisco, and I got to tag along.

A friend brought them to a small shop in central Kyoto named W'Atelier ENYA (縁家)...

First was Gigi's turn, and she quickly zeroed in on one to try...

I don't know why kimono need to be so complex, but even most Japanese don't know how to put one on themselves.

Gigi tried various kimono....

Gigi's first instinct was apparently correct, because she had to return to the original green one to try again...

She decided to buy that one, so got fitted for all the various accouterments a kimono requires, starting with an under-robe kind of thing that requires its own myriad of knots to complete...

Then it was Eric's turn. Kimono for men are a much more simple affair, and he had one picked out and put on before I knew it.

I believe it was his first time in a kimono, but a combination of confidence and being Asian made it look natural on him. Whenever I wear a kimono I feel like a tall white guy playing dress-up. Lipstick on a pig, and all that, you know.

Anyway, I had Eric move to the better light where Gigi had been posing. It's tough to get a real picture of Eric because he's always hamming it up if you point the camera at him. I suspect deep underlying insecurities (even worse than mine, if that's possible), which is probably why, like me, he's a photographer and not a model. 🙂

He couldn't even pretend to hold a serious pose for more than a moment...

I wanted to get a picture of the two together, but stupidly didn't think about the light and put them back under the harsh fluorescent. The initial result was almost unusably blown out, but because I shoot raw, I can often recover from exposure mistakes, and eke something out:

Eric is wearing a hat that I'd jokingly given him to wear (see the opening shot). It's made partially of kimono fabric, and seems to be targeted at a 20-something demographic, but he wore it with gusto and frankly I was surprised how good it looked on him.

Of course, with the camera on him he couldn't pretend to be serious for long, so as the photographer I needed to direct him. Having seen the fantastic Peter Hurley headshot video several times, I know the concepts, but I'm really bad at remembering and executing.

Still, I get lucky sometimes. I think I said “Come on, guys, at least pretend you love each other”...

Through the cycle group that I mentioned last week, I met photographer/triathlete Kumiko Mini, who as it happened was expecting photographer friends from San Francisco to join her for a week of photography fun in Kyoto. I got to tag along on a trip into the mountains where they planned to do a little photoshoot at a temple far away from the crowds of the city.

There was no forecast for snow, but as we got into the mountains the flakes started coming and got thicker by the minute. The mountains turned splendid with a puffy, frosty blanket.

By the time we stopped for a picture, I'd gotten to know Eric and Gigi for an hour, by which time they'd cemented themselves as fun to be around and fun to talk photography...

They'd come to Kyoto to give their new Pentax medium format(!) SLR and delicious lens a workout.

Meanwhile Kumiko is shooting her Canon...

Three different brands, but somehow we remained friends. I just lament that I couldn't borrow lenses(!)

The snow is the heavy, sticky kind, but since Eric and Gigi had only the one camera between them, Eric was available for other tasks while Gigi shot...

We eventually moved on to the temple while the snow increased.

I'd been here once before, during cherry-blossom season two years ago, as seen in “On The Way Into Kyoto’s Northern-Mountain Joshoko-ji Temple”. This time it was a bit different.

Kumiko wore a kimono-inspired dress so that she could be a model, and with the snow falling and the place to ourselves, it seemed an opportunity to take advantage of.

My confidence driving in the snow plummeted with this abandon-the-car-in-the-snow event some years back, at least if I don't have snow tires, which I didn't now. So, I was getting a bit worried about the hour's twisty-mountain-drive ride home. But we'd come all this way, so we may as well take a peek at what's at the top of the steps...

... and through the gate at the top we saw this:

Compare to this August view of the same scene.

I've finally released a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom that I've been working on for some time, my “People Support” plugin. Once configured, it can tell you the age of people in a photo, and include that data in exports.

It's consumed me for weeks. The idea of calculating and displaying a person's age seems quite straightforward and simple, doesn't it? It's not. Date calculations are surprisingly fraught with complexity, and presentation all the more so when you take into account dealing with all the languages that Lightroom can work in.

English is simple in that we use the same “year” word for dealing with how long ago something happened (“this picture was taken five years ago”) and how old someone is (“this kid is five years old”). Not all languages are so simple... Japanese, for example, uses completely different words for “years” when talking about ages.

Then you have to take into account special cases, such as the day of birth, or even when someone is tagged in a photo before they're born (think ultrasound scan).

There's still plenty of features I'd like to add, but what I'm releasing today is a good start. Notably missing, for example, is a way to inject people information into exported captions when you're not using one of my many export/publish plugins. But if you are, the configuration for who's name and/or age should appear is remarkably powerful. A standalone solution will come later.

