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...

So I went again to the massive crowds at Kyoto's largest annual festival, Gion Matsuri as I did on the first night and second night. This time I didn't screw up the camera settings so things went better. I had intended to publish these few photos last night, but I ended up being too tired, so here they are the next day.

As always, my lens brought out smiles and curiosity, and various people and groups would pose for photos...

I wish I would have known of this "huge lens" effect on people when I was young and single, because [...]

So, as I wrote yesterday, I screwed up my camera settings and took all yesterday's photos at the smallest, lowest-quality JPEG settings, which leaves little room to correct white balance and exposure in Lightroom. I did much better the first day.

I'll probably try one more time tonight, but for what it's worth, here are some of the shots from last night, recovered as best I could, presented for the story they tell more than for their photographic qualities...

This worker (manning a large set of trash cans) chatted with me a bit about my lens, and I told him [...]