Archive for the 'Temples and Shrines' Category

Posts about various temples and shrines

Boat at Kyoto’s Shugakuin Imperial Palace

The fall-foliage season is in full swing in Kyoto, and with the number of photos I take in an outing I'm quickly filling up my laptop's disk. So before I can even look at this year's photos, I need to make room for them by cleaning up prior years' stuff. I've spent the last couple of months going through my photos from 2012, and have worked my way through to late November 2012, and my first visit to Kyoto’s Shugakuin Imperial Villa, and realize that I hadn't even looked at all those photos yet.

So, here are two more from [...]


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My First Fall-Foliage Outing for 2014: Temples in the Takao Area of Kyoto

Almost-microscopic mushrooms growing in a bed of moss is hard to resist when you have a nice macro lens, as seen in prior posts here and here.

Paul Barr is back in Kyoto for the first time in a year, as is the fall-foliage season. Paul, Damien Douxchamps, and I made our way out to the Takao (高雄) area in the mountains of north-western Kyoto to see the fall colors. It was my first outing for fall colors this year (though in the past month or so I've posted a lot of fall-foliage shots from prior years, including here, here, [...]


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A Few Photos From The Start of a Visit to the Kyoto Imperial Palace

The grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace are open for tours most days, and like other imperial palaces in the area (Shugakuin, Sento, and, Katsura), holders of a foreign passport can visit pretty easily. It's much more difficult for a Japanese citizen to visit, except during a special open house for a few days each year.

During the open house, huge throngs of tourists (Japanese and foreign alike) visit, which makes it unappealing to someone who can visit on a less-crowded regular-tour day, but after finally making my first visit to the palace last week, I realized a great benefit [...]


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Huge Main Gate at Kyoto’s Chion’in Temple Now Shrouded in Scaffolding

I was surprised today to notice that the huge main gate of the Chion'in Temple (Kyoto, Japan) is in the process of getting a huge wooden scaffolding. It seems that it'll be having its roof tiles repaired for the next couple of months.

This construction is in addition to the multi-year renovation of the main hall that includes taking apart its roof, but as I belatedly discovered the other day, there's so much more to this site, so it's well worth a visit.

As I mentioned in a recent post, this place has a lot of flights of stairs. The [...]


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A Wigglegram of Three Lovely Ladies in Kimono at the Kyoto Imperial Palace

I visited the Kyoto Imperial Palace for the first time yesterday, and these three young college students also enjoying the sites were kind enough to pose for a wigglegram for me. The frame above is the last in the series, after they broke out in a smile at the rapid-fire sound of my camera capturing frames at the zippy pace of 10 per second.

昨日京都御所でこの大学生の美人達はポーズしてくれて、僕はウイグルグラムを作りました。以下の写真の上にマウスをあっちこっちしてね!

Here's the wigglegram:

Kimono are almost always photogenic, which is why they tend to appear in my wigglegrams, such as this one and this one.

Because the individual frames are taken manually (as I sweep [...]


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