Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/750 sec, f/4, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Heian Shrine From Afar

As Nils suggested the other day, I visited the hiking trails behind the Westin Miyako Kyoto Hotel today. The trails are extremely simple (with mild stairs the whole way), and because it's all shaded, it was substantially less strenuous than moving around inside the gardens at the water treatment plant of recent posts.

I brought Anthony with me, and it was thoroughly enjoyable for both of us. (It was much better than when I bought him on a multi-kilometer, much more difficult hike up the Daimonji Mountain last December, where I had to carry him most of the way. Sigh, I still haven't gotten around to posting any photos from that trip, despite having some great ones. Well, I did use one photo from it on my post about my calendar-building Photoshop script.)

[ Update: posts about that hike are here, here, here, here, and here. ]

Today's outing was pleasant, but I was just a bit disappointed that I couldn't see my building, nor could I see anything toward my way from the top (which isn't that high — it's just a big hill — rising only 120m higher in elevation than my place). Still, I got some okay shots like the one above, from a little clearing at the 90m-higher-in-eleveation level.

The building in the center, which is the main building of the Heian Shrine, is about 1.2 km (3/4 mile) away. To give a sense of scale, the smaller orange building to the left is the shrine's entrance gate, which despite looking fairly small in the picture, is quite big itself. The very lowest portion that building has what looks like stilts in the picture above, are huge columns in this picture from a previous post:

Main Gate of the Heian Shrine

You can also see that gate building in one of my older posts that I'm particularly proud of, about Photoshop and Japanese New-Year's Cards.

(For additional reference, because I'm a geek and I love the way distance is compressed in shots like this, the large cream building at the top of the frame, just right of center, is 3km (1.9 miles) away.)