As I mentioned in this morning's post, I went on a drive to the northern mountains of Kyoto yesterday. Our first stop was the middle-of-nowhere Sourenji Temple (宗蓮寺).

It was cold and the light was lush. On the way from where we parked I snapped this picture, which unfortunately has a local farmer going by in his little truck and Paul Barr caught mid step, but the richness is almost unreal...

There were a bunch of very oddly pruned trees whose bottom half looked like large bonsai trees, with tall super-thin shoots doubling the height from there...

The style does [...]

Five and a half years ago -- 1,609 blog posts ago -- I posted "Kyoto’s Road to Nowhere", about a bridge that led straight into the rocky face of a mountain:

On a mountain fall-foliage-photography drive yesterday with Paul Barr and Damien Douxchamps, we came across the same bridge, now with the addition of a tunnel (the Oofuse Tunnel; 大布施トンネル))...

It's still a monumental waste of money, considering the expense that two bridges and one tunnel must have cost, and the total lack of apparent benefit in bypassing a few hundred meters of pleasant road.

One can hope that it's [...]

I stopped by the Koutouin Temple the other day, in the Daitokuji complex in north-central Kyoto. It wasn't quite peak of its fall-foliage colors, but it was quite. (I stopped by two years ago at a time when it was at the peak of color and it's quite nice then as well.)

One of my personal favorite photos comes from the first time I visited this temple, of a lady in kimono on this path.

Anyway, here's a wigglegram to give you more of a sense of the view...

And for good measure, here's a vertical-background view...

Sort of odd, [...]

I've been down with a cold since my previous post the other day, of another pair of lovely ladies in kimono. That post (like this post) came from a creative, productive outing with Paul Barr, but I'm somewhat dreading the 70 gigabytes of data awaiting me.

I did find enough energy today to prepare this wigglegram, taken at the old (circa 1880) aqueduct behind the Nanzen Temple.

Continued here...

I shot more than 3,500 frames today -- 70 gigabytes of raw data -- for about 470 potential wigglegrams. Above is one.

These two ladies from Osaka had wonderful kimono and wonderful smiles. I didn't want to impose on them much, so set up the shot and took it within seconds; despite the rush, I'm happy enough with the result.

大阪から来はったお姉ちゃんたち、ポーズしてくれた有り難う。

I actually had 17 frames in the sequence, but the marginal improvement in appearance is not worth double the bandwidth, so I'm using every other frame.

My shooting technique has a long way to go, but what I really [...]