Last week Anthony got together with a friend, Kenny, for some play by Kyoto's Kamogawa river...

The water level is about the lowest it ever gets (compare to almost flood level), which allowed the boys to climb down and throw rocks...

Of course, the first thing on the agenda was throwing rocks, which all kids seem to love...

They were skipping stones and I joined in, and to my great surprise one throw skipped all the way across the water in a long arc (touching down a dozen or two times) with such velocity that it reached the other side, [...]

(The large version of this photo might be interesting... I'm not sure... but this small thumbnail certainly isn't.)

I went out to Fushimi Castle the other day with Paul Barr and Nicolas, a French/American guy I met briefly at Gion Matsuri at the start of the summer when he noticed my big lens and introduced himself. Busy schedules prevented us from getting together until last week when we made the short trip to south part of Kyoto to visit the Fushimi Castle.

It rained nonstop.

We spent quite a while under the protection of the main gate just chatting, [...]

I included a pretty bamboo-and-leaf photo on my previous post, even though it wasn't related to the post, just to have something pretty, but I tend to like to share stories/context instead of just photos, so this post fills in that gap for that photo.

Just outside the Ryoanji Temple is a path/sidewalk that leads to the nearby suburban sprawl, and along it was a nice little area lined by bamboo fences separating the pedestrians from a small area of leaf-covered grass. Here's a picture I happened to have snapped from the same location I took the bamboo/leaf photo:

You [...]

I was sort of amused to read "Stop Advertising in Photo Magazines – Head West to the Web" on Trey Ratcliff's "Stuck in Customs" photo-travel blog, about how his $30,000 ad buy in some photography magazines was a bust. What caught my attention was not that print is dying, but that here's a guy with a blog roughly as popular as mine doing $30,000 ad buys(!)

I recall once he mentioned his pageviews and remember that they were comparable to mine. In his recent article, though, he lists the number of blog photos served per day, which is not quite [...]

It's been about six years since I've been to the Ryoanji Temple (龍安寺) in north-west Kyoto, but I think of it fondly because Fumie and I went there twice in the early years after moving here (once in the summer of 2005, and again in the fall), and because I've used this picture from there on my namecard for years.

I stopped in again the other day with Paul Barr, but it was a miserable day. It was the first day of real winter cold, but I was still dressed for autumn, and misty rain (ice/snow?) was blowing in at [...]