Today is the middle of a three-day weekend, one that happens to fall just as the fall colors are really getting going, so Kyoto was absolutely packed to the gills with tourists. Fumie and I both felt much better from our colds today, so we decided to take the opportunity to get out of town.

We went for a drive in the same general direction as we did with Fumie's folks three weeks ago, into the mountains to the northwest of Kyoto. This time we had a specific destination, the Hiyoshi Dam (which, in case you've never heard of it, is a dam), and we took a lovely route of pleasantly-windy mountain roads that we'd not taken before. (For those who know Kyoto: get onto Senbondori and just keep heading north.)

The primary advantage of this route is that it totally bypassed Arashiyama, an area of Kyoto steeped in exquisite beauty (explore the many thumbnails on this page for posts I've written about Arashiyama), a beauty surpassed in magnitude only by the number of tourists this time of year.

Once we got out of the city, it wasn't long before we were in the middle of nowhere. Still, there was a lot of traffic...

The road seen in the photo above is luxuriously wide compared to most we took today. Generally, they were quite narrow and winding, sometimes a very-thin one-lane-only road for long distances. It made for the occasional “interesting time” when you came across someone coming from the opposite direction and no wide spot presented itself.

But here it was wide enough that we could safely pull over, and it was pretty, so we took the opportunity to do so.

It's Fumie's brother's birthday today, so we made a short “happy birthday” greeting video on Fumie's phone and sent it to him...

While Fumie took care of the technical details of sending the video, I wandered around with the camera. It was only a bit after three in the afternoon, but the sun was just about to dip below the mountains, so some areas were brightly lit while others were in relatively deep shade....

We eventually got going and headed deeper into the mountains. I paused at one point to snap a shot that shows what much of the mountainous area in Japan looks like:

There were plenty of colorful trees everywhere, but the ones that stood alone among their green compatriots seemed more stunning. It was getting pretty dark down in the ravine that the road transversed, but one tree could brighten things up....

In the shot above, Anthony is inspecting the carpet of moss by the side of the road for, well, whatever little boys look for. I found a leaf....

The leaves still on the branches, above a stream far below, were wonderful, I thought.

It was here that Anthony, as six-year-old boys are apt to do, decided to just start jumping. Mommy joined him, and that's the shot that leads this post.

But, it was time to hit the road if we wanted to reach the dam before sunset...

And we did... just barely.

Down below, in the area that would become a raging torrent of death and destruction should the dam ever break, there was a park that Anthony could run around in and explore...

It was getting quite dark (darker than these ISO-6400 photos indicate), so I was hesitant to let him get too adventurous. Climbing around on some similar rocks two weeks ago when it was well lit, he slipped and soaked his shoe, so in the enveloping darkness, we opted for other play..... running.

There's just something about a little boy running like that. Wow. It's the way it should be.

It reminds me of one of my favorite shots, Anthony running at Nanzenji (although there are plenty of other shots on that post that are right up there, such as this one).

He ran down and across this huge empty field, to a stage that looked comically small sitting all alone at the bottom end of the field. I suppose it's perfect for summertime “concerts in the park” events, but for Anthony, it was just another place to run...

The view he had on stage facing as he was, was the imposing face of the dam, lit up with decidedly orange incandescent lights, which made for quite a pretty setting against the deep blue of twilight....

It turns out that adjacent to this park is a “refresh plaza” with an onsen (hot-spring bath), so we had a hot bath and dinner before heading home.

Continuing with more from my Visit to Kibune two weeks ago with Thomas Hertel, after we had dango at the restaurant with the old wooden gear, we were walking along the road and were beckoned by the tranquil sight of a tranquil site...

The photo above almost makes it look like some kind of miniature site, but the gate at left is plenty tall enough to walk under, and the bridge itself is about ten feet long.

Thomas posed for a picture, strictly as a size comparison...

If Thomas were to turn to the camera's left, he'd be looking up a set of steep steps running up to the Kibune Shrine....

I liked the many layers in that shot, so tried a tighter zoom...

I'm not sure it's anything more than clutter, but there it is.

Anthony sometimes likes to use my camera, and I like to encourage an interest in something creative, so we posed for a couple of shots. It's pretty funny to see him use my big camera, but he does pretty well...

And with that you can see why it's best for me to be behind the camera rather than in front of it.

The view from halfway up the steps, looking back, was also nice...

At the top was an ornate shrine building that we really didn't pay much attention to because it was getting late and dark. You can see a bit of it here, though...

On the opposite side from the stairs seen above was another much longer set going back down, seen from below in one of the earlier posts in this series. I'm sure that this is supposed to be the main entrance, but we didn't happen to use it.

Here's the view from the top...

