Today I visited eastern Kyoto's Chishaku-in Temple (智積院) with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin. I'd driven by its large temple grounds hundreds of times, but had never stopped in, and perhaps couldn't have picked a better day. It was the first short-sleeve day of the year, and the open grounds were dotted with all kinds of blossoming trees...

To be continued...

There were plenty of folks enjoying the blossoms, but it was quiet and relaxed, nothing at all like the ugly, disgusting spectacle you so often find (that I wrote about seven years ago in "The Ugliness of Japanese Cherry-Blossom Viewing"). It wasn't even like "Cherry-Blossom Joie de Vivre in Kyoto". It was just a normal (chilly) Sunday afternoon in the park with kids playing and folks jogging, but with a quiet floral bonus for those who happened by.

Anyway, the photo above is horrible from a photographic sense, but I like the mood.

I was playing catch with Anthony and [...]

It's not that I don't have enough recent stuff that I'm behind on to post about, but I thought it'd be a nice change of pace to jump back half a year to when the fall foliage first started showing its colors in the area, to a November 9th visit to the Kongourinji Temple (金剛輪寺) in Shiga, an hour's drive from Kyoto. This is the same temple featured in "Deep Sorrow at the Kongourinji Temple's Path of Jizou", about the many bibbed statues representing children who died before their parents.

The fall colors don't arrive in full force this area [...]

It was a nice day, so I stepped out for a short stroll with the camera. Many cherry trees have lots of stems and few blossoms, like in the photo below, but some still have large complements of blossoms. With the photo above, I put the sun behind the blossoms and tried to expose for the blossoms, but the result wasn't particularly good, but on a whim I cranked up the exposure in Lightroom, and the result has a nice dreamy glow, as if I had applied the Funky Joy touch-up as I did here.

Part of the effect could [...]

Here are some more pictures from the first two stops during our essentially all-day drive at the start of our short but photographically-satisfying trip to Imabari City (Ehime Prefecture, Japan) at the start of the month. It was a trip which included an attraction so thrilling, the Towel Museum :-), that a single post couldn't contain its full measure of win: part 1, part 2.

Many of the photos on today's post are variations of pics seen on "On The Road to Imabari", which I had prepared in haste that first night from the hotel.

I couldn't decide which view [...]