The plugin is here

Today I made my first “real” bicycling ride. Normally the bicycle is just for transportation from one place to the other, and not my first choice for either exercise nor pleasure, but I recently replaced my 10-year-old mamachari (“Mama Chariot”, heavy, built like a tank, and can carry oodles of kids and stuff) with a lighter cross bike.

今日は初めての本物の自転車でツアーイング。新しい友達と一緒に55キロの山巡り。大原と貴船を見に行きました。

Through the Cycling Kyoto Facebook group I learned that some folks would have a “slow easy” ride today, so I thought it was a good opportunity to give it a try.

We ended up going 55km (34 miles) up into the mountains and back. The “and back” part was easier.

We met up at the Sanjo St. bridge at 11am, and soon headed off...

It wasn't all that steep as far as mountains go, but it was certainly the most steep road I'd ever taken on a bike. It rose 210m over about 900m length. Since it was my first ride I decided that I would always stay at the back. This gave me a great excuse to rest if I wasn't the slowest, and if I was the slowest, well, what do you expect from the guy at the back? 🙂

It turns out that Lianca's normal road bike is in the shop, so she was using a heavy mountain bike, which wasn't really appropriate for this kind of riding. So, I could take it easy most of the time. 😉

The trip down the other side of the mountain was equally steep...

We stopped by the Family Mart near the Sanzenin Temple. I've visited that temple numerious times in the past, but I would have never imagined going that far by bicycle.

We then retraced our path part way...

This time I thought I'd try to stay with the two guys when we retraced our steps back up the aforementioned steep climb....

Coming off an injury, Ross is riding for the first time in a month and so was taking it “slow and easy”, and Antti was kind enough to slow down to keep him company. I hadn't really been taxed in the 20km we'd done so far, but the photo above was the last I saw of them for quite a while. They made it look effortless, but I can assure you it was most certainly not effortless.

Still, I made it to the pass without passing out or even stopping, and so I waited for the rest of the group and tried to catch an “action shot” as they came by (though I realize now that I should have set up a bit downhill, so they'd have some speed...)

Having retraced our steps for 8km, we headed back into the mountains, toward Kibune.

Somewhere near Kibune we stopped for a quick photo, seen at the start of this post.

Sharp readers will of course 😉 recall that the same bridge guardrail appeared on my blog eight years ago, at the end of “Getting Ready for Summer, in Kibune”.

Then some quick individual snaps...

Since I wasn't in any of the group pictures, I thought I'd at least grab a snap of myself for my own memory, on one of the road-curve mirrors ubiquitous in the mountains of Japan.

Since the ride was done save for returning home, the two guys took off at their own speed, and we never saw them again. After getting down into town, I decided to pop over to a park where I knew Anthony was playing with friends. The moment I said “bye” to the other two I'd been returning with and was on my own in the city, the bike ceased to be fun. It was now just drudgery “get to Point B” work.

So, while I enjoyed the first 45km of the trip, it's the social aspect of it that appealed to me. The last 11k was drudgery.

Anyway, here's what the Google Earth shows for my ride:

The red arrow is about where this post's lead photo was taken.

Later that evening, I had dinner at Via Transito, the Italian restaurant located here owned by friend Salvo Mannino. Salvo had helped me buy my new bike, and had introduced me to the Kyoto Cycling group, so I wanted to stop by to thank him and report on my ride.

Damien and Kumiko joined me and Anthony for a wonderful dinner and conversation.

I remembered to take a picture of the salad, but then forgot after that. It was tasty.

My neck and shoulders are a bit sore from the ride, but otherwise I seem not too much worse for wear. Not sure when I'll do such a thing again, but it was a wonderful day for the experience, made all the better by the company I lucked into having.

Was a good day.

Today was the annual toshiya archery event for new adults at the Sanjusangendo Temple (三十三間堂) here in Kyoto. I blogged about it extensively three years ago starting with “Traditional Archery Like a Boss”.

I then followed up with what turned into one of my most popular series of posts, starting with “Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer’s Shot”, followed by a note about the crowds and the hubub outside and the instructors taking their turn (“More Badass Japanese Archery”) and then a look at the colorful wardrobes of the ladies and then perhaps my favorite post on the subject: “Badass Japanese Archery: Now It’s The Ladies’ Turn” (followed by more and more ladies) and then finally more instructors. Phew!

I'll post more about the day later, but for now just a few photos...

Continued here...