Driving today on a road in Kyoto today that I've driven many times in the past (the road I reddened above, traveling from the upper right to the lower left), I was surprised to notice for the first time that there's a building right in the middle of an interchange cloverleaf.

Quite efficient, if not a bit unpleasant for the occupants of the building.

When viewing a geoencoded photo – one where the location's latitude and longitude are encoded in the metadata – in Lightroom, its coordinates are displayed in the metadata panel as shown below:

(Well, it shows up if you're using a metadata-panel view that includes the coordinates among the items to be shown, such as "all", but you can also use my Lightroom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder to build a customized metadata-panel view.)

Clicking on the little arrow to the right of the coordinates brings up your web browser, with the location showing in Google Maps. In the case of the [...]

I noticed a tiny old house being demolished nearby the other day, and stopped in for a look. It could be anywhere from 40 to 100+ years old... the guys tearing it down didn't know, but it was built at a time when Japanese homes were still built with mud and bamboo for the walls.

There are still plenty of this kind of construction in Kyoto. Often, the outside of such walls are veneered in wood, as seen in my Randomly Photographed Stroll in Kyoto and Old Wood-Veneer Siding (Desktop Background) posts.

The shot above shows rough-hewn beams that were [...]

Fumie and I made an overnight trip to the city of Takamatsu, in Kagawa Prefecture, on the large island of Shikoku, Japan, to see pop singer Kousuke Atari (中孝介) in concert. Just as I did the last time we made an overnight trip (which was also to see Kousuke Atari in concert, at a shrine in Miyajima), I awoke early to see what photo opportunities there might be in the early of morning.

Unlike Miyajima and our extended time there, which produced so many nice (or story-telling) pictures that I had to make a Miyajima category on my blog, we [...]