I had a fun outing this morning on a temple tour led by Joshua Levine, who wanted to lead a test tour in preparation for offering tours by bicycle as part of his "cycle cafe" NORU, scheduled to open near the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine at the end of the month.

Unlike the cafe whose target demographic is cyclists, the tours merely use bicycle as a means to move around freely, so they're cute highly-adjustable easy-to-ride little bikes. Riders ranged from 153cm to 192cm (5'0 ~ 6'2) and we all had a great fit. The bikes were surprisingly easy to ride.

After including the above photo on "Thoughts on the Venus/Laowa 60mm f/2.8 Super-Macro Lens" in February, it was pointed out to me that the coin includes some visible security features that I'd never noticed.

At the bottom of the zero in the middle, the lower-most horizontal line is flanked on each side by a letter "P"...

This shot was taken with an 8:1 macro setup that falls into the "stupid tricks" category, using extension tubes and a teleconverter. The accumulated chromatic aberration turns the cold monochromatic metal into a squishy field of splotchy color. But it was fun to try.

最近の記事はサイクリングと撮影ソフトばかりので、やっと僕の基本に一雄戻ります。

I've been posting mostly cycling and Lightroom stuff lately, so time to return a bit to my roots with something Kyoto...

Last November I took a tour of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, and at the time posted "A Few Photos From The Start of a Visit to the Kyoto Imperial Palace", but got sidetracked, as I often do, before posting more. So today I'm picking up from there with a few architectural shots....

Let's start with a simple wigglegram of the courtyard that ended the previous post...

Looking through, the columns and doors on the wall on the right [...]

I led my recent post about inaccuracies with consumer GPS devices with the photo above, but I'm repeating it here to tell a different story...

In the photo, taken by a passing hiker at the summit of Mt. Otowa (音羽山) in Kyoto, my fingers are lightly resting on the bike frame. When touching the bike that way as I was posing for the shot, my fingers felt a kind of buzzing vibration sensation, which I thought was odd. The wind was strong, but I didn't think the gusting would hit the bike's resonate frequency or anything.

Later, when moving the [...]

I made my second cycling run up Mt. Otowa (音羽山) on Wednesday, the first having been two days prior in the gloomy late afternoon just before a typhoon came through. Wednesday's was the first afternoon after the mild typhoon passed, so I expected the air to be really clear (like this and this), so I lugged my Sigma "Bigma" 50mm~500mm zoom all the way up there, along with the 2×TC to give me a 1,000mm lens.

It was so not worth it... it was the most hazy I'd seen it in ages.

The only things that were sort of clearly [...]