Busy day today... caught the fringe of two famous Kyoto festivals. In the afternoon was Jidai Matsuri (時代祭 -- "Festival of the Ages"), more or less a re-enactment parade representing the many periods Kyoto's long history. I caught the tail end of the procession as it made its way past my place.

(I'll post more another day, I'm sure, but in the meantime, for a different take on the genre, check out Stéphane Barbery's photos from three years ago, and from today.)

In the evening was the Kurama Fire Festival, which involves a lot of fire being heaved and hoed [...]

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Finally getting that all-consuming project that I just posted about off my back, I can now return to my photos. Here are a few from the ikebana (flower arranging) event I went to a couple of weeks ago at the Shoren'in Temple (青蓮院) in eastern Kyoto. I'd managed to post a few shots earlier (in my "busy hallway", "cute and colorful scene ", and "serene photos" posts).

This event was related to the flower-arranging events that I post about every year, but it was a special event to mark the ascendancy of a new head of all worldwide practitioners of [...]

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I've been so busy all week I've not had time to look at the two big shoots I did last week, Anthony's sports festival mentioned in my fritzing lens post, and the temple ikebana event that I posted about here and here.

The little scene above unfolded as the sun was setting on the latter event, in the garden of the Shoren'in Temple (青蓮院) in eastern Kyoto.

Continued here...

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Anthony (almost 10 years old) needed new shoes, so we took him to the store and let him pick what he wanted, and this is what he got.

The colors are shockingly vibrant, so I thought it would be a good chance to try out the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport introduced to me in this comment a few days ago.

I still need to learn how to use it and its software to its full potential, but it's easy enough to use to profile one lighting situation...

Custom   -   Adobe Standard   -   Camera Standard

mouseover a button to see that [...]

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What a difference a day makes.

Yesterday I had such a wonderful, inspiring time at the ikebana show at the Shoren'in Temple; today was great until the evening when I had the mind-numbing, soul-sucking experience of spending four hours on half a dozen travel web sites trying to find reasonable tickets for Fumie and her folks to visit my folks this winter when Anthony and I are already visiting.

Through the process I became intimately familiar with global flight schedules, but was unable to produce an itinerary that combined the best flights for us... every travel web site I checked [...]

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