I've been crazy busy lately with my Lightroom plugins, a transpacific flight (complicated by a back that went out 10 minutes before leaving for the airport :-(), visiting with family, and fending off jetlag. Posts will likely be sparse for a while.

It's been a while since I posted anything from the Uji mountain trips I made a couple of months ago. (The first trip produced a bunch of posts starting with "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road"; the second trip's posts started with "Pleasant Little Village in Uji".)

On that second trip, after [...]

In the few days that I've been clawing back from a nasty cold, a couple of folks that I chatted with during Kyoto's big Gion Matsuri festival last week have sent me copies of photos they took of me. As I described in "A Thin Slice of Big Crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri Festival", I brought a small stool to raise me a bit above the considerable crowds, and with my Nikkor 300mm f/2 on a monopod, shot the festivities. I've much left to post, but ones already up include a bit from day 2, some from day 3, a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]