I've tried getting this post done every day since “Little Pink Flowers” 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 days ago, but I keep getting caught up with Lightroom plugin work. I guess the balance between plugins and blog varies over time, with “blog” on the short end these days.

Anyway, the “Little Pink Flowers” post was from an outing a couple of weeks ago when I showed a visitor a bit around some of the fringe countryside areas of Kyoto. Our first stop was the Nishimura Stonecarver's garden, an amazing place that has its own category on my blog...

Then we made a brief stop at the Tanukitanisan Fudouin Temple (狸谷山不動院) where I snapped a photo of a carving on a sub-temple for “everyday life”...

Then we popped up to Ohara and the Sanzen'in Temple (三千院). At one point inside a little boy came around the corner and saw me (and likely that I looked obviously different from people he normally sees) and just stood there looking at me, taking me in. I snapped a shot.

After several seconds he apparently decided that I was neither a threat nor a source of treats, and proceeded to go on his way.

Later in the garden I noticed these stone faces rising from the moss...

I'd never noticed them before, but in looking around now I found many. I'll have to go back when the light is better to try photographing them all.

This next picture was taken quickly when I noticed a group of three young-at-heart ladies in their 70s or 80s were forming a human chain to allow one on the end to reach over a pond to touch a stream of water coming from a bamboo pipe....

I'm not sure what the deal is with the water and having to reach out over the pond, but it's a thing at the temple.

Anyway, in picking photos to include on this blog post I realized that I neglected to get an “establishing shot” that shows the wider context of the pond, but I knew I'd taken such a shot during a previous visit. Lightroom provides numerous ways to find photos, in this case all would be slow.

Several days of plugin development later, I came up with an extremely fast way to search my 130,000-photo catalog for nearby photos, and voila, here are a couple from 2010:

As a bonus, I found some that I'd posted in 2011 but forgotten about.

On the way out of the temple you pass under a low-hanging branch that seems to have interesting leaves... after taking this shot the other day...

I realized that I'd done the same thing a few years ago, slightly later in the season...

I'm not sure that the leaf pictures are particularly compelling, but the ability to instantaneously see photos from other times, taken in the same immediate area, makes me a bit giddy. I guess I'm just geeky that way.

We then took a drive on little-used roads through the deep mountains north of Kyoto, stopping by a little village...

Elsewhere in the village we came across an old couple harvesting rice, by hand, with just a sickle and hard work...

Most of the rice has been flattened, likely by wind gusts during the typhoon the other day.

I've written about the rice harvest various times in the past, including here, here, and here.