Picking up from yesterday's Part 1 of "My Mt. Hiei Climb Challenge 2013", where that post ended with a short pause at a clearing half way up...

From the clearing, the path up actually goes down sharply for a short while...

The trail goes up and down very steeply as it crosses several small river ravines, and this is where I worried that my knees would become debilitatingly painful. To my great relief it turned out fine, either because of the stretching I did (mentioned in Part 1), and/or because I was wearing a pair of knee compression straps that [...]

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This post is a continuation, of sorts, of my first climb of Kyoto's Mt. Hiei, painfully documented a year ago in "Yesterday's Hike: The Agony Where Bravado Yields, In Spectacular Fashion, To Painful Reality". After that horrible experience, I vowed to get into better shape, and to repeat the hike in a year.

That year had passed, so I repeated the hike last Thursday.

After the first hike, I made a concerted effort to get into shape, and just six week later I showed some of my progress in "Going Max Cliché While Learning About Off-Camera Flash", and probably hit [...]

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This post is a few more shots following on from "Quick Peek from Kyoto’s Aoi Matsuri", about one of Kyoto's main "period costumes" festivals, the Aoi Matsuri festival (葵祭; at Wikipedia).

Of course, where you have horses on parade, you have...

Continued here...

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The Aoi Matsuri festival (葵祭; at Wikipedia), one of Kyoto's big three festivals, was held the other day, and I stopped by for the first time in many years to photograph the folks in period (circa 1000AD) costumes.

A cursory scan of the initial photos shows that I missed focus on most of the shots taken with the Nikkor 300mm f/2 with a 1.4X TC, so I'll have to look into whether the camera or my technique needs an adjustment. In the shot above, the gravel shows the plane of focus is well behind the kids. )-:

The biggest problem [...]

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Today's post is part four on the Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in north-western Kyoto (prior parts: one, two, three, and a bonus couple photo shoot). Today's simple post includes three more wigglegrams, adding to those in part three and my first post from the garden.

Another Area of the Garden with someone crouching for a shot (the branch is waving to you) Damien in the garden

To be continued...

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