I've been busy with my Lightroom plugin stuff all weekend, so just a simple post today on some pretty flowers found among the moss during a recent visit to the Gioji Temple (祇王寺) in Kyoto.

We'll start with what I assume is some hydrangea (ajisai - アジサイ) just beginning to bloom...

It frankly doesn't look much in the small thumbnail, but clicking through to the larger version has the tiny buds in the center come alive like stars in a nebulae (or something like that).

I tried a side-view approach to get the petals edge on, and I shouldn't have [...]

Back again to the mossy temple visit from "Tag Along With Me on a Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Gioji Temple", with an orange followup counterpart to the "Gioji Temple Photo Shoot: Nicolas’s White Little Mushrooms" post.

The temple's entrance gate is covered by a little roof of bamboo and decaying moss-covered wood. For context, here's a photo of the roof with Nicolas under it (photographing a spider):

The bamboo on the roof makes a grid of squares... the mushrooms of today's post are in the lower-rightmost square:

Once Nicolas was done, I moved in with my all-time favorite lens, the [...]

I went with a friend to the Shoseien Temple (渉成園) today, in downtown Kyoto Japan. It's a little osasis on what must have been the outskirt boonies of Kyoto 360 years ago when it was started, but now it's in the middle of the city, a short walk from Kyoto Station.

It's got quite a different vibe than your average temple; here, they embrace being rustic, but always with class. It's nice.

I haven't really looked at my photos yet, but I'm sure I'll post more once I do.

It must have been painful for the owners during the last [...]

As I mentioned yesterday in "Rich Colors: A Good Start to an Amazing Day in Kyoto", I started a wonderful day of exploration and photography with a visit to the Gioji Temple (祇王寺) in western Kyoto.

In keeping with my "spray and pray" approach to photography 🙂 I ended up taking almost 600 photos over the course of the day, but maybe my approach is not quite as unskilled as I thought, because most of my shots came out nicely. Or maybe Gioji is just that photogenic and inspiring.

So, as somewhat of an exercise in showing my thought process [...]

Here are a few shots from the Koumyou-in Temple in Kyoto (光明寺, 京都) taken on the same outing as the photos accompanying my Lightroom 4.1 post the other day.

One of the verandas consisted of a single plank of pine more than a yard wide (94cm by my foot-measuring estimation). I'd never seen anything like it; I assume that all the trees big enough to allow this big a plank were harvested long ago.

I talked to a lady that I took to be the owner of the place, who said that the temple building itself was not all that [...]