It was more amazing than I could have possibly imagined. It was overwhelming. I am so exhausted (from it, and from not having slept last night trying to build a plugin for Adobe Lightroom to import face-recognition data from Google's Picasa photo app) that I have not even unloaded my images from the camera.

But Paul, who has never used Lightroom, wanted to give it a try, so I loaded his images and gave him about a minute's instruction, and let him loose. Having been inspired by some of Stéphane Barbery's recent work – such as his Jidai Matsuri shots, [...]

The other day in "Nishimura Stone Lanterns: the Workshop" I introduced the workshop of a fifth-generation stone-carving shop in north-east Kyoto that Paul Barr and I "discovered" the other day.

Next to and beside their shop are areas just teeming with a huge variety of stone carvings. I assume it's their "warehouse" and sales floor (so to speak), but I'm not really sure. It sure looked pretty if you stuck your head in a bit to look.

Paul is standing just behind the old discarded cutting wheels featured in the Fairly Dirty "What am I?" Quiz the other day.

I [...]

Out on a photo hunt with Paul Barr yesterday, we happened upon a stonecarver's shop, less than 200 yards from the site of the mysterious cut stones I posted about a few days ago. There's a real chance that they're related, though at this point it still seems very strange. (UPDATE: I later asked, and found out that the stones are sort of their overflow inventory.)

The relatively modern (within the last 30 years) workshop is right on the street, but without signage of any type....

There's not much around there... a few houses, a temple, a pet cemetery, and [...]

I was out with Paul Barr (he of the dubious camera-stabilization technique 🙂 ) and came across a sight that he suggested would make a good "What am I?" Quiz, and I readily agreed.

Continued here... (though, here's a direct link to the answer).

In yesterday's "Fall Colors in Nature, as Nature Intended" I wrote about an area of (what I think is) natural-growth deciduous trees in a long ravine along the mountain road between Kyoto and Otsu. In using the phrase "as nature intended", I meant to contrast the exquisite (but planned) landscaping of large temples like Eikando. I did not, however, mean to imply that nature intended such a gorgeous display of color to be marred by ugly visual pollution like guardrails, telephone poles, and junk.

But, like most areas of nature in Japan that are accessible to people, junk was aplenty, [...]