I did something yesterday that I'd never done: I went out shooting with two camera bodies.

I often go out shooting with one body and many lenses, changing lenses upwards of 70 times on a long and interesting outing, and this works well for what I like to do, but when I added the Nikon D4 to my Nikon D700 at the start of the summer, I specifically thought it might be nice to have two bodies when out among the festive crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, one body with the huge Nikkor 300mm f/2, and another with a [...]

Busy day today... caught the fringe of two famous Kyoto festivals. In the afternoon was Jidai Matsuri (時代祭 -- "Festival of the Ages"), more or less a re-enactment parade representing the many periods Kyoto's long history. I caught the tail end of the procession as it made its way past my place.

(I'll post more another day, I'm sure, but in the meantime, for a different take on the genre, check out Stéphane Barbery's photos from three years ago, and from today.)

In the evening was the Kurama Fire Festival, which involves a lot of fire being heaved and hoed [...]

Not too exciting, but there's the view from Kyoto.

Using my naked eye with eclipse sun-glasses, I can just make out that there's something there, if I know where to look and look carefully. It's a bit easier as the planet moves further in from the edge, but I wonder how on earth people ever noticed these things in ancient times.

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So, as I mentioned this morning, we had a nice view of the annular eclipse today. I'd never seen one (nor have I ever seen a total eclipse, except on TV). Here are a few more pictures.

That picture above illustrates in one way just how bright the sun is... I was using stacked filters to cut all but 1/3,200th of the light, leaving everything dark except the sun, which was still completely blown out. I wonder what the dynamic range is during one of these things, between the surface of the moon and the surface of the sun.

Notice [...]

We had a nice view of the annular ('ring-shaped') eclipse from Kyoto this morning. We are on the edge of the shadow's path, so the view for us was of the moon skirting the edge of the sun. We had only 100 seconds of ring. (Folks in Tokyo got five minutes.) I took a bunch of pictures, but don't know whether anything came out. Will look through them later. At the moment (an hour later), the sun still has a small bite out of it, getting smaller by the minute.

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