Continuing from the other day's "First Look at the Ultra Modern (as in "Modern Art") Benesse House Museum Art”, a few shots from yesterday...

Not sure whether this is the susuki that I like (seen often on my blog, as of late here, here, here, here, and here), but it's certainly pretty.

To be continued...

We're on a three-day weekend trip to Naoshima (直島), an island just off the coast of Okayama, about four hours' drive south-west from Kyoto.

We're staying at Benesse House, a modern-art museum and hotel.

That bridge is the subject of this post from a year and a half ago.

The hotel doubles as a modern-art museum. Modern art is not my cup of tea at all, but this place feels more like I'm in a video game (Doom, circa 20 years ago), so it's actually fun.

Apparently, the Big Squash is a famous landmark. You can see it jutting [...]

I did something yesterday that I'd never done: I went out shooting with two camera bodies.

I often go out shooting with one body and many lenses, changing lenses upwards of 70 times on a long and interesting outing, and this works well for what I like to do, but when I added the Nikon D4 to my Nikon D700 at the start of the summer, I specifically thought it might be nice to have two bodies when out among the festive crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, one body with the huge Nikkor 300mm f/2, and another with a [...]

Busy day today... caught the fringe of two famous Kyoto festivals. In the afternoon was Jidai Matsuri (時代祭 -- "Festival of the Ages"), more or less a re-enactment parade representing the many periods Kyoto's long history. I caught the tail end of the procession as it made its way past my place.

(I'll post more another day, I'm sure, but in the meantime, for a different take on the genre, check out Stéphane Barbery's photos from three years ago, and from today.)

In the evening was the Kurama Fire Festival, which involves a lot of fire being heaved and hoed [...]

Finally getting that all-consuming project that I just posted about off my back, I can now return to my photos. Here are a few from the ikebana (flower arranging) event I went to a couple of weeks ago at the Shoren'in Temple (青蓮院) in eastern Kyoto. I'd managed to post a few shots earlier (in my "busy hallway", "cute and colorful scene ", and "serene photos" posts).

This event was related to the flower-arranging events that I post about every year, but it was a special event to mark the ascendancy of a new head of all worldwide practitioners of [...]