While on a bike ride the other day, we stopped to watch a bit of hubbub as 15+ people doing a photo shoot for a catalog spent the better part of half an hour for just one shot.

Of course, Anthony doesn't care that they had a Nikon D3 or how they did the lighting, etc., so he was soon off to investigate more important things...

He eventually noticed the ones I was photographing, and he came over and got it (that's the first photo above). He also had one that hadn't yet turned fluffy, and was surprised and interested [...]

I wrote the other day about some hiking in the hills of eastern Kyoto, finishing up that story noting that a trail we took came out at the back of a "sorta' famous spot", which if you looked at any of the map links, you realized was the Kiyomizu Temple.

This internationally-known cultural attraction is less than 1.2 miles from my house, but I've only been to it a few times, most recently just to photograph the front during one of Kyoto's evening light-up events (with the first photo on that post being the entrance area of Kiyomizu Temple). I [...]

Fumie is still miserably sick, so after school, I took Anthony over to play with three-year-old Gen (Zak's son, who has appeared on my blog plaing with Anthony here and here).

We went exploring in western Otsu where the city meets the mountain, with plenty to see and photograph, although I didn't quite get as many photos as yesterday. We got back late (after a delicious Zak-cooked meal... thanks!) and I haven't even looked through all the pics yet, but I wanted to post a few before heading to bed....

A couple of hours (and a couple of hundred pictures) [...]

Well, I fall further behind. I had been planning to post the answer to the What am I? quiz from the other day (none of the guesses so far are even close), but Fumie has been quite sick, so I wanted to get Anthony out of the house so that she could rest. I'd been wanting to try some nearby hiking trails, and I ended up with enough photos to fill at least five different blog posts.

We started out after lunch with the grueling seven-minute drive up to Shogunzuka. (We hit a few red lights, so it took longer [...]

Continuing with my series about my five-day camping trip with Anthony, I pick up the story after the rain and wind (and eventual hotel) of Day 5...

Day 6 was glorious, both in terms of weather and mood (a warm futon and a hot bath have a way of helping the latter). After a lazy morning, we caravaned back toward Kyoto, stopping after about an hour at Amanohashidate (天橋立), a thin, 3.3km long natural land bridge pinching off several square miles of a bay in northern Kyoto Prefecture, off the Sea of Japan. It reminds me vaguely of San Diego's [...]