Still busy working on Lightroom plugins, so just a short post today on the next phase of the Setsubun festival last week at the Heian Shrine. After demons representing the ills of the past year were banished, the next step was wishing good forutune for the next year with another bean-centric event. I posted about it three years ago in "Setsubun Mamemaki: Throwing of the Beans", so from this year just a few pictures to catch the vibe....

Continued here...

Continuing from this weekend's Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine in Kyoto, with nasty demons representing the ills of the past year, being banished in the hope of a better year to come...

I captioned the third picture with "Door, slightly misleading" because, as you can see in the final photo, what look like door handles are really brackets to hold a huge brace.

Continued here...

Today was the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine, so I walked over to snap some pictures. I'll post and write more another day, but today just a few photos. (For an introduction to the event, see my "Setsubun and Mamemaki: Driving out the Demons" post from four years ago.)

The picture above is from the bonfire event, described in my "Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine" post. A line of priests was chanting as others threw bundles of sticks with wishes written on them (the wishes then going up with the smoke to the heavens, or something [...]

Wow, time flies... now that there's a Lightroom 4 beta out, I'm really ramping up the work to upgrade my Lightroom plugins appropriately, and have barely had time to come up for air, and so I was a bit surprised when I noticed today that it's been five days since my previous post. So, here's the part-two follow-on to "Traditional Japanese Archery: More Ladies, Part 1".

I'll start out with the original photo from which the previous post's "Tall Tale" lead photo was derived...

In that "Tall Tale" photo I had fun stitching together two unrelated shots, but in the [...]

Picking up from my "Badass Japanese Archery: Now It's The Ladies' Turn" post the other day, here are some more of the very colorful young ladies at the shooting platform.

As described in "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot", each archer goes at her own pace, but each group of a dozen starts at the same time, so they're fairly in sync at the beginning, which can make for some interesting shots.

You can tell it's the second arrow because she has no spare in her right hand. You can also tell by the fact that the group [...]