The reflections on the wet rocks and foliage during the visit to the Honen'in Temple (法然院) presented in my previous post made for some interesting possibilities with the polarizing filter.

Swiping the mouse side to side on the photo above shows the effect of different filter rotations.

I like the rocks better when the bright reflections, but that also leaves the reflections on the foliage in the background, leaving them relatively washed out compared to the richer colors seen when the polarizer is turned to block reflections. (More impactful examples of foliage-related reflections are shown in "Heading Out To Photograph [...]

Probably the last of these for a while, as I'm off tomorrow to travel for a few weeks, but here's a sequence of different-aperture shots taken looking down a railing on the covered bridge in the gardens of the Heian Shrine (平安神宮) in Kyoto Japan, where my previous post left us.

Though with fewer shots, this scene perhaps makes for a better example than the one I posted the other day in "The Effects of Aperture on a Subtle, Tranquil Cluster of Cherry Blossoms".

Still, the shutter-speed one from earlier in the month ("The Effect of Shutter Speed on the [...]

This post is sort of a continuation of "Hoverfly and Hydrangea", from a trip last month with Aeron to the gardens of the Heian Shrine (平安神宮) in eastern Kyoto.

The light was really not very good (mostly quite harsh), and I was enjoying the conversation with Aeron more than I was paying attention to the photography, but I thought I'd share a few more pictures anyway.

Some of the trees in the garden had wonderfully "interesting", twisted shapes, though I had no idea what to do with them camera wise. As I said, the light was often really harsh, which [...]

This is a followup to my "Subtle · Pastel · Tranquil" post the other day, where I posed desktop-background versions of this cherry-blossom picture (blossoms at Kyoto's Ryouanji Temple (龍安寺), from a trip last spring covered earlier here and here):

Apparently I really liked the scene because I took shots at various apertures, and seemed to do an okay job keeping the camera steady (it was all handheld with a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 macro), so I went ahead today and put together the animatable display above.

Of course, this is along the lines of what I did a couple of [...]

I posted some water-flow pics the other day in "A Drenched Visit to the Kuuya-Taki Waterfall" (空也滝), taken during an outing in which I'd hoped to miss the rain, but found a rare Kyoto thunderstorm. Since I had my tripod with me, I did some tests on the effect of shutter speed on the feeling of water flow.

Swabbing the mouse from side to side over the image above (and all the images below) causes different frames of each test set to come up, with the shutter speed in seconds showing in the lower right.

I would have liked to [...]