The caption is just a silly reference to the "art" vs. "photography" discussion in my recent post about HDR. When I first looked this picture, I wondered why it was a blurry – it seemed mosaiced or pixelated, as if it hadn't been fully loaded from disk before display – and I waited for it to finish loading and to "snap" into focus. I eventually realized that it wasn't pixelated, but rather, it just had a lot of water drops that you (or, at least, I) don't notice at first.

It's a lotus flower. [UPDATE: Peter Barnes of Barnes Botany [...]

In my running set of posts about my visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine in south-east Kyoto, I showed the paths lined with thousands of gates that the shrine is famous for, but I ended the most recent installment – Fushimi Inari Shrine: Foxes, Treasure, and More with the teaser that there was so much more than just the gates.

We didn't have a map, so we took what turned out to be a side path that later looped back to the main path....

It was great luck to take this side path, because in doing so we discovered a [...]

High-dynamic-range – HDR – is an image-processing technique that's been gaining popularity over the last few years. HDR can be used to create some amazing, impactful, stunning images. For some eye-popping examples, see this page, which is just one page of many that are linked from this HDR roundup.

I haven't created anything amazing with HDR, but I utilized HDR in whipping this image together, just for this post...

HDR attempts to overcome a limitation of current camera technology... a limitation that disallows a camera from picking up fine detail in the dark shadows and bright highlights of a scene [...]

I snapped these photos outside a shop near the entrance to the Kiyomizu Temple (the subject of yesterday's post) on one of the evenings I was out for the Kyoto Higashiyama "Hanatoro" Lightup Event in March. I had my tripod with me, and the crowds had thinned, so I set up outside the shop (and outside the path of customers) and started snapping.

A few doors down, there was a cute toddler-sized kimono...

Of course, these are just toys... you can see kids in real kimono in this post and this post.

I wrote the other day about some hiking in the hills of eastern Kyoto, finishing up that story noting that a trail we took came out at the back of a "sorta' famous spot", which if you looked at any of the map links, you realized was the Kiyomizu Temple.

This internationally-known cultural attraction is less than 1.2 miles from my house, but I've only been to it a few times, most recently just to photograph the front during one of Kyoto's evening light-up events (with the first photo on that post being the entrance area of Kiyomizu Temple). I [...]