Archive for the 'Nishimura Stonecarvers' Category

Views of the workshop and gardens of Nishimura Stone Lanterns, hand-carving stone lanterns and other decorative/religious items at the same location (Kitashirakawa area of Kyoto, Japan) for five generations.

Random Shots from a Kyoto Countryside Tour

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...

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Nishimura Stone Carvers in a Light Snow

I've been to the garden behind Nishimura Stone Lanterns (西村石灯籠) many times -- that link is just one of many posts; see the nearby photos link under any of these photos brings you to many more -- but yesterday was the first time in the snow. I posted a few moss/snow shots on my earlier post today.

There wasn't much snow, but enough to add just a touch of new character. I went with Zak Braverman and Nicolas Joannin...

For a few minutes the sun came out at the same time the snow got a little harder, and so I [...]


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The Colossal Battle of Pageviews: xkcd vs. Reddit

I'm adamant about keeping my blog content what  I  want to share; I hope others will happen to like it, of course, but I don't "pander for pageviews",* despite having been called an attention whore by a random Internet anonymous coward the other day. 🙂  So, I don't often pay much attention to my blog's pageview statistics, and I often go months without even seeing them, but I've looked at them this past week, and the results are interesting.

The photos on today's post, by the way, have nothing to do with the text; I just wanted to include some [...]


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Visiting My Photo Archives: Random Pretty Shots #1

Since my main computer (a laptop holding my photos for the last two years) is still in the shop, I'm taking random walks through the 90,000 photos in my desktop-computer's Lightroom catalog, dating through the end of 2010. I'm taking the opportunity to delete a lot of cruft, but occasionally run across shots I want to share because they're pretty or interesting or respond well to "weird" processing...

Photos on this post date from 2007 (with a Nikon D200) to 2010 (with a Nikon D700). But, at least, they benefit from 2013-level processing in the name of Lightroom 4 and, [...]


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Visiting the Stonecarvers’ Gardens with Mike Bennett

As I wrote last week, my former manager at Yahoo!, Mike Bennett, visited town. After seeing his girlfriend and her family off in Tokyo, he returned to Kyoto for a couple of days of touristy stuff with me.

I took the opportunity to try out a slightly-broken Nikkor 50m f/1.2 that I'd picked up on Yahoo! Auctions (which is the eBay of Japan). Even after I add the cost to repair the heavy aperture ring and slight rattle of unknown origin, it'll have been cheaper than buying a new one, but truth be told I bought it because I'd confused [...]


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