I noticed a tiny old house being demolished nearby the other day, and stopped in for a look. It could be anywhere from 40 to 100+ years old... the guys tearing it down didn't know, but it was built at a time when Japanese homes were still built with mud and bamboo for the walls.

There are still plenty of this kind of construction in Kyoto. Often, the outside of such walls are veneered in wood, as seen in my Randomly Photographed Stroll in Kyoto and Old Wood-Veneer Siding (Desktop Background) posts.

The shot above shows rough-hewn beams that were [...]

Fumie and I made an overnight trip to the city of Takamatsu, in Kagawa Prefecture, on the large island of Shikoku, Japan, to see pop singer Kousuke Atari (中孝介) in concert. Just as I did the last time we made an overnight trip (which was also to see Kousuke Atari in concert, at a shrine in Miyajima), I awoke early to see what photo opportunities there might be in the early of morning.

Unlike Miyajima and our extended time there, which produced so many nice (or story-telling) pictures that I had to make a Miyajima category on my blog, we [...]

Kyoto had some wonderful sunsets last month. The picture above is a crop from a shot I took from the top (fifth) floor of my building just after sunset. It doesn't look much different than the original frame, except for the size of the birds. Here's the uncropped frame...

I'd used my 200mm zoom to try to isolate the orange, and just got lucky with the birds. A couple of minutes prior, I was using my wide-angle lens and got some of the blah cityscape in there, as well as an airplane far above....

It's interesting to compare the colors [...]

I love my Nikon D200, but yesterday added a new woe to the "Dead Battery Syndrome" I experienced a couple of months ago: "Black Frame Syndrome"

Yesterday, Kyoto was a cold and heavily overcast, with sporadic misty rain. Occasionally and all too briefly, the sun would poke out in brilliant fashion to set the foliage momentarily on fire, so on the way back from picking up Anthony at preschool, I stopped by the grounds of the old imperial palace, now mostly a big park heavily laden with fall colors at their peak.

The trees were amazing, but it was dark [...]