It's been three weeks since I posted "Matt Campagna Wigglegrams Kyoto", so I'm finally getting around now to posting other photos from that outing, where I met fellow Lightroom developer Matt Campagna while he was visiting Kyoto.

Our plan was to visit the Fushimi Inari Shrine, and since I'd been there for photoshoots many times (most recently with former Yahoo! co-worker Andrei Zmievski, and The Japan Times columnist Alice Gordenker), I thought I'd try something different this time.

Unless I'm going out on a bike ride or other special situation like a heavy snowfall, I tend to bring three lenses, [...]

I've found a new place to try to get nice sunset photos of Kyoto from. Sort of.

For years my go-to place has been the Shogunzuka, which I first posted about almost eight years ago, but have posted about many times since. It's a 5-minute drive from my place on a high hill (small mountain?) over eastern Kyoto.

The small mountain it's on is the little bump going across the center of the shot above... the mountain I'm on for the shot, Mt. Otowayama, is 593m (1,950') high and 6½ km farther away. It took me about an hour fifteen [...]

In the screenshot of Google Earth above, you can see the route that I rode my bicycle last Wednesday... the little bit of green coming in from the right is a downhill section of road, followed by the long red uphill section through the tiered rice paddies of the village, then up the mountain on an old road no longer open to traffic.

I'd ridden 55km (34mi) to get to that point, and would end up riding 72km (44mi) farther before I got home, but ever since my first "real" ride in February, I've not been so interested in how [...]

If you would have told me half a year ago that I would be riding a bicycle as far as 10km, I would have never believed you. Bicycles where for places too close for a taxi or my scooter or a car.

It's amazing how "giving it a try" can change your opinion about something.

On Thursday I retraced the path I took on my first "real" ride last February, covered in "Attempting a 100km Bikeride in the Mountains of Kyoto, Part 1: Hanase Pass" and then "Part 2: the Last 70km". The tough part of this ride is not [...]

I had a wonderful little bike ride today, 48km distance with 1,720m of elevation gain (30 miles of distance with 5,600 feet of elevation gain). (The report of the ride at Strava reports longer distance and less elevation gain, but I trust Google's elevation data for Kyoto more than I truest my phone's GPS/GLONASS unit's elevation.)

Things didn't start well.

I went downstairs to my bike to find the rear tire quite flat, likely a slow leak from the spoke problem I had on the ride last week. I'd ridden 70km after it was fixed so I thought it was [...]