It's surprising to me that in all my visits to this area – see any of the “nearby photos” links for more posts from Kibune – this was the first time I'd ventured up to the shrine. I'm sure that this grand staircase is all lit up during the big Kibune Lightup fall-foliage event that I mentioned in the post about the Fall--Foliage Tunnel the other day. My cold is starting to get better, so perhaps I'll be able to run up three some evening to check it out.

Well, I seem to have come down with a cold, and so I spent almost all day sleeping. Up now at midnight with just enough energy to stare blankly at the screen, so I'll just post a few pictures from yesterday to brighten my day (er, my night) before heading back to bed.

The entrance way to the small restaurant next to our place has a tree that we can see the top of from our livingroom window, and each year at about this time, it turns all kinds of fiery reds and oranges.

We just see the top, but it's still pretty...

So, yesterday, between taking pictures of Kyoto City neutering trees and riding through a fall-foliage tunnel, I spent a few minutes to go see the tree up close.

When I got down there, I was surprised to find that the leaves that I thought were so fiery red were actually fairly drab, until you got the sun behind them and got a lot of light shining through. They transmit red, but don't reflect it as much. Backlighting is a great way to get the excitement from fall colors, whether it's via the sun or from high-intensity floodlights.

It's on my list of things to do this season to try using a small handheld flash (in my case, a Nikon SB-800 Speedlight) to backlight. Especially if I can use settings that allow the flash to dominate the ambient light, I suspect some really interesting results. We'll see whether the cold I've come down with will let me...

Anyway, yesterday, I had the sun almost directly behind the leaves, and I didn't have the lens hood with me, so the result was occasional flair, like the greenish hexagon in the upper-left of the shot above, or the big sweeping circle in the first shot.

The Eizan Train Line (eizan dentetsu, or eiden for short) is a little train line that runs from north-east Kyoto up into the mountains to the village of Kurama, just past Kibune. I've posted about Kibune many times, most recently a week ago when I visited with Thomas, although the area is known more for its summertime dining over the river and, er, noodle fishing. Anyway, despite having gone up that way many times, I'd never taken the train, until today.

Fumie's been under the weather for the last week or two, but felt good enough today that we all went on a ride through Eizan's “Fall Foliage Tunnel”, a section of the track through a mountain forest of colorful trees that's lit up by rows of floodlights during the evening.

Japanese love their lightup events — fall colors, cherry blossoms, and no particular reason – and I love them too, because they're really pretty. The train's “tunnel” lightup is part of a larger “Kibune Lightup”, which runs in the evenings from the 13th to the 30th this month. I've never seen it, but it looks extremely photogenic.

Anyway, we took a taxi the one mile to the start of the train line, and took a train that left at 5pm, a few minutes after the 4:49pm sunset...

Twenty minutes later it was pretty dark, especially in the mountains under the trees. As we approached the “tunnel”, the driver slowed down and turned off all the lights in the train.

It was very nice, but it would have been nicer had people who had been sitting for the whole trip not come rushing up trying to take a picture in front of me, some using their flash (which turns the window into a mirror). Sigh.

But it was nice for the minute or so that it lasted. A bit later, we got off at the end of the line, Kurama, one stop past all the lightup stuff at Kibune. Kurama has a big shrine and apparently can hold its own fall-color wise during the day, but at night it was more or less deserted. Luckily, we found a small restaurant that was still open, and had dinner.

Heading back, we happened to catch one of the special “kirara” trains that has a few sideways-facing seats, although we opted for regular seats. The train wasn't that full from the mostly-deserted Kurama, but it filled right up at the next station, Kibune.

It was really nice, and now I'm itching to go up and explore that Kibune lightup....

It's that time of year again in Kyoto where the trees turn beautiful colors, and the City of Kyoto races to erase them from the face of the earth.

Several miles of street in this area are lined with Ginkgo trees, and each year the city strips them naked like this, working down one side of each street, then up the other. I've heard that this is done because stripping the trees like this is easier than cleaning up the leaves. I dunno. Seems strange.

All but the first shot above are from yesterday. The sun was out a bit more today, so I brought the camera when I picked Anthony up from school.

The guy crossing the street without apparent regard for his life wanted a sprig of yellow leaves, and when he got it, returned to the car he had parked illegally near where I was standing.

When the light turned red I stepped out into the street a bit for the shot above, but stepping the other way to the sidewalk and looking the same direction, you see what a wonderful effect the trees – the trees with their leaves – have...

Ever year at about this time, crews work their way down one side and then up the other, putting the bulk of each tree into a garbage truck.

The road leading to this slight curve is straight for a mile or three, and you can see the wall of yellow straight the whole time.... at least until the crews get there.

(This last snapshot doesn't have much going for it except the ability to illustrate the scene, but in an attempt to put lipstick on a pig, I used the virtual version of a gradient filter (mentioned in a comment yesterday) to “paint” some lower exposure and lower contrast onto the clouds so that the sky retains some detail. Without it, it's a massive blog of white. I tried to have a light touch, but it still looks sorta' fakish...