Anthony had a school event near the Kitano Tenmangu shrine three miles away toward the north-west of town, so I took the opportunity to stop in with the camera for a few minutes. The shrine is famous for its collection of plum trees that blossom in pure whites and deep, vivid pinks, both due to its breadth (50 varieties) and scale (2,000 trees).

The shrine dates from 947, although their February 25th Plum Blossom Festival dates back only to 1109. This year will be the 900th anniversary.

Today's visit was my second. I wrote about my first trip in two [...]

After spending most of last week with a mild cold, I finally felt better toward the weekend, so we took off on an impromptu overnight trip to the onsen (hot springs) at Kinosaki, a three-and-a-half hour drive through the mountains north-west of Kyoto, to Toyo'oka City in the neighboring prefecture of Hyogo.

We haven't had snow yet in Kyoto, but hoped to see some on the way. I envisioned the scene we saw in 2007 in Hokkaido with clean dry streets surrounded by pretty snow, but just in case, I had new snow tires on the car, to avoid the [...]

I took the photo above this afternoon. What is it?

Continuing from the Portraits post about the recent Coming of Age Day holiday in Japan, here are a few more photos.

The shot above is of the pleasant-vibe Peace, Dude guy from the Portraits post, as are the next two shots...

The next two are of the Trying Her Best girl ("Trying her best to fuse tradition with her desire to shock"), also from the Portraits post. I'm sure she'll appreciate if you notice her legs, and eye colors....

The rest of the shots are mostly random... but mostly gaudy. There seems to be a few mullets in there, too.

As I've been doing lately in hopes of catching a great sunset, I headed up again the other day to the overlook at Shogunzuka, which offers a commanding view of downtown Kyoto.

The sunset was not particularly interesting....

While waiting to see how the sunset would develop, I occupied myself by practicing to track focus on crows as they flew around....

I had a 1.7× teleconverter on my 70-200, and with the resulting big zoom, I knew I could isolate the little bit of color the far-away sky did offer, so I tried to catch a bird in front of [...]