I paid a visit to the Yoshiminedera Temple in the mountains of south-west Kyoto today, and the resulting photos pretty much covered all the main things I normally have on my blog. Let's run through some of them....

Above we have a vertical desktop background, which I started doing four years ago. I've now posted 385 of them.

And here's a wigglegram featuring Ai (who appeared with her husband in this photoshoot a year and a half ago)...

I first started making these things that I call "wigglegrams" two years ago, and I still have a lot of work yet [...]

The fall-foliage season is in full swing in Kyoto, and with the number of photos I take in an outing I'm quickly filling up my laptop's disk. So before I can even look at this year's photos, I need to make room for them by cleaning up prior years' stuff. I've spent the last couple of months going through my photos from 2012, and have worked my way through to late November 2012, and my first visit to Kyoto’s Shugakuin Imperial Villa, and realize that I hadn't even looked at all those photos yet.

So, here are two more from [...]

Almost-microscopic mushrooms growing in a bed of moss is hard to resist when you have a nice macro lens, as seen in prior posts here and here.

Paul Barr is back in Kyoto for the first time in a year, as is the fall-foliage season. Paul, Damien Douxchamps, and I made our way out to the Takao (高雄) area in the mountains of north-western Kyoto to see the fall colors. It was my first outing for fall colors this year (though in the past month or so I've posted a lot of fall-foliage shots from prior years, including here, here, [...]

The grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace are open for tours most days, and like other imperial palaces in the area (Shugakuin, Sento, and, Katsura), holders of a foreign passport can visit pretty easily. It's much more difficult for a Japanese citizen to visit, except during a special open house for a few days each year.

During the open house, huge throngs of tourists (Japanese and foreign alike) visit, which makes it unappealing to someone who can visit on a less-crowded regular-tour day, but after finally making my first visit to the palace last week, I realized a great benefit [...]

I was surprised today to notice that the huge main gate of the Chion'in Temple (Kyoto, Japan) is in the process of getting a huge wooden scaffolding. It seems that it'll be having its roof tiles repaired for the next couple of months.

This construction is in addition to the multi-year renovation of the main hall that includes taking apart its roof, but as I belatedly discovered the other day, there's so much more to this site, so it's well worth a visit.

As I mentioned in a recent post, this place has a lot of flights of stairs. The [...]