On my deep-mountain scooter ride deep in the mountains north of Kyoto the other day, I came across something I hadn't quite expected, a tree floating upside-down flying across a small valley between two local peaks.

(By the way, I wonder whether the large cone-shaped tree behind the backhoe is the same pseudo-cedar discussed in "Deep In The Mountains Above Kyoto's Kumogahata Village", but without the branch pruning done by the tree farmers....?)

This thing this was absolutely amazing to watch....

Picking up the action with a different log...

Then the claws open slightly and the internal knobby-teeth tracks spin, [...]

If the pic above looks familiar, it's because I had a portrait version of it on "An Amazing Day of Photography at Some Eastern-Kyoto Temples" back in April. I was rummaging around in my Lightroom catalog today and got depressed at how many posts are waiting for me to get around to them -- I have so much I want to share -- so I thought I'd start with a few more from the morning of the photogenic stroll that produced that post.

Having recently posted "Trying Some Hard-Edged Black and White", I thought I see what I could do [...]

Last week I posted "Deep In The Mountains Above Kyoto's Kumogahata Village" and its followups, featuring photos from a rainy car trip into some remote mountains. The weather was nice yesterday, so I went back on my scooter, and could probe deeper than I could with the car.

Today's simple post just shows some scenes of the roads I was on, or of areas just off the road.

Fallen trees looped off at the road line was a frequent sight. The mountain is covered with trees, and they fall from time to time, and if they block the road, they're [...]

In the mountains of Northern Kyoto, after the stop along the logging road that produced last week's "Deep In The Mountains Above Kyoto's Kumogahata Village", we moved deeper in/up the mountains and eventually came upon our first "vista" with a distant view. It wasn't particularly magnificent by any stretch, but it was the first we'd seen so it was nice.

I knew instinctively that I'd not be able to capture the sense of depth and elevation, and I was correct...

The "tree in section" in the center of the photo is way below us down a steep slope, but the [...]

During yesterday's trip into the woods of northern Kyoto, we came across the remote Shimyouin Temple (志明院) at the end of a dead-end road that branches off from another dead-end road; in other words, it's remote.

As I wrote yesterday, I was with Paul Barr and Katsunori Shimada, and we were out on one of our photo expeditions, having spent the previous two Thursdays similarly occupied in Uji (as evidenced by many posts recent, such as this, this, this, and many more I've yet to write). We take a lot of photos among us because that's our main goal, yet [...]