In "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" the other day, I noted that while driving through a sparsely-populated village deep in the mountains of Uji City south-east of Kyoto, we made a stop to check out a local shrine we happened upon. The shrine's entrance gate appeared in yesterday's "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" as well.

The shrine has the name Kiyotakiguu (清瀧宮), and is just a small local shrine for the village, like any number of similarly unassuming local shrines and temples that have appeared on this blog (recent [...]

The trip the other day that produced "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" was a lazy no-plan drive through some sparsely-populated mountains south-east of Kyoto, in Uji City (famous as the setting for The Tale of Genji, so I hear). Driving on the edge of a small valley, the views of the rice paddies were stereotypical small-village Japan...

This was the first outing of my little lens with a proper monopod. It's the same monopod body I've had for years, but I got rid of the piece-of-crap Manfrotto #3232 head, replacing it with the [...]

I had the most pleasant hospital experience today. (That's not something you hear often!)

For the last 15 years of so I've had occasional bouts of atrial fibrillation (a not-particularly-dangerous arrhythmia, or "irregular heartbeat"), where my heart suddenly can't keep a steady rhythm. In older folks it's often accompanied by tachycardia ("super-fast heartbeat") which is bad, but I've never had that problem, so my A-fib is not directly dangerous. However, if left untreated for more than a day or two, the irregular flow of blood through the heart could allow clots to form, which are directly dangerous, so when it [...]
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During our visit to Pierre Nadeau's smithy in the middle of nowhere of Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, Pierre let me have a go at smithing. He normally makes Japanese swords, but set the bar a little lower for my first try.

He grabbed a length of #3 rebar, which is round with pronounced ridges all along, and told me to square it. The instructions were as simple as the task: put the part you'll work on into the center of the forge and turn on the forge blower. Once the thing is red hot (but before it gets white hot), take [...]

Today's photos are sort of a combination of the softness we saw in "Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh with Lily of the Nile" with detail in "Exploring the Sharper Side of the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5". I was driving through the middle-of-nowhere mountains south-east of Kyoto with friends Shimada-san and Paul Barr, and when we stopped to check out a small shrine we happened upon, these clover(?) were right next to the car.

The shots above and below are almost identical (the flower is slightly further away in the shot above), but the effect is wildly different....

The Voigtländer [...]