Archive for the 'Temples and Shrines' Category

Posts about various temples and shrines

A (Slightly) Better Aperture-Comparison Presentation

Probably the last of these for a while, as I'm off tomorrow to travel for a few weeks, but here's a sequence of different-aperture shots taken looking down a railing on the covered bridge in the gardens of the Heian Shrine (平安神宮) in Kyoto Japan, where my previous post left us.

Though with fewer shots, this scene perhaps makes for a better example than the one I posted the other day in "The Effects of Aperture on a Subtle, Tranquil Cluster of Cherry Blossoms".

Still, the shutter-speed one from earlier in the month ("The Effect of Shutter Speed on the [...]


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More Shots from Last Month’s Visit to Kyoto’s Heian Shrine

This post is sort of a continuation of "Hoverfly and Hydrangea", from a trip last month with Aeron to the gardens of the Heian Shrine (平安神宮) in eastern Kyoto.

The light was really not very good (mostly quite harsh), and I was enjoying the conversation with Aeron more than I was paying attention to the photography, but I thought I'd share a few more pictures anyway.

Some of the trees in the garden had wonderfully "interesting", twisted shapes, though I had no idea what to do with them camera wise. As I said, the light was often really harsh, which [...]


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The Effects of Aperture on a Subtle, Tranquil Cluster of Cherry Blossoms

This is a followup to my "Subtle · Pastel · Tranquil" post the other day, where I posed desktop-background versions of this cherry-blossom picture (blossoms at Kyoto's Ryouanji Temple (龍安寺), from a trip last spring covered earlier here and here):

Apparently I really liked the scene because I took shots at various apertures, and seemed to do an okay job keeping the camera steady (it was all handheld with a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 macro), so I went ahead today and put together the animatable display above.

Of course, this is along the lines of what I did a couple of [...]


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Hiking From Kyoto’s Kuuya-Taki Waterfall to the Tsukinowa-Dera Temple

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 [...]


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The Effect of Shutter Speed on the Appearance of Flowing Water

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 [...]


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