Anthony noticed a crown-shaped image on a carton of milk (seen at right), and asked what it was. I explained that it was what happens when a drop of milk splashes, and he was quite interested, though somewhat skeptical.

I promised to show him, explaining that it was too fast for the eye to notice, but that we could use a camera to stop the action. His interest was piqued.

I set the camera up on a tripod, got a black dish and put some milk in it, set my SB-800 flash as a slave on 1/64 manual power and [...]

In last week's post "A Visit to Kyoto's Sanzen-in Temple" (which was followed up by some pretty desktop backgrounds and Part II), I included a photo captioned Contemplation, showing a lady at the edge of a garden-viewing room, viewing one of the temple's gardens.

I never got around to actually entering the garden-viewing room myself, but on the way out of the temple grounds an hour or so later, a small break in an intermediate wall gave a glimpse of the garden and the garden-viewing room from right angles to before, and I took the opportunity to snap another shot.

So, continuing with the story about our recent visit to the Sanzen-in Temple in the Kyoto mountain suburb Ohara on Sunday (which produced the pretty desktop backgrounds I posted yesterday)....

As I said in the first post, it's a mountain temple, and so it has different zones separated by various flights of stairs....

You can see in the background of the picture above the trunks of some cedars disappearing above the lower canopy of maple and other leafy trees. The cedars here were all very tall, and ramrod straight...

The next level included a modern (circa 1989) temple building (one [...]

A few desktop-background pictures from the first half of yesterday's visit to Sanzen-in Temple in Ohara, a mountain suburb of Kyoto, Japan....

Continued here...

Getting cabin fever from being cooped up inside due to the swine flu hysteria, Fumie wanted to get out and into nature, and I was all for it. We decided to visit the Sanzen-in temple (home page) in the mountains north-east of Kyoto, about 20 minutes by car.

We'd gone by the unattractive bus parking lots for it many times, and so based on that my preconceived image wasn't very complimentary, but it turns out that my prejudice was what most prejudice is: ignorant.

The unattractive parking lots are apparently private third-party lots, among many dotting the main road through [...]