In my previous post, "Changing Lenses", I showed a picture of a friend in front of a serious splash of fall colors. The leaves were so low in the view because we were at the top of a set of stairs. From the bottom of the stairs, looking up, the view was the impressive canopy seen above.

The view was pretty impressive from most everywhere...

In the background of the center of the shot above, you can just barely make out bits of the namesake for my "Gate of Disrepair" post.

The shrine area itself is fairly small, but picturesque...

So, the other day, I posted the above photo without a title, soliciting captions. Almost two dozen suggestions later (all of which were kept hidden until after I posted this followup, so as not to influence subsequent suggestions) and the overwhelming theme is "layers" and "strata".

Of course, the wonderful banding of different colors and textures is what prompted me to take the photo in the first place. It took it from my balcony, looking across the little stream next to our place to the path on the other side. I've lived here for four years and never noticed it [...]

The initial destination of my photo outing with Paul Barr yesterday (the one where we discovered the workshop of Nishimura Stone Lanterns) was to visit the Nitenji Temple, nestled up in the mountains of north-east Kyoto, perched precariously over the ravine on the road over to Otsu.

After the outing, we returned to my place and I introduced Lightroom to him, and in using random photos from the day to demonstrate things you could do within Lightroom's Develop module, I happened upon the soft-focus creamy effect you see above. I liked the effect in this case, so I decided to [...]

I visited today the Eikando Temple gardens, nestled in the base of the mountains at the far east of Kyoto, about a 15-minute walk from our place. I'd been there before and thought it was really pretty, but I must have been stupid or blind (or on parenting duty with an impatient kid to look after) because today it was FREAKING MIND-BLOWING AMAZING.

Just *WOW*.

My photos don't even come close to doing it justice.

The temple is famous for its fall colors, as I found out the first time I drove by during the proper season, posted in "Colorful [...]

The picture above is not that special, but for some reason really grows on me as a desktop background. When viewed big, there's just something about it that I like, giving my current desktop-background image a run for its money.

It was the view just outside the window at the Toganojaya Restaurant in the north-west mountains of Kyoto, Japan, which we visited this past weekend (and was the subject of the four previous posts: one, two, three, and four). In this post are a few final pictures from that visit...

The same branch that heads out of frame in the [...]