While Anthony was at his swimming lesson last Sunday morning, I decided to kill the hour by scooting the kilometer over to Mt. Yoshida and poke around.

I "discovered" Mt. Yoshida when Stéphane Barbery (he of my earlier Jidai Matsuri festival photos and the wilting flower posts) introduced me to it back in April. At that time I got to visit only one small part; this time I wanted to visit the major shrine I knew to be there.... somewhere. Mt. Yoshida is a relatively small outcropping in the middle of town – about 35 acres, half the area of [...]

Returning from an errand today, I liked how the late-afternoon brisk autumn sun was hitting some old cozy (read "dilapidated") Machiya houses near my place, so I grabbed the camera and headed out for a short photo-hunt stroll.

I'll share the pictures of the houses another day; in this post, just a few "mood" pictures from the day, which was sunny and brisk, much nicer than the overcast gloom of yesterday (which was photogenic nevertheless).

The picture above was the last I took of the day, just as I was returning home, of two ladies (likely a girl and her [...]

Having felt cooped up in the house for the last week, we took an impromptu drive into the mountains north of Kyoto yesterday, stopping by a bakery on the way to pick up a snack. Not long after entering the mountains, we stopped off the road to eat at a location that happened to be near the Hakuryuuen Garden, which I posted about in some detail a couple of months ago.

As before, it was closed off with a fence across the entrance, right at the road shoulder....

But if you took care when buses passed, you could walk up [...]

Kyoto is starting to see splashes of color all around, quite earlier than I expected (which says something either about an early season, or my failing memory). These pictures were from yesterday, which was a mix of sun and clouds.

The previous day saw some rain in the morning, and when Anthony came home and opened his umbrella to air it out, this acorn fell out. He had apparently picked it up somewhere along the way home and deposited it in his folded umbrella for transport.

Yesterday he brought home a pumpkin seed that he procured somewhere, so we're off [...]

A couple of weeks ago I posted Lightroom Plugin Development: What To Do When a Hobby Becomes Work, a long missive about the weight that Lightroom plugin development has taken on me.... how something that I intrinsically enjoy has become, in part, a chore. I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and encouragement, both online and off.

I've decided to take the route that I speculated I would take, and that many encouraged me to take: Tim Armes' "donationware" model.

(The stack of unanswered email and comments has only grown while I've concentrated on implementing this system, so I've [...]