Today I revisited for the first time a few of the temples that I first visited last spring (as seen in "An Amazing Day of Photography at Some Eastern-Kyoto Temples" and "Revisiting April's Eastern-Kyoto Temple Stroll, among others), spending most of the time wandering the sprawling grounds of the Imakumano Kannonji Temple (今熊野観音寺).

It was almost completely deserted except for light tourist traffic in the main area. Those who ventured 30 seconds beyond were treated to the most amazing single tree I've ever seen, the red one seen above. It was a dull, heavily-overcast day, and there were no electronic [...]

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Here are a few more from my Yoshiminedera Temple visit the other day with Paul Barr. As I noted on the earlier post, the colors are less impressive this year than last year, but it's still the nicest temple in Kyoto for fall colors, I think, ahead even of the Eikando Temple, which has the benefit of being a convenient stroll from my house.

I've probably posted these kinds of temple-roof cross-sectional views a dozen times (most recently that I can recall, here, here, and] here), but I'm always drawn to them, and the setting sun shining directly on this [...]

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My cold definitely seems to be over, so today I made the trek to the deep-mountain southwest corner of Kyoto City, to the Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) that Stéphane Barbery introduced me to last year. I made two trips last year, producing enough story and photographic material to fill dozens of blog posts, but being lazy I've so far posted only a few (here, here, and most recently here).

Arriving today with Paul Barr after an hour-long scooter ride, and getting the first view of the entrance seen above, I was struck by three things:

The fall colors are much weaker [...]
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Having recovered from a mild but lingering cold, I went out for some lite temple/shrine exploration in western Kyoto with Paul Barr yesterday. The autumn colors are late and weak this year, but it's always fun to explore new nooks and crannies of Kyoto, so I enjoyed it.

There's a tradition of sake (rice wine) companies sending donations to shrines in exchange for prominent display of their patronage, and the barrels on display at this particular shrine we came across were particularly large.

It's the season for children's "7-5-3" celebrations (as described here, and as seen with my own kid [...]

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For some reason that I can't fathom at the moment, I let Zak Braverman talk me into taking a walk through Kyoto, ostensibly for some vaguely-defined health benefits. We were to meet at Kyoto Station and then walk the couple of miles to a restaurant for lunch, but I decided walk to the meeting point as well, and after adding a few things in the evening, ended up walking about 12 miles.

I brought the camera with me, of course, but since I'm not much into street photography, I didn't take all that many shots. (I made a post from [...]

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