最近の記事はサイクリングと撮影ソフトばかりので、やっと僕の基本に一雄戻ります。

I've been posting mostly cycling and Lightroom stuff lately, so time to return a bit to my roots with something Kyoto...

Last November I took a tour of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, and at the time posted "A Few Photos From The Start of a Visit to the Kyoto Imperial Palace", but got sidetracked, as I often do, before posting more. So today I'm picking up from there with a few architectural shots....

Let's start with a simple wigglegram of the courtyard that ended the previous post...

Looking through, the columns and doors on the wall on the right [...]

I led my recent post about inaccuracies with consumer GPS devices with the photo above, but I'm repeating it here to tell a different story...

In the photo, taken by a passing hiker at the summit of Mt. Otowa (音羽山) in Kyoto, my fingers are lightly resting on the bike frame. When touching the bike that way as I was posing for the shot, my fingers felt a kind of buzzing vibration sensation, which I thought was odd. The wind was strong, but I didn't think the gusting would hit the bike's resonate frequency or anything.

Later, when moving the [...]

I made my second cycling run up Mt. Otowa (音羽山) on Wednesday, the first having been two days prior in the gloomy late afternoon just before a typhoon came through. Wednesday's was the first afternoon after the mild typhoon passed, so I expected the air to be really clear (like this and this), so I lugged my Sigma "Bigma" 50mm~500mm zoom all the way up there, along with the 2×TC to give me a 1,000mm lens.

It was so not worth it... it was the most hazy I'd seen it in ages.

The only things that were sort of clearly [...]

It's been three weeks since I posted "Matt Campagna Wigglegrams Kyoto", so I'm finally getting around now to posting other photos from that outing, where I met fellow Lightroom developer Matt Campagna while he was visiting Kyoto.

Our plan was to visit the Fushimi Inari Shrine, and since I'd been there for photoshoots many times (most recently with former Yahoo! co-worker Andrei Zmievski, and The Japan Times columnist Alice Gordenker), I thought I'd try something different this time.

Unless I'm going out on a bike ride or other special situation like a heavy snowfall, I tend to bring three lenses, [...]

I've found a new place to try to get nice sunset photos of Kyoto from. Sort of.

For years my go-to place has been the Shogunzuka, which I first posted about almost eight years ago, but have posted about many times since. It's a 5-minute drive from my place on a high hill (small mountain?) over eastern Kyoto.

The small mountain it's on is the little bump going across the center of the shot above... the mountain I'm on for the shot, Mt. Otowayama, is 593m (1,950') high and 6½ km farther away. It took me about an hour fifteen [...]