As I mentioned the other day on the impromptu portraits post, I picked up a Nikon D4.

説明書を読まずに、買ったばかりニコンD4で夜の撮影遊び。

I actually ordered it the day it was announced, but ended up canceling the order for lack of excitement about what I'd get over the Nikon D700 I've been happy with for years. But despite having canceled the order, the shop shipped one to me a couple of months later when they finally got stock, and well, not ordering is one thing, but returning is another, so here I am with a D4.

I've used Nikon bodies for years, so many of [...]

I'm mixing things up today by dipping into the large backlog of stuff I want to post, to my trip last December to the Jingoji Temple in north-west Kyoto.

今日の写真は去年の秋の神護寺(じんごじ、京都市)の裏にある散歩道。

This location is actually only about a mile away from the Kuuya-taki Waterfall that I've been posting about recently, but it's a very mountainous mile and the two locations feel worlds apart. To drive between them, for example, would take a considerable time because it entails a long loop into the city and back.

I'd made a few introductory posts from that trip, including "On The Path To (and From) [...]

Picking up from yesterday's "Beyond The Staircase Ruins" from an outing to the Kuuya-taki Waterfall (空也滝) in western Kyoto, this post has a few shots from the short trip back to the road.

This picture reflects the style of many of the buildings in the area... rusty corrugated metal, haphazard amateur cement work, dusty bottles.

These ferns were parallel with the ground, but floating 10 feet above the ground, sticking out from the top of a wall built into the side of a hill.

This is the same wall seen in "Beyond The Staircase Ruins", but from a less edge-on [...]

Picking up the story of last month's visit to the Kuuya-taki Waterfall in western Kyoto, where the story started with "Discovery On The Way to The Waterfall" and, after intermediate posts about bugs and bark, was most recently addressed in "Finally Reaching the Kuuya-taki Waterfall".

At one point in the approach to the waterfall you pass under the stone shrine gate seen earlier, and from there off to one side are the ruins of an old stone staircase being reclaimed by the mountain. We decided to see where it went.

The staircase is very steep, and barely there. The first [...]

I missed most of Kyoto's Gion Matsuri this year, except for one evening when I stepped out for a few hours with Anthony. Unlike last year where I shot with a massive 300mm f/2 lens, this year photography was secondary, so I just brought along a simple 85mm f/1.4.

No particular theme to today's photos... just snapshots I took along the way.

The wall of lanterns above (which are really warm orange, but appear white because the color channels were blown out) is on one of the big yamaboko floats that are a major part of the festival. Up inside [...]