In our second drive through the rural mountains of Uji City (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) that I most recently wrote about the other day in "Pleasant Little Village in Uji, Part 2", after leaving that village we wound our way north for half an hour (for what turned out to be only a mile and a half as the crow flies!) and had to stop when we came across some extremely vivid flowers at the end of someone's driveway.

I didn't realize it until I went to check the photo times between the village and these flowers, to see how long [...]

As I mentioned three months ago in "Anthony Lego World #27", 8½-year-old Anthony likes to build complex scenes in LEGO™ (of which he has a lot). Recently he made a big Clone Wars battle scene. He took a bunch of pictures of it, as did I, then we went through and picked the ones he wanted to show. The captions are also his, for the most part.

Before the detail shots, here are a few I took to show the overall scene, with two opposing sides (clones vs. droids) separated by a bridged river and embankment...

Now come the rest [...]

In "Pleasant Little Village in Uji" last month, I showed photos from the edge of a small remote village in Uji City (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) of maybe a dozen houses scattered about. Today's photos are from the other edge of the village...

Considering the similar shots in "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" and "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" (both from a trip the week prior to the one that produced today's photos), I'm probably overdoing these a bit, but I like them and it's my blog, so here we [...]

Internet acquaintance and Lightroom guru Mark Sirota recently posted a few of the most amazing fireworks shots I've ever seen, with a smooth richness that's just unearthly. The one shown above is his favorite, but I've got to say that mine would be the first or second in the slideshow.

Just wow.

Yesterday I posted a few pictures in Part 1 on a particularly photogenic ravine first seen in last week's "Scenes From Mountain Roads in Northern Kyoto".

This post is a bunch more, mostly without comment.

First, again, here is the view from the road...

I climbed up into that for the rest of the pictures.

The trees aren't actually all that tall... maybe 25-30m (~7 or 8 stories tall), but they're plenty tall enough to awe.

This next one isn't much in the thumbnail version, but it's quite something else when viewed full screen...

While heading back down, I came [...]