This year has gotten off slowly for me, having woken up January 1st with a cold and all, but with "Inspired Artistic Temple Shot" and its followup, "Simple Temple Sliding Wall", I seem to have a black-and-white theme going, so I'll continue that today with a post about charcoal, from last year's visit to Japanese swordsmith Pierre Nadaeu (the swords are Japanese; Pierre is Canadian).

All the photos on today's post are shown in full color, but the subject matter's lack of chromatic variety makes them feel more monochrome than not.

A swordsmith can use various things to heat the [...]

Continuing with the series of photos from last month's Gion Matsuri festival in Kyoto (first seen in this post), here are some more photos from the third day I went out to the evening street festival...

The two colorful ladies were posing for a touristy-looking lady (seen at left). I'm not sure whether I'm more impressed by the shear volume of their hair, or their selection of shoes to accompany their traditional yukata: high-heel platforms for the one, purple Crocs for another.

The third day was by far the most packed with people, and it was a struggle to make [...]

So, the other day I posted one quick photo from one of the last major events of the month-long Gion Matsuri, Kyoto's biggest annual festival. I've picked a few more photos to share in this post.

The event has the name Shinkousai (祇園祭神幸祭), and I'd never heard of it before, and knew nothing about it other than "three tabernacle-like things are carried through the streets from the Yasaka Shrine, via different routes, to the corner of Shijo and Teramachi streets", and I saw map that indicated that the street would be closed for 15 minutes at the corner where Shijo [...]

The photo above is pretty much exactly the kind of shot I had in mind when I first thought to venture out into the crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, and seems to be what the Nikkor 300mm f/2 was made for. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people were milling about, but as far as the lens was concerned, at that moment there were only two people on earth.

I bet they felt the same.

Just compare it to a shot taken a few seconds later at f/11...

Back to the isolating effects of f/2...

I've [...]

Today was the biggest day of Kyoto's biggest annual festival, Gion Matsuri. I opted out of the main event, a sun-grilled parade of the big wooden floats seen in an earlier post, but I did attend an interesting event in the late afternoon when it was cooler, shinkousai. I'll post more photos another day...

Continued here...