I had a fun outing this morning on a temple tour led by Joshua Levine, who wanted to lead a test tour in preparation for offering tours by bicycle as part of his “cycle cafe” NORU, scheduled to open near the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine at the end of the month.

Unlike the cafe whose target demographic is cyclists, the tours merely use bicycle as a means to move around freely, so they're cute highly-adjustable easy-to-ride little bikes. Riders ranged from 153cm to 192cm (5'0 ~ 6'2) and we all had a great fit. The bikes were surprisingly easy to ride.

The test subjects consisted of some cycling friends (Kumiko, Manseki, Michael who had to leave before this photo was taken, and me), and two non-cycling acquaintances of Joshua visiting from Switzerland, Sara and Dino. They fit the demographic for this kind of tour, and if their reaction is any indication, it will be a great success.

The next stop was the Ryouanji Temple...

(The sort of yellowish-green tone to the back room screams “fluorescent-light white-balance problem” to my gut, but it was actually that way in real life, green flooding in from the overhanging trees out the door seen in the background.)

The temple's grounds are gorgeous in the autumn, gorgeous in the spring, really just quite nice any time. But it's most famous for its Zen rock garden. It seems that I've never posted specifically about it, which I find hard to believe, but all I can find are one-off pictures of it, here, here, and here. Perhaps it's telling that all three are provided as desktop backgrounds.

The next spot, the Toji-in Temple (等持院), was new to me and by far the highlight of the trip. Unlike the Golden Pavilion which was mad-house crowded, and Ryouanji which was normal crowded, Toji-in was almost empty, yet the garden was prettier than both.

It as brilliantly sunny, which makes it difficult to get shots that don't feel washed out. I had my polarizer filter (which makes a huge difference) and so it helped, but with many of these shots I had to be sufficiently aggressive with post processing that they start to edge toward an HDRish feel (what I call single-shot HDR). I don't care for HDR, but it's a “lesser of two evils” situation.

The shot that leads this post was created with Lightroom 6's new HDR photomerge feature, combining seven shots that I created in rapidfire with a bracketed-exposure burst (handheld). I just selected them, invoked “Photo > Photo Merge > HDR” and let it do it. It corrected for the slight movement among the shots, and came up with a great result without any further input from me.

On the other hand, the next two highly-similar shots are of the aforementioned “single-shot HDR” variety...

Another two-methods pair, one from a single frame and one combined from multiple frames...

The tour continued on to other places, but I had to bow out early for a prior commitment, so this is where the story ended for me.