I visited today the Eikando Temple gardens, nestled in the base of the mountains at the far east of Kyoto, about a 15-minute walk from our place. I'd been there before and thought it was really pretty, but I must have been stupid or blind (or on parenting duty with an impatient kid to look after) because today it was FREAKING MIND-BLOWING AMAZING.

Just *WOW*.

My photos don't even come close to doing it justice.

The temple is famous for its fall colors, as I found out the first time I drove by during the proper season, posted in “Colorful Leaves and Colorful Kimono”, of kimono-clad ladies congregating at the entrance to the temple's preschool. Visiting the preschool was my main goal today, as we were again invited to their “Fall-Color Festival” by one of Anthony's friends (the same festival is the subject of “Anthony and Friends Among the Colors” from two years ago).

The visit two years ago resulted in “Bonanza of Fall-Foliage Desktop Backgrounds”, but we were with Anthony and some of his friends, so I couldn't really spend much time in the temple gardens during that visit. This year, we spent some time at the festival in the morning and then left for mass, after which I left Fumie and Anthony at home and returned to explore the gardens at my leisure.

It was heavily overcast in the afternoon, eventually starting to rain while we were there (in the afternoon, I met a camera-toting friend visiting from The States). But the cloud cover made the photography all the better, I think.

The temple is the most expensive to visit that I've ever seen (1,000 yen – about $12 – to enter), and on a day like today was worth every single yen.

In the evening they light up everything with flood lamps, which brings out the crowds yet again, but it, too, is pretty, as I wrote in last year's “How I Spent My Saturday in Kyoto” and “More From the Eikando Temple Foliage Lightup”

These 15 photos are just about the first 15 photos I took. Not quite, but almost, save for a bout of testing the exposure.... I still feel I'm fighting the D700's desire to overexpose, and most of these were taken with -1EV exposure compensation.

I haven't even gone through most of the 157 photos from the day, but even just these, full size on a high-quality (high-gamut) monitor... wow, my head wants to explode.

I wanted to include Desktop-Background versions of most of these, but gave up after spending a couple of hours trying to get the requisite Photoshop script working on my new Mac. Must eventually figure it out and revisit these.

Continued here...