My cold definitely seems to be over, so today I made the trek to the deep-mountain southwest corner of Kyoto City, to the Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) that Stéphane Barbery introduced me to last year. I made two trips last year, producing enough story and photographic material to fill dozens of blog posts, but being lazy I've so far posted only a few (here, here, and most recently here).

Arriving today with Paul Barr after an hour-long scooter ride, and getting the first view of the entrance seen above, I was struck by three things:

The fall colors are much weaker [...]
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Having recovered from a mild but lingering cold, I went out for some lite temple/shrine exploration in western Kyoto with Paul Barr yesterday. The autumn colors are late and weak this year, but it's always fun to explore new nooks and crannies of Kyoto, so I enjoyed it.

There's a tradition of sake (rice wine) companies sending donations to shrines in exchange for prominent display of their patronage, and the barrels on display at this particular shrine we came across were particularly large.

It's the season for children's "7-5-3" celebrations (as described here, and as seen with my own kid [...]

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I mentioned in yesterday's post that the late-afternoon view was quite dynamic from eastern Kyoto's Shogunzuka Overlook, and I wasn't kidding. I'd never seen such a variety of conditions, much less over a mere hour and a half.

The view above is from when we got there an hour or so before sunset, toward Osaka. The air is crisp enough that you can see the picket-fence silhouette of Osaka's skyscrapers 30 miles away, yet somehow hazy enough in areas to be punctuated by colorful sunbeams. It was nice.

Yet, panning toward the right to look northwest instead of southwest, the [...]

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For some reason that I can't fathom at the moment, I let Zak Braverman talk me into taking a walk through Kyoto, ostensibly for some vaguely-defined health benefits. We were to meet at Kyoto Station and then walk the couple of miles to a restaurant for lunch, but I decided walk to the meeting point as well, and after adding a few things in the evening, ended up walking about 12 miles.

I brought the camera with me, of course, but since I'm not much into street photography, I didn't take all that many shots. (I made a post from [...]

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I have no idea why I like this shot, but I did at first glance, and I still do, so here it is. It's one of the first shots I took on a visit to the most fabulous Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) in southern Kyoto last year, with Paul Barr. (As an aside, Paul is likely at this very moment on a flight from The States to make another visit this year, but that's a post for next week).

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in "Kyoto Fall-Color Preview With Impact: Impressionism in Lightroom", I found thousands of photos [...]

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