The fall colors are probably already starting to appear in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but we won't begin to see them in Kyoto for another six weeks, so I'm dipping into the archives for a preview.

These shots are from a trip to south-western Kyoto's Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) last November. As the proximity-search feature of my blog shows, I've posted plenty from this area in the past, including three posts with photos from this particular trip:

So, there's nothing new here, but I like pretty pictures, so here we go...

Went up again to Kyoto's Shogunzuka overlook (京都の将軍塚) for the sunset, as I often do. Wasn't too bad... a bit better than two days ago.

Like in that post the other day, I'm dusting off the Sigma 50-500mm "Bigma" lens. As a challenge, I practiced hand-held manual-focus tracking on birds, at 500mm. For those who've never tried it, this is ridiculously difficult; the point was general practice, not to get good shots (because there's little hope to get a good shot under these conditions without about 100 years of experience under your belt).

The air was more clear for the [...]

Dipping into the several metric tons of pixels that I want to post but have yet to barely even look at myself, a short trip back to late April, to a visit to the Joshoko-ji Temple (常照皇寺, more properly transliterated in English as "Joushoukou-ji") with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin. It was an amazing place, though the harsh sunlight of the hot spring day made for photographic challenges.

I did post just a few shots the day after the trip, in "Pretty As a Peach Blossom", and some time later some shots that happened to be from that outing to [...]

I wrote in yesterday's post about great T-Shirts for Kyoto's hot summer, but took advantage of an even better situation today when I made a visit to the Kuuya-taki Waterfall (空也滝) in western Kyoto. It was my third visit, and I've posted about it at length before, such as "Finally Reaching the Kuuya-taki Waterfall in Western Kyoto" last month.

Anthony and I went with some friends from France, Anne and Yoshi, and 10-year-old Nao. I have much I want to post, but lacking energy this evening I'll put just a few shots.

There was much less water than when I [...]

Geez, where has the time gone!? Time seems to evaporate when researching stuff, and for the last several days I've had my head buried in setting up a big data-backup system at home and in the cloud (something I'm sure I'll post about soon).

Anyway, it's been a week since I posted the Bendy-Line "What am I?" Quiz where many people answered "paper", and yes, it's paper, but there's a more expressive (dare I say "richer"?) answer....

Earlier this year I was given access to a huge pile of cash -- ¥7,000,000 (about US $91,000) -- though sadly that access [...]