Archive for the 'Temples and Shrines' Category

Posts about various temples and shrines

Kyoto’s Housen-in Temple, Part 2

Picking up from "First Visit to Kyoto’s Housen-in Temple" the other day, where I ended with having tea and sweets in the garden-viewing room, here are some more shots of that room and the area.

The back of the room had some nice paintings in the alcoves...

In the shot above, Paul is facing the window seen in the opening shot, shooting the detail of the translucent opening above it. It's covered with thick Japanese paper, so he probably got a shot like this:

The full window looked like it should be very photogenic, but despite spending considerable effort on [...]


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First Visit to Kyoto’s Housen-in Temple

Dipping back into my largely-untapped archive from November's many fall-foliage outings, here are some photos from a trip to the Kyoto mountain-suburb of Ohara, where we (Damien Douxchamps, Paul Barr, and I) visited some of the smaller temples surrounding the justly-famous Sanzen-in temple (三千院), which has been on my blog many times since my first visit four years ago, including the bazillion offering statues and one of my all-time favorite photos, "Serenity".

But on this trip a few months ago, we avoided the oppressive crowds at Sanzen-in, instead letting Damien introduce us to the hidden-gem lesser temples dotting its perimeter.

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Visiting My Photo Archives: Random Pretty Shots #1

Since my main computer (a laptop holding my photos for the last two years) is still in the shop, I'm taking random walks through the 90,000 photos in my desktop-computer's Lightroom catalog, dating through the end of 2010. I'm taking the opportunity to delete a lot of cruft, but occasionally run across shots I want to share because they're pretty or interesting or respond well to "weird" processing...

Photos on this post date from 2007 (with a Nikon D200) to 2010 (with a Nikon D700). But, at least, they benefit from 2013-level processing in the name of Lightroom 4 and, [...]


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Cherry Blossoms in November: Looking Back to Autumn To Get Ready For Spring

My laptop, where I do all my photo work for the last couple of years, is in the shop, so I'm having to dip back into the old Lightroom catalog on my old desktop machine, where I have photos from the 90s through the end of 2010. I hadn't looked at them in ages, and wow, the quality of my pics from back then is pretty bad, so there's slim pickings for blog posts until I get my laptop back.

But these two pics aren't so bad, relatively speaking. They're "October Cherry" blossoms from an early-autumn (Nov 9th) trip to [...]


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Impossible Shot at Kyoto’s Enkoji Temple: Garden *and* Garden-Viewing Room at the Height of Fall Colors, Devoid of People

This is an (almost) impossible shot to get... the garden and the garden-viewing room at the Enkouji Temple (圓光寺, Kyoto Japan), at the height of fall colors, both completely devoid of people.

This next photo of the same place six years ago (from this blog post) is what this kind of place normally looks like:

Indeed, that's what it was like when I was there last fall (Nov 2012)... 今回...

A clear shot from near the edge of the room with a 50mm lens is one thing, but what about with a wide-angle lens (24mm) from the back of the [...]


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