Anthony graduated from elementary school today, a big event in Japanese culture. I snapped the photo as we were heading to the school for the last time.

It reminds me of this photo of the two of them from the day he started elementary school half his life (six years) ago, and also the post about his going to school on his own for the first time. He's growing up all too quickly.

Today I'm sharing the first results from "Photo-Development Challenge: Inspire Me and Others With Your Artistic Interpretation". Today's photo is one of some minor outlying buildings at the Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) in Kyoto, Japan.

First, let's look at the uninspiring original:

This was from a productive outing four years ago that produced "Temple Hopping in the Mountains of South-Western Kyoto", two examples for "Heading Out To Photograph The Fall Foliage? Don’t Forget The Polarizer Filter", and an item on "Visiting My Photo Archives: Random Pretty Shots #1".

For lack of a better idea, I'll present the various results in the [...]

水曜日もサイクリングをしました。今回は友達６人と一緒に６０kmの山上下いっぱいのルートでした。

Two days ago I did a short easy bicycle ride into the mountains of western Kyoto, but yesterday I did something a bit more ambitious. As seems to be the habit since my first ride with folks from Cycling Kyoto!, we met in front of the Starbucks on Sanjo Street. This time there were seven people total...

Today's route would be a repeat of one that Manseki had done two days prior, so he was group lead. We got moving at 9:20.

We spent the first 45 minutes heading east on Route 1. The route looks horrible in the [...]

Today I went out for a short, mostly-easy bicycle ride (track at Strava) with Manseki Kanemitsu, another member of the Cycling Kyoto! group on Facebook. Rain was forecast for the late afternoon so it was just us.

It was my first real ride since the grueling 90km mountain/snow adventure three weeks ago, and my third "real" ride in total, since my inaugural ride a month and a half ago.

(We're planning to do a more ambitious ride tomorrow with a larger group, so that'll be ride #4.)

We decided to head off to the Arashiyama area of western Kyoto, which [...]

I've had my Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 lens (seen here) for more than eight years. I don't use it all that much anymore because for the last few years I've tended to prefer faster prime lenses, but it's a great lens for many situations.

I'm pretty tough on my gear... I don't baby it, I use it, and this lens is no exception. In particular, after using it all day in heavy snow five years ago ("First Look at Snowy Shirakawago Village"), the zoom became a bit less smooth. It wasn't so bad that it was worth the bother of having [...]