In "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" the other day, I noted that while driving through a sparsely-populated village deep in the mountains of Uji City south-east of Kyoto, we made a stop to check out a local shrine we happened upon. The shrine's entrance gate appeared in yesterday's "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" as well.

The shrine has the name Kiyotakiguu (清瀧宮), and is just a small local shrine for the village, like any number of similarly unassuming local shrines and temples that have appeared on this blog (recent [...]

Today's photos are sort of a combination of the softness we saw in "Exploring the Edge of Creamy Macro Bokeh with Lily of the Nile" with detail in "Exploring the Sharper Side of the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5". I was driving through the middle-of-nowhere mountains south-east of Kyoto with friends Shimada-san and Paul Barr, and when we stopped to check out a small shrine we happened upon, these clover(?) were right next to the car.

The shots above and below are almost identical (the flower is slightly further away in the shot above), but the effect is wildly different....

The Voigtländer [...]

So, last week with "Revisiting Imabari's Colorful Towel Museum" I was wrapping up a series of posts (part: one and two) about the oddly-interesting Towel Museum in Imabari, Japan, and I ended with a shot of the flowers on our table at the museum's cafe.

For context, here's our table...

... and here's the little shot-glass of flowers on the table...

But the little unassuming collection of flowers becomes great fodder for exploration with the creamy goodness of the Cosina Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5, so while waiting for our food, I took a few minutes to try different compositions. I was [...]

It's not that I don't have enough recent stuff that I'm behind on to post about, but I thought it'd be a nice change of pace to jump back half a year to when the fall foliage first started showing its colors in the area, to a November 9th visit to the Kongourinji Temple (金剛輪寺) in Shiga, an hour's drive from Kyoto. This is the same temple featured in "Deep Sorrow at the Kongourinji Temple's Path of Jizou", about the many bibbed statues representing children who died before their parents.

The fall colors don't arrive in full force this area [...]

Here are a few random pictures from the colorful Towel Museum in Imabari Japan, which I covered in a couple of posts last month (part one and part two). The towel giraffe above is a smaller version of the one Anthony is hugging in this photo from part one.

The displays of wares for sale at the many shops were always colorful...

I was thinking of using this picture as one of my "What am I?" quizzes, but it's probably not challenging enough, so I'll just post it here, and the answer follows later in this post.

The big wall [...]