One lovely side-effect of using Adobe Lightroom as the hub of my image workflow is that I now have all the shots I've loaded into it available at my fingertips (which at this point is everything since last summer, currently about 12,500 images that have survived the delete key).

I came across the wonderful photo set from when Nils and I visited some temples last fall, and realized that I hadn't posted many of them. At the time, I did post a bunch of fall-foliage desktops, and a few about our visit to Konpukuji Temple, as well as one post [...]

Fumie and I spent today, our 9th anniversary, being sick, me mildly and Fumie miserably. Yuck.

This is a photo I took at the Kyoto Botanical Gardens about a year ago, during the first field trip of Anthony's preschool life. It was the same trip with the funky echium wildpretii plants of an earlier post.

I love the rich colors in this shot, although how rich they appear to you depends on your browser, your OS, your monitor, and many interrelated settings. If things are set up to show accurate colors (as I've worked to ensure my setup is), these [...]

While viewing the amazing cherry blossoms in northern Kyoto last month, despite all the attention on the blossoms, there were plenty of other botanical signs of spring, and I took a moment away from the blossoms to enjoy them as well.

In an earlier post, I showed some of Kyoto's brilliant spring colors, but those of today's posts are a bit more subtle. Among the weeds around the little river that flowed through the area were a number of different flowers....

Out of focus behind the white flower above were scraggly bushes with pink blossoms of some kind or another....

During our drives around the countryside on our recent trip to Hokkaido, I noticed a fairly large number of abandoned houses. I love them for their photographic opportunities, and because I find them to be quite intriguing.

I wonder who built the house? Who lived there? Were kids raised there? (How did they like it, and where are they now?) Why did someone leave it? What's happened to it since? Who owns it now, and where are they?

Mostly, I wonder about who might have lived in it first, when it was new. How wonderfully peaceful it must have been, [...]

As Nils suggested the other day, I visited the hiking trails behind the Westin Miyako Kyoto Hotel today. The trails are extremely simple (with mild stairs the whole way), and because it's all shaded, it was substantially less strenuous than moving around inside the gardens at the water treatment plant of recent posts.

I brought Anthony with me, and it was thoroughly enjoyable for both of us. (It was much better than when I bought him on a multi-kilometer, much more difficult hike up the Daimonji Mountain last December, where I had to carry him most of the way. Sigh, [...]