It's been stressful for me lately, so I'm posting something tranquil to make me feel better.

On an entirely unrelated subject, here's a protip for folks living in a foreign country: when it comes time to renew your visa (your permission to reside in the country), don't forget; they don't like it when you forget.

(Japan didn't like it when I forget, but they kindly granted me "special permission" to stay, so I don't have to remember again for another three years, but wow, what a colossal paperwork headache I created for myself.)

Continued here...

Last week's "The Effect of Shutter Speed on the Appearance of Flowing Water" post reminded me that I had not finished the story I started a year ago in "On The Way From The Kuuya-taki Waterfall", so I'll go ahead and do that now.

In that story about my first visit to the Kuuya-taki waterfall (空也滝), upon returning to the road, Nicolas Joannin and I found another path going up a different direction and decided to take it to see where it went, and soon came across this sign:

The temple's name means "Ring/Circle of the Moon".

The path was [...]

I posted some water-flow pics the other day in "A Drenched Visit to the Kuuya-Taki Waterfall" (空也滝), taken during an outing in which I'd hoped to miss the rain, but found a rare Kyoto thunderstorm. Since I had my tripod with me, I did some tests on the effect of shutter speed on the feeling of water flow.

Swabbing the mouse from side to side over the image above (and all the images below) causes different frames of each test set to come up, with the shutter speed in seconds showing in the lower right.

I would have liked to [...]

It's been ages since I've been out with just me and the camera, so I took some time for myself yesterday to visit the Kuuya-taki Waterfall (空也滝) in the mountains of western Kyoto. I first posted about it a year ago, and have since posted many updates, such as here and here.

(As always, the "nearby photos" link under any of these shots brings up other photos taken over the years in the same area.)

It had been raining recently, so yesterday I hoped to get lucky with a large flow of water over the falls, and also lucky to [...]

This post finally winds up the story started in "Anatomy of a Photoshoot by Someone Who Has No Clue About Them" and then continued in parts two and three, of a photoshoot Paul Barr and I did with a mutual friend, Yuko, at the Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in Kyoto.

Winding our day down, we came across a sleepy cat happy to sit with a stone fox (Inari shrines are known for their foxes).

The cat was not in the mood to pose, or even open its eyes (though it was clearly awake)...

The cat would have none of it. [...]