In the large version, you can see individual branches on the trees. Not too bad for almost 14km away, handheld.

I was gratified not only to be able to pick up the camera today, but to actually remember how to use it. Kyoto had a mild version this evening of the sunset described in my November 2008 post "Today's Sunset: the Deepest, Truest Orange I Have Ever Seen". Like then, I was at my condo and just ran up to the top floor to catch the view.

The picture above represents the true experience of what you'd see at that [...]

Well, it's not "Three Generations" quite in the same way as this shot or this one, but you get the idea.

As you can tell by my lean posting schedule of late, I'm buried with work on my Lightroom plugins, hoping Lr3 doesn't come out before I'm ready. But I had the opportunity to use an amazing lens today, and took it for a short stroll near my place.

The lens -- an all-manual Cosina Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 -- is a full 100% macro, something I'd never used before. I got close with the 64% macro of the Sigma Bigma [...]

As I wrote in yesterday's post about the doggy funeral, we had lunch at a great cafe. In the southern part of Shiga Prefecture, perhaps an hour's drive from Kyoto, is a private business called Sunainosato (寿長生の郷), which consists of a restaurant, a cafe, and a confectionery, all on 50 acres of wonderfully wooded land in the countryside.

The grounds are open as if it were a public park, and they're very nice.

The little drop-off shelter near the parking lot illustrates the simple, understated class of the entire site.

From there, one enters a small orchard that has more [...]

I've been dogged by a mild cold for the last few days.... maybe some flowers will brighten things up. These are from our trip to Awaji Island last week, including one from the Awaji Flower Review that we visited last year.

We went to a traditional "yabusame" archery rite today at the Shimogamo Shrine, part of the month-long "Aoi Matsuri" Festival, whose most well-known part is the Aoi Matsuri procession in the middle of May.

You can read about "Yabusame" on Wikipedia, but in short, this yabusame mounted archery involves an archer on a horse at full gallop running a 280-yard straight track with three small targets at equal intervals. The archer has but a few seconds between each one to grab an arrow, prepare it, aim, and shoot, and then must do it again two more times, all the while [...]