Continuing the story about a day with friends in Kyoto last November that started with a morning visit to the Shugakuin Imperial Villa, after lunch we made our way to the Sento Imperial Palace, a small palace tucked away in a corner of the huge park that also houses the main Imperial Palace in Kyoto.

It was my first trip to this particular palace.

I include this photo mostly as an example of why one needs to be careful about using a polarizing filter with a wide-angle lens. I'd brought the filter along because it has such a dramatic impact on fall foliage, but here it's having an impact on parts of the sky. But the sky is at best polarized only in certain directions, and the wide-angle lens is covering both polarized and unpolarized parts of the sky, so the effect is an area of deeper blue with washed-out areas on either side. Ugh.

When the tour started, its first stop was the big building in the background, which is one wing of the actual palace. While the guide talked about the building, I shot the garden to the right...

These palace tours run at a brisk pace and they don't like stragglers, so if you wnat photos, you have to grab them when you can. Adjusting camera settings and composition while walking, three seconds after the shot above I got something that I like a bit more...

Through the door in the wall seen in the two photos above, we came into an open area on the other side of the same building we'd started at. More talk. From the outside it was unremarkable by Kyoto standards...

We then moved on to the main attraction open to the public, the gardens. A short path brought us to this lake vista:

The presence of this lake absolutely floored me.

As I noted earlier, this entire palace and garden is tucked into a corner of the huge central-Kyoto park known as the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park, named so not for the subject of today's post, but because it also houses the main imperial palace in Kyoto. The park is huge and I've written posts from it on many occasions (including cherry blossoms, plum blossoms, festivals, family outings, and fall colors), but I never knew this second palace and its garden was here. I've ridden right by on a bicycle a hundred times in the last decade, but I had no clue. I was floored.

I took a bunch of photos of my masseur friend Kentaro Kataoka during these palace visits because it was his first time for both palaces, and it's difficult for a Japanese to visit. Someone with a foreign passport can stop in on the day and likely get a spot, but a Japanese must make a reservation months in advance for tours that fill up very quickly. But a group of up to three foreigners can bring one Japanese national along with them (ostensibly as a translator), so this opportunity allowed him to take the tour.

We eventually come to a small bridge over a narrow pinch in the lake...

Just as I crossed the bridge, the sun dipped behind a cloud, but still, the mossy area on the other side was unearthly in its beauty (much more so than I have the skill to capture in a photo)...

I was marveling dumbstruck at this amazing beauty when nature laughed and said “you ain't seen nuthin' yet”, and moved the cloud:

It was perhaps the most beautiful scene of nature that I've ever witnessed firsthand.

Because I'm so passionate about photography, every bit of me wanted to capture that beauty in a photo, but I knew it was impossible. I don't have the skill. The multitude of folks with 10× my skill, put together, wouldn't have enough skill to capture this scene, especially with the pressure that a policeman tour-guide was likely to come along any second to yell at you for dawdling, forever putting and end to your attempts.

(I do have to say that the police/guides here were much nicer than at the other palaces I've been to in Kyoto, the aforementioned Shugakuin palace, and the Katsura Palace, which I realize now that I've yet to post about. Anyway, on today's trip they were much more forgiving of slow photographers, so I appreciated every extra second in this mossy colorful dream.)

Continued here...