From our visit last month that yielded the "Gate of Disrepair" post.

Continued here...

Chipping away at the backlog of things I want to share, here are some photos from a short outing with vacationing American Jon Van Dalen in July. He was traveling Japan with his wife and her sister, and while in Kyoto I took them on a drive in the mountains north of the city.

Along the road in a small village, we noticed a shrine gate over a path leading away up a hill. It was visible from the road only for a moment as driving by, so we were lucky to spot it. I'd driven by many times in [...]

The initial destination of my photo outing with Paul Barr yesterday (the one where we discovered the workshop of Nishimura Stone Lanterns) was to visit the Nitenji Temple, nestled up in the mountains of north-east Kyoto, perched precariously over the ravine on the road over to Otsu.

After the outing, we returned to my place and I introduced Lightroom to him, and in using random photos from the day to demonstrate things you could do within Lightroom's Develop module, I happened upon the soft-focus creamy effect you see above. I liked the effect in this case, so I decided to [...]

Buddhist shrines and Shinto temples can be almost any size, ranging from huge sprawling multi-building complexes, down to little things a few feet square. Often they're found in clusters, so it was no surprise when Zak Braverman and I went to visit the small Himukai Shrine tucked away at the base of a mountain in eastern Kyoto, we found next to the parking lot a tiny room-sized shrine, the Kaneda Inari Shrine.

What was somewhat surprising (to me, at least) was the state of its gate, rotting so much that I didn't dare touch it for fear of toppling it.

In my previous posts about this weekend's visit to the gardens of the Eikando Temple in eastern Kyoto ("Holy Cow, the Gardens at Kyoto's Eikando Temple are Gorgeous!" and "More From Yesterday's Trip to the Eikando Temple") I purposefully chose photos devoid of (or mostly devoid of) people, but in fact it was quite crowded.

I detest crowds. I grew up in rural Ohio, and am definitely not a city person. The crowds leading to the Eikando Temple were oppressive, made worse by the fact that it's right next to the Nanzen Temple, itself noted for its fall colors (as [...]