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Archive for the 'Vertical Desktop Backgrounds' Category

Photos appropriate for a vertically-oriented screen (a screen that’s taller than it is wide)

Another Kyoto Stroll: Seeing (or Not Seeing, as the Case May Be) Reds
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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Returning From Lunch: New Discoveries Close To Home in Eastern Kyoto
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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Delicious Yuba Lunch at Junsei, Near Kyoto’s Kiyomizu Temple
The other day in "On The Way To Lunch: Eastern-Kyoto Stroll" I ended with a few shots of the girls above taking advantage of a photogenic location, made more so for everyone else by their presence. I was heading to the Kiyomizu branch of the most excellent Junsei Tofu Restaurant to have lunch with Paul [...]
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Pretty As a Peach Blossom
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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On The Way To Lunch: Eastern-Kyoto Stroll
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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Some Kyoto Domesticated Flora
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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More Early Shots From the Ishiyama-dera Temple
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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Cliché Incarnate: Lame Formulaic Pictures of Plum Blossoms and Those Enjoying Them
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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Some Random Japan Desktop Backgrounds From the Past Year
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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A Few Colorful Kyoto Desktop Backgrounds from November
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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Traditional Japanese Archery: More Ladies, Part 2
Wow, time flies... now that there's a Lightroom 4 beta out, I'm really ramping up the work to upgrade my Lightroom plugins appropriately, and have barely had time to come up for air, and so I was a bit surprised when I noticed today that it's been five days since my previous post. So, here's [...]
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Badass Japanese Archery: Now It’s The Ladies’ Turn
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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Rediscovering Kyoto’s Mt. Yoshida with Friends
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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Charcoal Preparation: Monochromatic Work of a Japanese Swordsmith
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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Simple Temple Sliding Wall
I've been taking it easy this year because I'm still recovering from the cold I woke up with on 1/1, but after posting Paul Barr's inspired creation yesterday, I thought I'd look into my own photo archive to see what I was doing when he took that photo. I was standing next to Paul, but [...]
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Big, Moody Space of the Kosan Temple in Northwest Kyoto
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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That Particularly Amazing Tree at the Imakumano Kannonji Temple
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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Blessing in Disguise: Rained out at the Fushimi Castle
(The large version of this photo might be interesting... I'm not sure... but this small thumbnail certainly isn't.) I went out to Fushimi Castle the other day with Paul Barr and Nicolas, a French/American guy I met briefly at Gion Matsuri at the start of the summer when he noticed my big lens and introduced [...]
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Context for the Bamboo-and-Leaf Photo, and Some Crazy Post-Processing
I included a pretty bamboo-and-leaf photo on my previous post, even though it wasn't related to the post, just to have something pretty, but I tend to like to share stories/context instead of just photos, so this post fills in that gap for that photo. Just outside the Ryoanji Temple is a path/sidewalk that leads [...]
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A Cold, Wet, Photogenic Visit To The Ryoanji Temple
It's been about six years since I've been to the Ryoanji Temple (龍安寺) in north-west Kyoto, but I think of it fondly because Fumie and I went there twice in the early years after moving here (once in the summer of 2005, and again in the fall), and because I've used this picture from there [...]
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