Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 50 mm — ¹/160 sec, f/5, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Patrolled and Protected
driveway gate in Kyoto

I took the shot above while exploring a small neighborhood near my place this morning. I'll have plenty of interesting things to share from this morning's adventure, but for today, just the picture above (did you see the tiny, curious dog?) and a few uninteresting things...

I posted the other day about the Shinto evergreen/tangerine display that people adorn their cars with during the New Year season. Those displays are also often found above entrances to homes, and with the post from the other day fresh in my mind, I took the opportunity to snap a few pictures of these displays when I came across them during this morning's adventures.

Here's one on a fairly modern house...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 34 mm — ¹/160 sec, f/8, ISO 450 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 58 mm — ¹/160 sec, f/8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos

Here's another, on a large, old house...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 58 mm — ¹/200 sec, f/6.3, ISO 560 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — ¹/200 sec, f/6.3, ISO 2800 — map & image data — nearby photos

As you can see from the wide shot above, the house is old enough to have external knob wiring (like this place), leading me to suspect that the house was built prior to electricity being available.

Also of note is that this particular house is about as “middle of nowhere” that you can get less than 200 meters from a major thoroughfare. To get to this house, you have to leave the main road via a small side road that heads up a hill, then take an even smaller, steeper road that juts off almost 180 degrees back toward the left, then wind your way a bit up and down and around the side of a mountain, until you come to a thin paved offshoot barely wide enough for a scooter, but steep enough that you'll have a second thought about using one. At one point this offshoot does a hairpin turn that's sufficiently tight (while still going uphill at a steep angle) that it's advised to just park and walk the rest of the way, then continue on the path up a steep hill until it makes a 90-degree turn, the path flattens out, and then ends.

That's where this doorway is. (You can follow along by viewing the map via the “map & image data” link under the picture.)

So, now that I have a “doorway” theme going in this post, I'll share two more doorways that I came across this morning.. The first has pretty much the thinnest door I've ever seen:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24 mm — ¹/500 sec, f/5, ISO 1100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Fire-Marshal Heart Attack
a couple of pairs of shoes wide

And finally, this little gem...

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm — ¹/160 sec, f/5, ISO 2500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Opening: Every Sunday and National Holidays
Entrance to the now-defunct Hua Huan Museum
Kyoto, Japan

The museum above, less than a mile from my place, was the reason for this morning's outing. I'll leave its somewhat interesting (and entirely dilapidated) story for another post (here).