It's been a while since we've seen anything from Nishimura Stone Lantern stone-carving shop, so here's a close up of a stone sphere, tucked away haphazardly under the legs of a large stone lantern. (The combination is visible toward the bottom of this wider view.)

As I mentioned in "Deceptively Clear: Snow-Covered Mountains in Exquisite Detail", I prefer a darker tone to the image I use for my desktop background, so I'll give this one a try for a while. I've accumulated quite a number of them on my blog over the years, as evidenced by my pretty Desktop Background [...]

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This looks like a misty-white snow-covered mountain, but it's not.

There's no mist; the fuzzy white areas that seem to be blurry turn out to show clear detail of every snow-covered branch and twig when you look at the full-sized version. (However, most web browsers will downscale the huge image at first, so you'll likely have to click once on the link to bring up the larger version, then again on that larger version to see it in its full-resolution glory).

Also, I like how the snippet of less-snowy foreground mountain in the bottom-right corner adds an odd sense of [...]

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In my "Hot Noodles in Gokayama" post the other day, I ended with this photo....

... and posed the question as to what the tall slanted wooden brace was for. Of course, it's a set of stairs, but I thought the incredible steepness might throw some off.

The stringers on these are obviously new, but the house dates to the 1880s, and these stairs match perfectly the contemporary description in Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward Morse (published in 1886, based on observations made from 1877-1880). In it, he writes:

A stairway incorporated into the structure of a building [...]
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So, it's been a week since "Introduction to a Snowy Gokayama Village", and though I intended to pick up where I left off right away, I got sidetracked with related posts "Rosy Cheeks", "Japan's Deep-Rooted Ethos of Fire Prevention", "Snowy Mountains", and "Shutter Speed's Effect on Falling Snow". So, picking up where I left off in the Introduction post, more on our stroll through this picturesque frozen countryside...

I'm really disappointed with this last shot... the scene offered so much potential, but my composition here is just pathetic. Would like to return in time to that spot to try the [...]

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It's the view on my computer, at least, when I first sat down this morning. When I'm testing Lightroom things, I'm often jumping around randomly in my image archive, and apparently this was the image I happened to end at when I went to bed last night. Concentrating on my work at the time, I didn't think much about it one way or the other, but it was a nice image to wake up to, so I thought I'd share it.

It's from the last day of our short New Year trip to Toyama Prefecture, seen in other recent posts, [...]

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