Picking up from yesterday's Part 1 of "My Mt. Hiei Climb Challenge 2013", where that post ended with a short pause at a clearing half way up...

From the clearing, the path up actually goes down sharply for a short while...

The trail goes up and down very steeply as it crosses several small river ravines, and this is where I worried that my knees would become debilitatingly painful. To my great relief it turned out fine, either because of the stretching I did (mentioned in Part 1), and/or because I was wearing a pair of knee compression straps that [...]

This post is a continuation, of sorts, of my first climb of Kyoto's Mt. Hiei, painfully documented a year ago in "Yesterday's Hike: The Agony Where Bravado Yields, In Spectacular Fashion, To Painful Reality". After that horrible experience, I vowed to get into better shape, and to repeat the hike in a year.

That year had passed, so I repeated the hike last Thursday.

After the first hike, I made a concerted effort to get into shape, and just six week later I showed some of my progress in "Going Max Cliché While Learning About Off-Camera Flash", and probably hit [...]

This post is a few more shots following on from "Quick Peek from Kyoto’s Aoi Matsuri", about one of Kyoto's main "period costumes" festivals, the Aoi Matsuri festival (葵祭; at Wikipedia).

Of course, where you have horses on parade, you have...

Continued here...

The Aoi Matsuri festival (葵祭; at Wikipedia), one of Kyoto's big three festivals, was held the other day, and I stopped by for the first time in many years to photograph the folks in period (circa 1000AD) costumes.

A cursory scan of the initial photos shows that I missed focus on most of the shots taken with the Nikkor 300mm f/2 with a 1.4X TC, so I'll have to look into whether the camera or my technique needs an adjustment. In the shot above, the gravel shows the plane of focus is well behind the kids. )-:

The biggest problem [...]

Dipping into my archives from last October, I realize that I haven't yet posted much about the Kurama Fire Festival (鞍馬の火祭り) that I briefly mentioned at the time, and a bit in my shooting-with-two-bodies post.

One reason that I haven't posted is that the photos are not very good (taken haphazardly handheld while not really knowing what was going on), but it's quite the different kind of festival, so it's worth a quick look.

The village of Kurama is long and narrow, wedged into a valley in the mountains of northern Kyoto. During this festival, fires and people are everywhere, [...]