I went to the tooshiya archery event for the first time, held annually at the Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto today. The official name of the event is 「第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会」. Mostly it's for ranked archers who have turned 20 years old this past year (and there were 2,132 that took part today), but this was one of a couple dozen instructors who got to shoot, and who ended up placing.

Having hauled a massive lens around all day, I got home to find that I was more exhausted than I ever recall. After an hour's power nap and a hot bath, [...]

After what's turned out to be a monochromatic year so far, I'm happy to get some color back in my blog. The fall-foliage season is Kyoto's most glorious, and it runs a long six or seven weeks, so I've got more fodder for posts than I could actually process, so I'll dip in for today's post about a stroll around Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida that I did with some friends (Stéphane Barbery, Nicolas Joannin, and Paul Barr) last month.

I've posted about this area many times, starting in "Discovering Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida" several years ago after Stéphane first introduced the area [...]

This year has gotten off slowly for me, having woken up January 1st with a cold and all, but with "Inspired Artistic Temple Shot" and its followup, "Simple Temple Sliding Wall", I seem to have a black-and-white theme going, so I'll continue that today with a post about charcoal, from last year's visit to Japanese swordsmith Pierre Nadaeu (the swords are Japanese; Pierre is Canadian).

All the photos on today's post are shown in full color, but the subject matter's lack of chromatic variety makes them feel more monochrome than not.

A swordsmith can use various things to heat the [...]

I've been taking it easy this year because I'm still recovering from the cold I woke up with on 1/1, but after posting Paul Barr's inspired creation yesterday, I thought I'd look into my own photo archive to see what I was doing when he took that photo. I was standing next to Paul, but aiming my camera at a the sliding walls of a nearby building, with the thought that it might make a nice desktop background.

One thing I like about it is that even though it's full of detail, it's not necessarily clear right away what you're [...]

Rarely does a photo take my breath away, but this rendition by Paul Barr does it every time I come across it. I don't know what it is about it, but if you'll excuse the pun, I'm really drawn to it.

Paul recently got an iPhone 4s, and to complement its camera he loaded a few photo-processing apps, and spent some time over coffee futzing with the apps to get a feel for them. He ended up with a jumbled mix of results, almost all of which are interesting (though one really creeps me out), but the one above really [...]