妙法院（京都市東山区)の景色。この記事の写真は処理過剰ばっかりですが、今日はそんな気分です。 （今週は特別拝観が有ります。お寺の中は中々美しいですが、残念ながら中では撮影禁止）。

I paid my first visit to the Myouhouin Temple (妙法院) in eastern Kyoto yesterday. The buildings are closed to the public except for early November, so I took the opportunity to visit on the first day of this year's open house.

The good news is that the buildings and inner gardens and many artifacts on display were magnificently beautiful, but the bad news is that photography was not allowed at all. Still, well worth the ¥800 if you can get there before the open house ends on the 18th.

The first building you enter on the open-house [...]

Yesterday was a really blustery day, with cold, biting wind.... really the first true taste of autumn here in Kyoto. Made me want to peek at some of the many photos I haven't even look at yet from last year's fall-foliage season. Here are a few random photos from four separate outings with Paul Barr during the last week of November (last year).

From the same outing: "Some Rustic Temple/Shrine Visits in Western Kyoto" and a bunch of shots on "A Few Colorful Kyoto Desktop Backgrounds from November".

Yoshiminedera (善峯寺) is an autumn favorite. Shots from this particular outing appeared [...]

I did something yesterday that I'd never done: I went out shooting with two camera bodies.

I often go out shooting with one body and many lenses, changing lenses upwards of 70 times on a long and interesting outing, and this works well for what I like to do, but when I added the Nikon D4 to my Nikon D700 at the start of the summer, I specifically thought it might be nice to have two bodies when out among the festive crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, one body with the huge Nikkor 300mm f/2, and another with a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]