The Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 macro lens certainly does love itself some tiny flowers, and in this regard I can only encourage it. I found these dainty pink things yesterday in a garden at the Sanzen-in Temple (三千院) in Ohara, a mountain suburb of Kyoto.

The flowers looked quite different depending on what angle you viewed them, and on what stage they were in life.

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"Typhoon #18" for 2013 rolled by this morning, bringing lots of rain and the once-every year-or-so high water in the Kamo River. This post is essentially a repeat of the high-water posts from 2010 and last year, except this time there was significant flooding elsewhere in Kyoto.

If I'd had my iPhone with me while sleeping, I would have been awoken at 5am by the emergency alerts from Kyoto Prefecture and Kyoto City, warning of heavy rain. I'd never seen one of these before.

When growing up in Ohio, the National Weather Service would issues different level alerts for tornados [...]

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" It used to be the way you take better pictures is you learn to be a better photographer " -- Phil Schiller Senior VP Worldwide Marketing, Apple Inc. at 46:31 into the video for the iPhone 5C/5S announcements
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In my post last week about a trip to a Kyoto temple last autumn, I wrote about some out-of-season cherry blossoms that bloom in November. Continuing with my recent theme of visiting my photo archives, I'm going back this time not to last fall, but just to the more recent spring, to a trip to the Ryouanji Temple (龍安寺) in northwest Kyoto.

I've posted a few times from that trip among the awesome blossoms, including:

"Weeping Cherry at Kyoto’s Ryouanji Temple" "Cherry Blossoms at Kyoto’s Ryouanji Temple, Part 1" "Subtle · Pastel · Tranquil" "The Effects of Aperture [...]

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Photo-buddy Damien Douxchamps came back from a trip to Finland, and sent me a huge care package of Läkerol, the not-available-in-Japan candy he introduced me to last year (seen on my blog in "Cornucopia of Tasty Läkerol Licorice" and then later in "Priceless: Candy and Pottery in a Surprisingly Tasteful Display").

The care package included 122(!) boxes of a dozen different Läkerol flavors (many new to me), plus a few extra odds and ends.

Some of the boxes were exceptionally colorful, and some were exceptionally colorless...

I'm also not sure what tastes these names ("Black Diamond" and "Sparkling") might represent. [...]

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