Flipping around in my image library while doing some Lightroom testing, I came across an image that I happen to see fullscreen, and was wowed by it much more than a small-sized view would have led me to expect. I'd published it before (two and a half years ago in "A Few Unremarkable Fern Pictures"), but with desktop-image sizes, so I thought I'd go ahead and do that today.

It's from a trip a couple of years ago to Giouji Temple, images from which have appeared many times on this blog... if you're interested, check out the "nearby photos" link [...]

It's been a while since we've seen anything from Nishimura Stone Lantern stone-carving shop, so here's a close up of a stone sphere, tucked away haphazardly under the legs of a large stone lantern. (The combination is visible toward the bottom of this wider view.)

As I mentioned in "Deceptively Clear: Snow-Covered Mountains in Exquisite Detail", I prefer a darker tone to the image I use for my desktop background, so I'll give this one a try for a while. I've accumulated quite a number of them on my blog over the years, as evidenced by my pretty Desktop Background [...]

This looks like a misty-white snow-covered mountain, but it's not.

There's no mist; the fuzzy white areas that seem to be blurry turn out to show clear detail of every snow-covered branch and twig when you look at the full-sized version. (However, most web browsers will downscale the huge image at first, so you'll likely have to click once on the link to bring up the larger version, then again on that larger version to see it in its full-resolution glory).

Also, I like how the snippet of less-snowy foreground mountain in the bottom-right corner adds an odd sense of [...]

It's the view on my computer, at least, when I first sat down this morning. When I'm testing Lightroom things, I'm often jumping around randomly in my image archive, and apparently this was the image I happened to end at when I went to bed last night. Concentrating on my work at the time, I didn't think much about it one way or the other, but it was a nice image to wake up to, so I thought I'd share it.

It's from the last day of our short New Year trip to Toyama Prefecture, seen in other recent posts, [...]

Among the seemingly infinite variety of objects in the gardens behind the Nishimura Stone Lanterns stone-carving workshop in the mountains of north-east Kyoto, Japan, I was particularly taken with the curved pieces. And of these, there was quite a variety, including water basins, pedestal tops, lantern-top adornments, and sloping roofs like the one in the photo above.

The roof of this piece looks thin and delicate, but the original block of stone it was made from must have necessarily been thick and substantial, only to surrender most of its mass to the carver's chisel. The bulk of that original block [...]