Kyoto friend Zak Braverman was asked by his friend, pottery artisan Koji Kamada, to take photos of some recent pieces. Knowing I'm into photography, and of late trying to up my game on artificial lighting, Zak kindly invited me along.

I prepared everything I imagined I would need for, well, what I imagined I would be shooting, but upon arrival I quickly realized that my imagination differed significantly from reality, and we were totally unprepared. Specifically, I was unprepared for 1) the need for dark backgrounds instead of white, and 2) pottery that had direct reflections, like a mirror.

We [...]

I did something yesterday that I'd never done: I went out shooting with two camera bodies.

I often go out shooting with one body and many lenses, changing lenses upwards of 70 times on a long and interesting outing, and this works well for what I like to do, but when I added the Nikon D4 to my Nikon D700 at the start of the summer, I specifically thought it might be nice to have two bodies when out among the festive crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, one body with the huge Nikkor 300mm f/2, and another with a [...]

Busy day today... caught the fringe of two famous Kyoto festivals. In the afternoon was Jidai Matsuri (時代祭 -- "Festival of the Ages"), more or less a re-enactment parade representing the many periods Kyoto's long history. I caught the tail end of the procession as it made its way past my place.

(I'll post more another day, I'm sure, but in the meantime, for a different take on the genre, check out Stéphane Barbery's photos from three years ago, and from today.)

In the evening was the Kurama Fire Festival, which involves a lot of fire being heaved and hoed [...]

Finally getting that all-consuming project that I just posted about off my back, I can now return to my photos. Here are a few from the ikebana (flower arranging) event I went to a couple of weeks ago at the Shoren'in Temple (青蓮院) in eastern Kyoto. I'd managed to post a few shots earlier (in my "busy hallway", "cute and colorful scene ", and "serene photos" posts).

This event was related to the flower-arranging events that I post about every year, but it was a special event to mark the ascendancy of a new head of all worldwide practitioners of [...]

What a difference a day makes.

Yesterday I had such a wonderful, inspiring time at the ikebana show at the Shoren'in Temple; today was great until the evening when I had the mind-numbing, soul-sucking experience of spending four hours on half a dozen travel web sites trying to find reasonable tickets for Fumie and her folks to visit my folks this winter when Anthony and I are already visiting.

Through the process I became intimately familiar with global flight schedules, but was unable to produce an itinerary that combined the best flights for us... every travel web site I checked [...]