As I wrote back in April's "An Amazing Day of Photography at Some Eastern-Kyoto Temples", I'd spent a wonderful morning wandering around an area of eastern Kyoto that I'd not visited before, with many temples and a bounty of spring blossoms and flowers. I did one followup post a couple of months ago, but much remains that I'd like to share.

Perhaps the largest temple complex I came across was that of the Sennyuji Temple (泉涌寺). It has many buildings separated by large expanses of gravel -- a decidedly non-spring feeling not made better by the weather, which was heavy [...]

The photo above is pretty much exactly the kind of shot I had in mind when I first thought to venture out into the crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, and seems to be what the Nikkor 300mm f/2 was made for. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people were milling about, but as far as the lens was concerned, at that moment there were only two people on earth.

I bet they felt the same.

Just compare it to a shot taken a few seconds later at f/11...

Back to the isolating effects of f/2...

I've [...]

In our second drive through the rural mountains of Uji City (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) that I most recently wrote about the other day in "Pleasant Little Village in Uji, Part 2", after leaving that village we wound our way north for half an hour (for what turned out to be only a mile and a half as the crow flies!) and had to stop when we came across some extremely vivid flowers at the end of someone's driveway.

I didn't realize it until I went to check the photo times between the village and these flowers, to see how long [...]

In "Pleasant Little Village in Uji" last month, I showed photos from the edge of a small remote village in Uji City (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) of maybe a dozen houses scattered about. Today's photos are from the other edge of the village...

Considering the similar shots in "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" and "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" (both from a trip the week prior to the one that produced today's photos), I'm probably overdoing these a bit, but I like them and it's my blog, so here we [...]

Yesterday I posted a few pictures in Part 1 on a particularly photogenic ravine first seen in last week's "Scenes From Mountain Roads in Northern Kyoto".

This post is a bunch more, mostly without comment.

First, again, here is the view from the road...

I climbed up into that for the rest of the pictures.

The trees aren't actually all that tall... maybe 25-30m (~7 or 8 stories tall), but they're plenty tall enough to awe.

This next one isn't much in the thumbnail version, but it's quite something else when viewed full screen...

While heading back down, I came [...]