As I mentioned the other day in the post about an outing with Vaughn Hart to the mountains of north-western Kyoto, we stopped by a simple, unassuming rural shrine. The entrance to the immediate shrine area was through a small little wooden gate, seen here at the top of the steps Vaughn is standing on...

You can't see them in the photo above, but the gate actually has doors, propped open at the moment...

Something about the carving at the top of the gate caught my eye. The light was just wonderful for it... strong shadows, yet somehow soft....

The [...]

At the end of my previous post, I showed an odd tree... very tall without branches, except at the top a rat's nest of tightly bunched twigs and cones. Futzing around in Lightroom with a shot of the top of the tree, I came across a fairly stark monochrome version that struck me as interesting enough to give it a try as a desktop background.

Prior to happening upon that, I had a "stylized" version that I sort of liked...

I don't often venture into these non-realistic versions unless I'm doing something specific (such as this, this, this and this), [...]

The flood of photo opportunities I enjoyed last November at the start of Kyoto's fall-foliage season began with a visit to the Kongourinji Temple in Shiga. I posted about it in "First Taste of Fall Colors" and "Deep Sorrow at the Kongourinji Temple's Path of Jizou", but the aforementioned flood has kept me from following up with the main attractions from the visit.

The main stuff still awaits, but today's post moves us one step closer.

The path to the temple's main garden leads through an area that seems as pretty as a small garden in its own right...

I [...]

Last week, Kyoto friend Britto posted on his blog about a couple of recent bicycle trips he'd recently taken, including one to a shrine in the mountains north of Kyoto that sounded so appealing that I went there myself the next day (though I went by motorbike). Paul Barr is still in town, so I invited him along; that's him in the photos above.

It was a long and steep enough trip on the scooter... mad props to Britto for doing it on a bicycle!

In the shrine's name (岩戸落葉神社; iwato ochiba jinja), iwato means "rock above a cave entrance", [...]

I was out again today for an amazing day of fall-foliage photography, and on the way home in the late afternoon stopped in to the Koutouin Temple (高桐院) for 10 minutes, just to peek at its most-excellent entrance path, which featured prominently in "A First Visit To Kyoto’s Koutou-in Temple" two weeks ago. I have still literally not even looked at the photos from my second trip to this temple, but since I took only a few photos on this trip today, I thought I'd post some.

I was greeted with exactly what I expected.... lots of people...

... and [...]