Today's photos are sort of a combination of the softness we saw in "Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh with Lily of the Nile" with detail in "Exploring the Sharper Side of the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5". I was driving through the middle-of-nowhere mountains south-east of Kyoto with friends Shimada-san and Paul Barr, and when we stopped to check out a small shrine we happened upon, these clover(?) were right next to the car.

The shots above and below are almost identical (the flower is slightly further away in the shot above), but the effect is wildly different....

The Voigtländer [...]

On our short trip to Imabari a couple of months ago, after leaving the oddly-interesting Towel Museum we made our way back to Kyoto via the Great Seto Bridge, the collective name for a bunch of large double-decker (cars on top, trains below) bridges that span about six miles of the Seto Inland Sea between Shikoku and Honshu, the smallest and largest of the four islands that make up the bulk of Japan.

The route we took on the outward leg of the trip crossed to Shikoku via the much longer Shimanami Kaido, hopscotching over a bunch of fairly large [...]

Anthony's friend Gen stayed over last night, so this morning they had an early start on play. They built a complex world of PlayRail and LEGO. It seems to involve rapelling Star Wars clones...

Actually, that one bowl of soumen was for all four of us, but before eating they hammed it up for the camera, at my request.

Then it was back to the LEGO / Star Wars / train play...

Well, it's not quite Mt. Everest, and not even as high as the mountain we visited in Ehime Prefecture last month, but the view made it feel like it was. Pierre Nadeau, the Japanese swordsmith I visited earlier this month, stopped off to show us this view on the way to lunch.

My imperfect Japanese can sometimes make for comical situations. I heard that we were going for lunch and that I should follow in my car. It was quite a long drive, but I wasn't surprised because someone had said we were going to "Oishiikougen", which I understood as, [...]

A scant fifteen seconds from the front door of Pierre Nadeau's Swordsmith deep in the rural mountains of Japan's Wakayama Prefecture is a sweeping view of "Aragishima" (commonly written あらぎ島, but sometimes 蘭島), a set of terraced rice paddies shaved from a hill almost completely encompased by the sweep of an almost-full-circle river bend.

The paddies weren't in their most photogenic state when I visited earlier this month, and the weather/lighting situation while I was there didn't help. These photos were taken over the course of a couple of days, so the lighting among them is all over the map. [...]