If the pic above looks familiar, it's because I had a portrait version of it on "An Amazing Day of Photography at Some Eastern-Kyoto Temples" back in April. I was rummaging around in my Lightroom catalog today and got depressed at how many posts are waiting for me to get around to them -- I have so much I want to share -- so I thought I'd start with a few more from the morning of the photogenic stroll that produced that post.

Having recently posted "Trying Some Hard-Edged Black and White", I thought I see what I could do [...]

During yesterday's trip into the woods of northern Kyoto, we came across the remote Shimyouin Temple (志明院) at the end of a dead-end road that branches off from another dead-end road; in other words, it's remote.

As I wrote yesterday, I was with Paul Barr and Katsunori Shimada, and we were out on one of our photo expeditions, having spent the previous two Thursdays similarly occupied in Uji (as evidenced by many posts recent, such as this, this, this, and many more I've yet to write). We take a lot of photos among us because that's our main goal, yet [...]

Fumie is in the thick for preparations for her fall ballet recital, but she took a rare day off on Sunday for an outing up to the Sanzen-in Temple (三千院), half an hour's drive to the mountains north-east of Kyoto. She particularly wanted to see the hydrangea they're somewhat known for, and since they were having a "hydrangea festival" (あじさい祭), the timing seemed fortuitous.

Anthony got a pre-visit snack of mitarash dango at a shop just outside the entrance...

He couldn't eat them all, but the sauce is a bit too sweet for my taste, so we formed a symbiotic [...]

In "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" the other day, I noted that while driving through a sparsely-populated village deep in the mountains of Uji City south-east of Kyoto, we made a stop to check out a local shrine we happened upon. The shrine's entrance gate appeared in yesterday's "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" as well.

The shrine has the name Kiyotakiguu (清瀧宮), and is just a small local shrine for the village, like any number of similarly unassuming local shrines and temples that have appeared on this blog (recent [...]

Today's photos are sort of a combination of the softness we saw in "Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh with Lily of the Nile" with detail in "Exploring the Sharper Side of the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5". I was driving through the middle-of-nowhere mountains south-east of Kyoto with friends Shimada-san and Paul Barr, and when we stopped to check out a small shrine we happened upon, these clover(?) were right next to the car.

The shots above and below are almost identical (the flower is slightly further away in the shot above), but the effect is wildly different....

The Voigtländer [...]