After 430km of driving, I'm ready for a snooze...

As I mentioned the other day in the post about an outing with Vaughn Hart to the mountains of north-western Kyoto, we stopped by a simple, unassuming rural shrine. The entrance to the immediate shrine area was through a small little wooden gate, seen here at the top of the steps Vaughn is standing on...

You can't see them in the photo above, but the gate actually has doors, propped open at the moment...

Something about the carving at the top of the gate caught my eye. The light was just wonderful for it... strong shadows, yet somehow soft....

The [...]

World-traveler Vaughn Hart was in Kyoto today, and we got together to enjoy some of the photographic delights of Kyoto. He's a user of one of my plugins and so had contacted me when he realized our paths might cross, but it turns out that he hadn't read my blog, so had no real idea about who I am or what it's like around here (and so had no specific ideas about what he preferred to see while here). So, I thought a random drive in the mountains might be nice, to see what we discover.

The susuki ("Japanese pampas [...]

Click through to the large version to see how compensating for severe underexposure has left a dreamy, almost drawing-like quality to the result.

On the outing last fall with Paul Barr into the mountains north of Kyoto that produced "Kyoto Mountain Restaurant 'Yama no Ie Hasegawa'" and "Carpet of Yellow at the Iwato Ochiba Shrine", we first made a detour on a small path even deeper into the middle of nowhere to stop into a remote village I'd spotted on a map, to check out its shrine. There's certainly appeal to the big, rich, fancy shrines and temples like [...]

The flood of photo opportunities I enjoyed last November at the start of Kyoto's fall-foliage season began with a visit to the Kongourinji Temple in Shiga. I posted about it in "First Taste of Fall Colors" and "Deep Sorrow at the Kongourinji Temple's Path of Jizou", but the aforementioned flood has kept me from following up with the main attractions from the visit.

The main stuff still awaits, but today's post moves us one step closer.

The path to the temple's main garden leads through an area that seems as pretty as a small garden in its own right...

I [...]