I continue to be busy getting my Lightroom Plugins ready for the next release of Lightroom 4 (the real thing if not another beta)... I just don't seem to have the energy to much else, but I hate not posting every day, much less every week(!)

So for something easy to post today, I just went through my photos from a couple of outings last November to pick a few pretty pictures, and ended up deciding to make them all fodder for my desktop-background category. Most have some fairly aggressive processing to make them punchy.

Not much prose with these [...]

In yesterday's "Colorful Ladies' Wardrobe" post we looked at some of the young ladies preparing for their turn at traditional Japanese archery at the rite-of-passage event described in "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot". Before and after their turn they were as lively as you'd expect a bunch of twenty-year-old girls to be, but on the shooting platform they were all business, every bit worthy to appear along the likes of the guy seen in "More Badass Japanese Archery".

I'd been disappointed early on when I was driven out by the ridiculous crowds just before the ladies started, [...]

After what's turned out to be a monochromatic year so far, I'm happy to get some color back in my blog. The fall-foliage season is Kyoto's most glorious, and it runs a long six or seven weeks, so I've got more fodder for posts than I could actually process, so I'll dip in for today's post about a stroll around Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida that I did with some friends (Stéphane Barbery, Nicolas Joannin, and Paul Barr) last month.

I've posted about this area many times, starting in "Discovering Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida" several years ago after Stéphane first introduced the area [...]

This year has gotten off slowly for me, having woken up January 1st with a cold and all, but with "Inspired Artistic Temple Shot" and its followup, "Simple Temple Sliding Wall", I seem to have a black-and-white theme going, so I'll continue that today with a post about charcoal, from last year's visit to Japanese swordsmith Pierre Nadaeu (the swords are Japanese; Pierre is Canadian).

All the photos on today's post are shown in full color, but the subject matter's lack of chromatic variety makes them feel more monochrome than not.

A swordsmith can use various things to heat the [...]

Earlier this month, on the wonderful day in Kyoto's Takao area that I mentioned in the rainbow post a few weeks ago, we visited two temples. I posted a few scenes from the first in "On The Path To Northwest Kyoto's Jingoji Temple", and while I have a bazillion more from there that I want to share, today's post is from the second, the Kousan Temple (高山寺).

The Japanese name, 高山寺, looks as if it should be pronounced kozanji and that's what most Japanese would guess, but for whatever reason the temple actually uses kosanji. Even the Japanese Wikipedia article [...]