Following up from yesterday's “Tea and Sweets in Front of a Temple Garden”, where I'm trying to make a dent in my photo backlog from last autumn, today we take a look at the setting for yesterday's post, the Jikkouin Temple (実光院).

The same water basin, but from a different angle with the garden-viewing room in the background, represents this visit on last year's “A Long But Photogenic November in Kyoto” post.

I'd visited with friends Damien and Paul while on a trip to Ohara, a somewhat remote mountain-village area of Kyoto. We'd just come from the most-excellent Housen-in Temple (宝泉院) first introduced in this post (with colorful followups to its interior and garden here, here, and here). Considering the visual overload of that first stop, I guess I can understand having needed a 10-month breather to get to this second stop of the day.

The weather was dynamic, alternating between a light rain and brilliant sunshine. Here's a section of the garden that you look at while having the aforementioned tea and sweets, as a light rain starts...

But five minutes later the sun is out in full force...

And before we move on from the tea and sweets, one more related shot, this time giving a stark black & white treatment a try...

I don't know whether it's any good, but it's different from my normal approach, so there we are.

And speaking of something different, elsewhere in the garden-viewing room is a xylophone made from what appears to be rough-hewn stones....

I'm sure it was quite a feat to get the tones just right.

Moving out now to the temple's back garden, it was blindingly bright with the now-blazing sun reflecting off every surface left glistening by the rain. Just the same as in the other day's “The Effect of a Polarization Filter on Wet Rocks”.. a polarizer filter made a huge difference as jiggling your mouse over this photos illustrates:

Both shots are total crap, but again, the difference is astounding.

Here's another pair of marginal-but-illustrative shots, of raindrops glistening (or not) in a moss closeup:

Now on to some nicer pictures. This garden included its own stone water basin, with a mossy/lichen patina similar to the bark of the neighboring tree...

It was lined with moss and filled with freshly-fallen leaves..

The shot above is with the polarizer, where the bright direct reflection of the sun has been attenuated greatly.

In this next shot without the polarizer, the brightness of the reflection dominates everything else, so the auto-exposure of the camera sends everything else into a moody darkness (somewhat recovered from later in Lightroom, due to the exposure latitude that shooing in raw affords)...

I made an attempt to get the standard shot of a single leaf somehow highlighted in the scene, but the attempt doesn't really satisfy.

I guess it serves me right for going along with Damien's plan to subvert nature; he placed the leaf there for me, so that I could say that I hadn't. :-)

This temple also has jyuugatuzakura (十月桜, “October Cherry Blossoms”), providing a soft contract to the rich autumn colors...

Another stone basin was tucked away in a corner...

It looks a bit like the exit has been closed off with stone, but of course that's the stone wall opposite the exit. Stepping just outside the exit and looking to the right, you see this scene, with buildings of the Sanzen-in Temple (三千院) at frame left....

To be continued...