Archive for the 'Desktop Backgrounds' CategoryPosts with desktop-background images I’ve made
I took another walk in Fushimi yesterday (a south-east area of Kyoto), similar to that of my previous post ("A Few Over-Process Under-Thought Photos From Lunch"), but with nice weather. Red and orange seemed to be a theme. For the most part, cherry trees here in Japan don't bear fruit in a meaningful way (normally [...]
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First there was the walk to lunch ("On The Way To Lunch: Eastern-Kyoto Stroll"), then lunch ("Delicious Yuba Lunch at Junsei"), and now the walk home... We came across an ultra-fluffy yaezakura cherry that comes out late (a variety seen five years ago on my blog in "10 Gallons of Blossoms on a 5-Gallon Branch"). [...]
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I had an amazing outing yesterday with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin, to a far-off temple in the mountains of north-west Kyoto. On the way home, we stopped in the "Mountain House" restaurant Yama no Ie Hasegawa (山の家はせがわ) that I wrote about a couple of years ago (here and here). Upon pulling in, we were [...]
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I took my camera when I walked to lunch through a small area of eastern Kyoto yesterday. These are some of the shots I took along the way. Both lunch and the walk back will be their own posts...
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I've found especially this spring that I tend to use the Voigtländer 125mm more than ever, and seem to be falling into the easy-pickings trap of macro flora photography. I guess it's a phase. This seemed particularly evident to me the other day on the outing with Paul Barr that produced "Photographer's Low-Hanging Fruit: a [...]
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Picking up from yesterday's intro post on the Ishiyama Temple (石山寺) half an hour away in Otsu, Japan, here are a few more shots from early in the visit to the large mountainous grounds... To be continued...
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These were all at the entrance to a temple in Otsu that Paul Barr introduced me to today. I haven't yet looked at the rest of the photos, but it was quite an impressive place, so I have hope that at least a few good shots came of it. Continued here...
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Taking pictures of growing flowers is about as challenging as I imagine it would be to photograph animals caged in a zoo... the only thing easier would be pictures of non-growing flowers, e.g. cut and arranged flowers, as I've done many times (including here, here, here, here, and here, among others), which is perhaps comparable [...]
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The other day after a short stroll through the Chishaku-in Temple in eastern Kyoto, we made our way behind it to search for a set of stairs that Stéphane had suggested. We found it. At the top of the small set of steps was a park with cherry blossoms and kids playing, beyond which was [...]
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Today I visited eastern Kyoto's Chishaku-in Temple (智積院) with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin. I'd driven by its large temple grounds hundreds of times, but had never stopped in, and perhaps couldn't have picked a better day. It was the first short-sleeve day of the year, and the open grounds were dotted with all kinds [...]
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There were plenty of folks enjoying the blossoms, but it was quiet and relaxed, nothing at all like the ugly, disgusting spectacle you so often find (that I wrote about seven years ago in "The Ugliness of Japanese Cherry-Blossom Viewing"). It wasn't even like "Cherry-Blossom Joie de Vivre in Kyoto". It was just a normal [...]
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Dark buds have been slowly making the cherry-tree branches bumpy, but today they suddenly erupted with color. No blossoms as of yet, but the color is clearly there where yesterday there was none. The blossoms are quite late this year. Comparing to the my cherry-blossom timelapse from 2007, this year seems to be about five [...]
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Some random desktop backgrounds in my photo library from the past year. I used these as practice with the new render engine in Lightroom 4, which I like but am not completely used to yet. Often, a photo here is from some trip or event that I already blogged about; the "nearby photos" link under [...]
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As I mentioned in my previous post, yesterday was the Kyoto Marathon (京都マラソン2012). I thought it'd be a fun experience to photograph, to see what I could come up with. The first challenge was to pick a location along the 42-kilometer course that was both photogenic and accessable. (Huge swaths of the city were shut [...]
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I continue to be busy getting my Lightroom Plugins ready for the next release of Lightroom 4 (the real thing if not another beta)... I just don't seem to have the energy to much else, but I hate not posting every day, much less every week(!) So for something easy to post today, I just [...]
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In yesterday's "Colorful Ladies' Wardrobe" post we looked at some of the young ladies preparing for their turn at traditional Japanese archery at the rite-of-passage event described in "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot". Before and after their turn they were as lively as you'd expect a bunch of twenty-year-old girls to be, [...]
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After what's turned out to be a monochromatic year so far, I'm happy to get some color back in my blog. The fall-foliage season is Kyoto's most glorious, and it runs a long six or seven weeks, so I've got more fodder for posts than I could actually process, so I'll dip in for today's [...]
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This year has gotten off slowly for me, having woken up January 1st with a cold and all, but with "Inspired Artistic Temple Shot" and its followup, "Simple Temple Sliding Wall", I seem to have a black-and-white theme going, so I'll continue that today with a post about charcoal, from last year's visit to Japanese [...]
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Earlier this month, on the wonderful day in Kyoto's Takao area that I mentioned in the rainbow post a few weeks ago, we visited two temples. I posted a few scenes from the first in "On The Path To Northwest Kyoto's Shingoji Temple", and while I have a bazillion more from there that I want [...]
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A month ago in "Another Day of Amazing Fall Colors in Kyoto" I posted on photo similar to the one above, from that day's trip to the Imakumano Kannonji Temple (今熊野観音寺) in eastern Kyoto. The tree with the red leaves had particularly impressive colors, but only when viewed from about where the group is standing. [...]
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