The other day while my wife was preparing for her ballet recital, I wandered around the shrine complex across the street from the venue. That's where I snapped the "Cute Little Melodrama in Five Photos" sequence that I posted the other day.

The direct sun made for harsh lighting that I just didn't have the skill to deal with well, so from a technical point of view these photos are crap, all lacking a certain richness. I'll have to head back on a lightly-cloudy day. Still, it's a pretty area, so even crappy photos are not too bad to look [...]

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A year ago I took a nice scooter drive into the mountains of northern Nara Prefecture, a trip that produced the following posts:

Perfect Flower in the Mountains of Nara Highlight of Yesterday’s Mountain Ride: Friendly Farmer Lady Stages of the Rice Harvest More From the Rice Harvest After the Rice Harvest

This post is a collection of random other photos from that trip.

Next we have three photos that are as different upon inspection as they appear to be the same at first glance....

A different view of a fisherman at this lake also appeared on this post of [...]

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As I wait for my laptop to come back from the shop, I realized that this gives me an opportunity to actually revisit the 93,462 photos in the Lightroom catalog on my desktop computer, which I haven't looked at since moving my photo-processing workflow my laptop a year and a half ago.

Then, as now, I was always behind on what I wanted to post, so there must be thousands of things waiting to be shared that will never see the light of day. Lacking the energy for a real search, I decided to go with the first thing that [...]

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The fall colors are probably already starting to appear in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but we won't begin to see them in Kyoto for another six weeks, so I'm dipping into the archives for a preview.

These shots are from a trip to south-western Kyoto's Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) last November. As the proximity-search feature of my blog shows, I've posted plenty from this area in the past, including three posts with photos from this particular trip:

So, there's nothing new here, but I like pretty pictures, so here we go...

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Went up again to Kyoto's Shogunzuka overlook (京都の将軍塚) for the sunset, as I often do. Wasn't too bad... a bit better than two days ago.

Like in that post the other day, I'm dusting off the Sigma 50-500mm "Bigma" lens. As a challenge, I practiced hand-held manual-focus tracking on birds, at 500mm. For those who've never tried it, this is ridiculously difficult; the point was general practice, not to get good shots (because there's little hope to get a good shot under these conditions without about 100 years of experience under your belt).

The air was more clear for the [...]

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