I play and experiment a lot when I'm out with the camera, slowly trying to add bits of experience of what "works" and what doesn't. The photo above, from a trip a year ago to one of my favorite hidden gems of Kyoto, the Gioji Temple, is one of a series of five shots that I took at different apertures, to get different levels of blur in the background.

I often know exactly what I want in a result and how to get it, but sometimes I just can't predict what aperture will give a pleasing result, so I do [...]

A final post to round out Part 1 and Part 2 about this year's Aoi Matsuri festival (葵祭), at the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park last week, which is a parade of period costumes from a millennium or so ago.

As the parade participants were marshaling before the start, others were going about their business...

This particular rope was such a pain. When i took this picture the parade had already ended and the rope would soon be dismantled, but during and before the parade, the rope separated the crowd from the parade participants, and if the rope had been equally [...]

Picking up from yesterday's Part 1 of "My Mt. Hiei Climb Challenge 2013", where that post ended with a short pause at a clearing half way up...

From the clearing, the path up actually goes down sharply for a short while...

The trail goes up and down very steeply as it crosses several small river ravines, and this is where I worried that my knees would become debilitatingly painful. To my great relief it turned out fine, either because of the stretching I did (mentioned in Part 1), and/or because I was wearing a pair of knee compression straps that [...]

This post is a continuation, of sorts, of my first climb of Kyoto's Mt. Hiei, painfully documented a year ago in "Yesterday's Hike: The Agony Where Bravado Yields, In Spectacular Fashion, To Painful Reality". After that horrible experience, I vowed to get into better shape, and to repeat the hike in a year.

That year had passed, so I repeated the hike last Thursday.

After the first hike, I made a concerted effort to get into shape, and just six week later I showed some of my progress in "Going Max Cliché While Learning About Off-Camera Flash", and probably hit [...]

This post is a few more shots following on from "Quick Peek from Kyoto’s Aoi Matsuri", about one of Kyoto's main "period costumes" festivals, the Aoi Matsuri festival (葵祭; at Wikipedia).

Of course, where you have horses on parade, you have...

Continued here...