I have no idea why I like this shot, but I did at first glance, and I still do, so here it is. It's one of the first shots I took on a visit to the most fabulous Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) in southern Kyoto last year, with Paul Barr. (As an aside, Paul is likely at this very moment on a flight from The States to make another visit this year, but that's a post for next week).

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in "Kyoto Fall-Color Preview With Impact: Impressionism in Lightroom", I found thousands of photos [...]

Since writing "A Few Polarization-Filter Examples" several years ago, I've been meaning to do a post on a polarization filter's effects when shooting fall foliage. Over the years I've mentioned some effect or other of a polarization filer on my blog (such as here, here, and here), but I'm only now getting to filling in a huge deficiency of my 2007 post on making the best of bright light in fall-color photography by demonstrating how useful a polarizing filter can be when shooting foliage.

While at the Yoshiminedera Temple south of Kyoto during various trips last year, I did something [...]

As I mentioned the other day in "Kyoto Fall-Color Preview With Impact: Impressionism in Lightroom", I stumbled across an artsy photo treatment in Lightroom that gives an interesting life to most any photo it's applied to. The more I played with it, the more I felt its gimmicky intensity is like the Auto Tune for images (Auto Tune is an audio-processing technique that can make most any singer sound in tune). I avoided it in the followup("Kyoto's Eikando Temple Continues to Amaze"), but it's hard to leave it completely alone, so here are a few more...

Here's one that's darker [...]

After "discovering" yesterday that I'd not even looked at thousands of photos from last year's fall-foliage season, I thought I'd go through a bit more today to pick some from the first batch, an outing to the Eikando Temple (永観堂) in eastern Kyoto. Unlike yesterday's highly "artsy" shots, these are pretty straightforward.

I posted an almost identical pagoda photo a couple of years ago, though it was later in the season then, and the light wasn't as good. Many of the shots on today's post are similar to previous years', as any of the under-image "nearby photos" links will attest....

I can't believe it's been a week since I last posted... time has just evaporated as I've been working on a new Lightroom project. Taking a break from that, and realizing that Kyoto is just a few weeks from the start of its most glorious fall-foliage season, I thought I'd dip into my archives from last year for some "Fall Foliage Preview" shots for this year. I was dumbfounded to find several thousand photos from a bunch of outings that I'd not even looked at yet. Always just too busy.

Anyway, I was futzing with a throw-away photo in Lightroom, [...]