I've been so busy all week I've not had time to look at the two big shoots I did last week, Anthony's sports festival mentioned in my fritzing lens post, and the temple ikebana event that I posted about here and here.

The little scene above unfolded as the sun was setting on the latter event, in the garden of the Shoren'in Temple (青蓮院) in eastern Kyoto.

Continued here...

What a difference a day makes.

Yesterday I had such a wonderful, inspiring time at the ikebana show at the Shoren'in Temple; today was great until the evening when I had the mind-numbing, soul-sucking experience of spending four hours on half a dozen travel web sites trying to find reasonable tickets for Fumie and her folks to visit my folks this winter when Anthony and I are already visiting.

Through the process I became intimately familiar with global flight schedules, but was unable to produce an itinerary that combined the best flights for us... every travel web site I checked [...]

I had an amazing afternoon at an ikebana (flower-arranging) show held at the Shoren'in Temple. 600 photos to sift through.... above is one that caught my eye.

Continued here...

The other day while my wife was preparing for her ballet recital, I wandered around the shrine complex across the street from the venue. That's where I snapped the "Cute Little Melodrama in Five Photos" sequence that I posted the other day.

The direct sun made for harsh lighting that I just didn't have the skill to deal with well, so from a technical point of view these photos are crap, all lacking a certain richness. I'll have to head back on a lightly-cloudy day. Still, it's a pretty area, so even crappy photos are not too bad to look [...]

A cute little scene unfolded before me at the Nagaoka Tenmangu Shrine (Nagaokakyo City, Japan; 長岡京市の長岡天満宮) yesterday while killing time before Fumie's ballet recital. The captions represent what I imagine is being said or thought...