As I wrote in January, one of the most forsaken places I've ever seen is Kyoto University's Kumano Dorm (京都大学の熊野寮). It's right here in the city, but once you enter the grounds, it feels as if you're visiting the long-abandoned remains of a war-ravaged society. Wandering the grounds, only the word "forsaken" seems to do justice to the ambiance. It's otherworldly eerie.

Since my visit last fall when I took these pictures, I've learned a bit about why it is the way it is from my friend Shimada-san. During the student unrest common around the world in the late 60s [...]

One lovely side-effect of using Adobe Lightroom as the hub of my image workflow is that I now have all the shots I've loaded into it available at my fingertips (which at this point is everything since last summer, currently about 12,500 images that have survived the delete key).

I came across the wonderful photo set from when Nils and I visited some temples last fall, and realized that I hadn't posted many of them. At the time, I did post a bunch of fall-foliage desktops, and a few about our visit to Konpukuji Temple, as well as one post [...]

That's Mt. Furano and a host of other peaks, 15 miles in the distance. The view from our 8th-floor hotel room on our trip to Hokkaido was wonderful. We stayed at the New Furano Prince Hotel, which is not to be confused with the non-new one some distance away.

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I love how low-angle shots like these really compress distance, especially all the tracts of farmland in the foreground.

As for the hills, the near edge of the hills in the shot above are 4 miles away, but the dark square patch [...]

Fumie and I spent today, our 9th anniversary, being sick, me mildly and Fumie miserably. Yuck.

This is a photo I took at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens about a year ago, during the first field trip of Anthony's preschool life. It was the same trip with the funky echium wildpretii plants of an earlier post.

I love the rich colors in this shot, although how rich they appear to you depends on your browser, your OS, your monitor, and many interrelated settings. If things are set up to show accurate colors (as I've worked to ensure my setup is), these [...]

Today was Kyoto's Aoi Matsuri festival, but instead of enjoying that, Anthony and I went to the store to look at (but not buy) toys.

The most popular little toy cars in Japan are a line called tomika from the Tomy company ("tomika" sounds like the way a Japanese would say "Tomy Car"). They're about two inches long and well made, and at only 378 yen (about $3.15) each, they're a good value. They've been around approximately forever.

Over the years, Anthony has accumulated many. He has all manner of cranes, police cars, ambulances, busses, construction equipment, garbage trucks, dump [...]