In last week's "Scenes From Mountain Roads in Northern Kyoto" I showed a view from the road looking up a steep ravine (this pic) and a bit of detail of its carpet of ferns (this pic), and mentioned that I'd climbed up the steep ravine for more photos. This post is just a few, three shots taken from the same location halfway up the ravine, at different focal lengths...

The sense of elevation disappears at the longer focal length, but this is my favorite photo of the three.

Continued here...

On the way to Pierre Nadeau's sword smithy in May, we came across the photogenic Zaobashi Bridge (蔵王橋) in the rural mountains of Aridagawacho City, in Wakayama Prefecture.

It's a short (160m) bare suspension bridge made of steel... steel grid plates that form the surface of the bridge, bolted on top of simple steel I-beams suspended with steel cables to even bigger steel cables draped over two steel towers. It makes it quite easy to see how all the parts conspire against gravity. It's also photogenic. The people in the photo above were the only ones to stop by while [...]

It was almost a month ago that I made the first drive through the rural mountain villages of Uji City (southern Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) with friends Katsunori Shimada and Paul Barr. We went again the next week, and on other photographic adventures since, but I still have photos I want to share from that first trip, so that's what this post is.

I'm a big fan of thin depth of field, but in this next case (taken with a 300mm f/2), I find having to scan around for something in focus leaves me a touch queasy. What do you [...]

If the pic above looks familiar, it's because I had a portrait version of it on "An Amazing Day of Photography at Some Eastern-Kyoto Temples" back in April. I was rummaging around in my Lightroom catalog today and got depressed at how many posts are waiting for me to get around to them -- I have so much I want to share -- so I thought I'd start with a few more from the morning of the photogenic stroll that produced that post.

Having recently posted "Trying Some Hard-Edged Black and White", I thought I see what I could do [...]

Last week I posted "Deep In The Mountains Above Kyoto's Kumogahata Village" and its followups, featuring photos from a rainy car trip into some remote mountains. The weather was nice yesterday, so I went back on my scooter, and could probe deeper than I could with the car.

Today's simple post just shows some scenes of the roads I was on, or of areas just off the road.

Fallen trees looped off at the road line was a frequent sight. The mountain is covered with trees, and they fall from time to time, and if they block the road, they're [...]