Yesterday we went for a short drive in the northern mountains of Kyoto to visit the Jakkoin Temple (寂光院). First we had lunch at a nearby restaurant, and Anthony made the picture of a little Japanese kid drawing in his notebook while we were waiting for our order...

Across the street from the restaurant was what I thought was the photogenic entrance to the temple, but it turns out the temple entrance was one door down...

I didn't realize it at the time, but the iron lantern was given to the temple by a man who died in 1598. The [...]

We went to a traditional "yabusame" archery rite today at the Shimogamo Shrine, part of the month-long "Aoi Matsuri" Festival, whose most well-known part is the Aoi Matsuri procession in the middle of May.

You can read about "Yabusame" on Wikipedia, but in short, this yabusame mounted archery involves an archer on a horse at full gallop running a 280-yard straight track with three small targets at equal intervals. The archer has but a few seconds between each one to grab an arrow, prepare it, aim, and shoot, and then must do it again two more times, all the while [...]

Flipping around in my image library while doing some Lightroom testing, I came across an image that I happen to see fullscreen, and was wowed by it much more than a small-sized view would have led me to expect. I'd published it before (two and a half years ago in "A Few Unremarkable Fern Pictures"), but with desktop-image sizes, so I thought I'd go ahead and do that today.

It's from a trip a couple of years ago to Giouji Temple, images from which have appeared many times on this blog... if you're interested, check out the "nearby photos" link [...]

My fall-foliage photos always seem out of season compared with the rest of the world, Kyoto not getting its color until mid November after much of the Northern Hemisphere's autumn has passed. In line with that, this post features an out-of-season element in an out-of-season photo: cherry blossoms in late November.

Five minutes away from my place, buried back in the mountains of eastern Kyoto, is the small Himukai Shrine, featured in "Thatched Roofs and Colored Canopies" and "Changing Seasons, Changing Lenses" earlier this month. Among the spectacular colors I didn't even notice the lone blooming cherry tree off to [...]

In my previous post, "Changing Lenses", I showed a picture of a friend in front of a serious splash of fall colors. The leaves were so low in the view because we were at the top of a set of stairs. From the bottom of the stairs, looking up, the view was the impressive canopy seen above.

The view was pretty impressive from most everywhere...

In the background of the center of the shot above, you can just barely make out bits of the namesake for my "Gate of Disrepair" post.

The shrine area itself is fairly small, but picturesque...