In last week's "Scenes From Mountain Roads in Northern Kyoto" I showed a view from the road looking up a steep ravine (this pic) and a bit of detail of its carpet of ferns (this pic), and mentioned that I'd climbed up the steep ravine for more photos. This post is just a few, three shots taken from the same location halfway up the ravine, at different focal lengths...

The sense of elevation disappears at the longer focal length, but this is my favorite photo of the three.

Continued here...

On the way to Pierre Nadeau's sword smithy in May, we came across the photogenic Zaobashi Bridge (蔵王橋) in the rural mountains of Aridagawacho City, in Wakayama Prefecture.

It's a short (160m) bare suspension bridge made of steel... steel grid plates that form the surface of the bridge, bolted on top of simple steel I-beams suspended with steel cables to even bigger steel cables draped over two steel towers. It makes it quite easy to see how all the parts conspire against gravity. It's also photogenic. The people in the photo above were the only ones to stop by while [...]

It was almost a month ago that I made the first drive through the rural mountain villages of Uji City (southern Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) with friends Katsunori Shimada and Paul Barr. We went again the next week, and on other photographic adventures since, but I still have photos I want to share from that first trip, so that's what this post is.

I'm a big fan of thin depth of field, but in this next case (taken with a 300mm f/2), I find having to scan around for something in focus leaves me a touch queasy. What do you [...]

After climbing into and back out of a small extinct volcano (as seen in last month's "Descending Into a Volcanic Crater"), we were walking down the mountain when we came across a guy obviously looking for something, so we asked what it was. It turns out that he was looking for warabi, a fern whose shoots are edible. So we thought we'd keep an eye out as we went down...

Anthony found one and ran it down to the guy...

He went on his way, but we kept finding more...

We eventually found the guy again and added our collection [...]

Prior to Kansai International opening as Osaka's international airport in 1994, the closer-to-town Osaka Airport filled that position, but now it's used mostly for domestic flights. It straddles the border between Osaka and Hyogo prefectures, but lies mostly in Hyogo, in its city of Itami, so it's often referred to as "Osaka (Itami)".

Immediately next to it, running more than a kilometer long, is a thin strip of city park called the Itami Sky Park. We stopped by while visiting some friends last spring.

We tried some badminton, but it was a windy day and without buildings or trees to [...]