Today was the Kyoto Marathon （京都マラソン２０１２). The guy above, looking remarkably affable and relaxed, was not only leading the race at the 35km mark (about 80% of the way done), but had a full 30-second lead on second place, and more than a minute on third. I have no idea whether he ended up winning or even finishing, but at this point he looked solidly in command.

UPDATE: he won the race by 29 seconds, in a leasurly time of 2:26:21.

He was, at that point, #1 out of 14,093 runners: 1÷14,093 is 0.00078052, hence the caption.

The finish line [...]

Taking a break from the craziness that ensued for me yesterday when Lightroom 4 was released, I thought I'd pick up from last month's "Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine: Intense Burn Begins".

Once the blaze was going in earnest, they started throwing bundles of wooden slats into the fire, each slat with someone's wish for good health or the like written on it...

The heat for the fire-poker guy must have been almost unbearable. It was very very hot, even for me upwind 20 meters (two highway-bus lengths) away. But he could never retreat.

As I wrote about in [...]

It's been a while since I last posted about the traditional Japanese archery event that I attended last month. I left off a while ago with "Traditional Japanese Archery: More Ladies, Part 2", and you can see all the posts about the event via any of the "nearby photos" link under each picture.

The main event was for 2,200 twenty-year-olds, but when they were done a couple dozen instructors got to shoot, so I'll post from that group today. I'm still buried updating my plugins for Adobe Lightroom 4, so mostly just pictures today...

Among the photos on "Intense Burn Begins", my most recent post about the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine earlier this month, was Ripples, showing a thin slice of focus in the tumultuous heated hair near the burning pyre. This post is a bunch more of the same, just 'cause I think it's interesting.

What follows are pairs of images, a crop hilighting something interesting, and the full frame it's from. In many of these the full frame is a throw-away shot, but I include it for context.

Continued here...

Continuing with posts about the Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine (Kyoto, Japan) earlier this month, following on from "Attack (and Repulsion) of the Evil Spirits" and "Beans of Good Fortune", we move on to the bonfire event.

I covered the same event four years ago in "Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine", so this year I was concerned less about documenting the event in photos than to see what kind of interesting shots I might get.

In the event, two bonfires are set alight, and the bundles of sticks are thrown in one by one. Each stick [...]