I've been taking it easy this year because I'm still recovering from the cold I woke up with on 1/1, but after posting Paul Barr's inspired creation yesterday, I thought I'd look into my own photo archive to see what I was doing when he took that photo. I was standing next to Paul, but aiming my camera at a the sliding walls of a nearby building, with the thought that it might make a nice desktop background.

One thing I like about it is that even though it's full of detail, it's not necessarily clear right away what you're [...]

Earlier this month, on the wonderful day in Kyoto's Takao area that I mentioned in the rainbow post a few weeks ago, we visited two temples. I posted a few scenes from the first in "On The Path To Northwest Kyoto's Jingoji Temple", and while I have a bazillion more from there that I want to share, today's post is from the second, the Kousan Temple (高山寺).

The Japanese name, 高山寺, looks as if it should be pronounced kozanji and that's what most Japanese would guess, but for whatever reason the temple actually uses kosanji. Even the Japanese Wikipedia article [...]

A month ago in "Another Day of Amazing Fall Colors in Kyoto" I posted on photo similar to the one above, from that day's trip to the Imakumano Kannonji Temple (今熊野観音寺) in eastern Kyoto.

The tree with the red leaves had particularly impressive colors, but only when viewed from about where the group is standing. From where I took the photo above, the leaves look fairly bland, at least relatively speaking. As you can tell from the shadows, the leaves were not being backlit.... it was a hazy day and the sun was more or less to my back in [...]

(The large version of this photo might be interesting... I'm not sure... but this small thumbnail certainly isn't.)

I went out to Fushimi Castle the other day with Paul Barr and Nicolas, a French/American guy I met briefly at Gion Matsuri at the start of the summer when he noticed my big lens and introduced himself. Busy schedules prevented us from getting together until last week when we made the short trip to south part of Kyoto to visit the Fushimi Castle.

It rained nonstop.

We spent quite a while under the protection of the main gate just chatting, [...]

I included a pretty bamboo-and-leaf photo on my previous post, even though it wasn't related to the post, just to have something pretty, but I tend to like to share stories/context instead of just photos, so this post fills in that gap for that photo.

Just outside the Ryoanji Temple is a path/sidewalk that leads to the nearby suburban sprawl, and along it was a nice little area lined by bamboo fences separating the pedestrians from a small area of leaf-covered grass. Here's a picture I happened to have snapped from the same location I took the bamboo/leaf photo:

You [...]