As I mentioned the other day in the post about an outing with Vaughn Hart to the mountains of north-western Kyoto, we stopped by a simple, unassuming rural shrine. The entrance to the immediate shrine area was through a small little wooden gate, seen here at the top of the steps Vaughn is standing on...

You can't see them in the photo above, but the gate actually has doors, propped open at the moment...

Something about the carving at the top of the gate caught my eye. The light was just wonderful for it... strong shadows, yet somehow soft....

The [...]

At the end of my previous post, I showed an odd tree... very tall without branches, except at the top a rat's nest of tightly bunched twigs and cones. Futzing around in Lightroom with a shot of the top of the tree, I came across a fairly stark monochrome version that struck me as interesting enough to give it a try as a desktop background.

Prior to happening upon that, I had a "stylized" version that I sort of liked...

I don't often venture into these non-realistic versions unless I'm doing something specific (such as this, this, this and this), [...]

On the family outing to some nearby still-snowy mountains the other day, we noticed that the maple trees are starting to bud, with an odd rust-colored fringe...

Up close, it was easy to see what was happening...

Elsewhere along the drive we found a tree with big, pink buds.... likely plum.

I don't know for sure whether they're plum, but it's likely because we're well into plum-blossom season. Even two weeks ago another Kyoto blogger posted about plum blossoms in Gion, and in prior years I've posted about them as early as late January.

The plum-blossom season winds down early, [...]

World-traveler Vaughn Hart was in Kyoto today, and we got together to enjoy some of the photographic delights of Kyoto. He's a user of one of my plugins and so had contacted me when he realized our paths might cross, but it turns out that he hadn't read my blog, so had no real idea about who I am or what it's like around here (and so had no specific ideas about what he preferred to see while here). So, I thought a random drive in the mountains might be nice, to see what we discover.

The susuki ("Japanese pampas [...]

If you want visible presence at a shrine or temple, you make a donation and your name is put to something, such as the orange gates of various sizes at the Fushimi Inari Shrine, or affixed under a small statuette as at the Sanzen-in Temple, or engraved into a stone (such as a gravestone, or some kind of offering seen a bazillion times in passing on my blog, such as here and here and here).

Things such as the wooden gates eventually rot, but stone lasts a bit longer, so if you or your ancestors stop paying the annual maintenance, [...]