Earlier this month I told my tale of out-of-shape hiking woe in "Yesterday’s Hike: The Agony Where Bravado Yields, In Spectacular Fashion, To Painful Reality". The trip up the mountain was, if you'll excuse the pun, an exercise in pain, but the trip down was a breeze, as I availed myself of a cable car that heads straight up/down the mountain.

In the Japanese vernacular, a "cable car" is a train pulled by a cable. From where that ends near the top, a "ropeway" (as seen above) can bring you the rest of the short distance to the top. The [...]

This post shows some example effects of a polarizer filter on vegetation, specifically, the moss and fern laden garden of the Gioji Temple in Kyoto, Japan (祇王寺). On the topic of polarizers it follows from "A Few Polarization-Filter Examples" where I first brought up the topic four years ago, and the fall-foliage followup last year: "Heading Out To Photograph The Fall Foliage? Don’t Forget The Polarizer Filter".

On the topic if the Gioji Temple, this post follows from yesterday's "Gioji Temple Photo Shoot: Nicolas's White Little Mushrooms" and the slightly earlier "Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at [...]

Picking up from where "Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Gioji Temple" left off, after the initial moss shots, I turned to the thatched roof of a small gate.

The first photo is looking up the slant to the reeds making the top layer of the roof.

Here's looking at the evenly-sliced bottom face, which perhaps would be considered the eaves if there were walls...

Nearby a set of ferns seems to be springing from the base of a tree and have a real "presence" (I'm not sure what that even means for a plant), but [...]

As I mentioned yesterday in "Rich Colors: A Good Start to an Amazing Day in Kyoto", I started a wonderful day of exploration and photography with a visit to the Gioji Temple (祇王寺) in western Kyoto.

In keeping with my "spray and pray" approach to photography 🙂 I ended up taking almost 600 photos over the course of the day, but maybe my approach is not quite as unskilled as I thought, because most of my shots came out nicely. Or maybe Gioji is just that photogenic and inspiring.

So, as somewhat of an exercise in showing my thought process [...]

I had the most amazing day of photographic and gastronomic discovery today, so much so that a month's worth of blog posts won't do it justice. During the day I took off to the mountains of western Kyoto with a friend, and in the evening met other friends for an all-you-can eat (all-you-can-drink!) BBQ buffet. A truly wonderful day.

I barely had time to glance at some of the photos from the mountains before having to run off to the BBQ, but the colors above caught my eye. It has no post processing except white balance (which I set via [...]