I play and experiment a lot when I'm out with the camera, slowly trying to add bits of experience of what "works" and what doesn't. The photo above, from a trip a year ago to one of my favorite hidden gems of Kyoto, the Gioji Temple, is one of a series of five shots that I took at different apertures, to get different levels of blur in the background.

I often know exactly what I want in a result and how to get it, but sometimes I just can't predict what aperture will give a pleasing result, so I do [...]

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Anthony (almost 10 years old) needed new shoes, so we took him to the store and let him pick what he wanted, and this is what he got.

The colors are shockingly vibrant, so I thought it would be a good chance to try out the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport introduced to me in this comment a few days ago.

I still need to learn how to use it and its software to its full potential, but it's easy enough to use to profile one lighting situation...

Custom   -   Adobe Standard   -   Camera Standard

mouseover a button to see that [...]

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Picking up from yesterday's "Beyond The Staircase Ruins" from an outing to the Kuuya-taki Waterfall (空也滝) in western Kyoto, this post has a few shots from the short trip back to the road.

This picture reflects the style of many of the buildings in the area... rusty corrugated metal, haphazard amateur cement work, dusty bottles.

These ferns were parallel with the ground, but floating 10 feet above the ground, sticking out from the top of a wall built into the side of a hill.

This is the same wall seen in "Beyond The Staircase Ruins", but from a less edge-on [...]

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Back again to the mossy temple visit from "Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Gioji Temple", with an orange followup counterpart to the "Gioji Temple Photo Shoot: Nicolas’s White Little Mushrooms" post.

The temple's entrance gate is covered by a little roof of bamboo and decaying moss-covered wood. For context, here's a photo of the roof with Nicolas under it (photographing a spider):

The bamboo on the roof makes a grid of squares... the mushrooms of today's post are in the lower-rightmost square:

Once Nicolas was done, I moved in with my all-time favorite lens, the [...]

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This post shows some example effects of a polarizer filter on vegetation, specifically, the moss and fern laden garden of the Gioji Temple in Kyoto, Japan (祇王寺). On the topic of polarizers it follows from "A Few Polarization-Filter Examples" where I first brought up the topic four years ago, and the fall-foliage followup last year: "Heading Out To Photograph The Fall Foliage? Don’t Forget The Polarizer Filter".

On the topic if the Gioji Temple, this post follows from yesterday's "Gioji Temple Photo Shoot: Nicolas's White Little Mushrooms" and the slightly earlier "Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at [...]

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