Today was a laid back Saturday for me. Anthony was on a trip with his grandparents and Fumie was working on ballet, so I stayed home to try to make a dent in the unending backlog of stuff I'm behind on. But with the blossoms starting to come out in force and the temperature approaching 20°C (66°F), I couldn't resist to step outside a bit with the camera. The mood outside was wonderfully relaxed, an uncrowded, low-key version of the cherry-blossom joie de vivre that I've written about before. It was really nice. I expect next weekend will be the [...]

Another one from the outing last week that also produced the previous post about the carving on the wooden gate. This shot is part of the wall of the little relaxation hut in the stone-lantern gardens behind Nishimura Stone Lanterns in Kyoto Japan. The hut can be seen in previous posts, here and here.

I thought I'd give it a try as a desktop background, but since I'm still really digging the "stark tree" desktop background that I posted the other day, today I'll try it on my portrait-oriented second monitor (as mentioned in "Going Vertical"), using this next version....

Last week, Kyoto friend Britto posted on his blog about a couple of recent bicycle trips he'd recently taken, including one to a shrine in the mountains north of Kyoto that sounded so appealing that I went there myself the next day (though I went by motorbike). Paul Barr is still in town, so I invited him along; that's him in the photos above.

It was a long and steep enough trip on the scooter... mad props to Britto for doing it on a bicycle!

In the shrine's name (岩戸落葉神社; iwato ochiba jinja), iwato means "rock above a cave entrance", [...]

I recently replaced a six-year-old low-end Dell monitor with an Eizo FlexScan SX2462W, a widescreen mid-level monitor with many good features for photo work. Having moved from this setup to one now with two widescreen monitors, I decided to put the extra monitor on its side, vertically, so that the long edge is up and down. (You can see it in this photo.)

So, now having one portrait-oriented monitor, I suddenly had no photos to use as its desktop background. Especially since it's the "extra" monitor, and by default will be unused unless I'm doing something particular with it, I [...]

Paul Barr is in Kyoto again, and we made a trip to the back gardens of Nishimura Stone Lanterns, behind their stone-carving workshop, as we did last year. Even after all the posts last year (enough to merit a "Nishimura Stonecarvers" category on my blog), including a 51-photo "overview" post, there was much left to explore at the gardens.

Unfortunately, despite our visit being 10 days earlier than last year's, the fall colors were mostly gone and the trees bare, and to make it worse, someone had just cleaned up all the photogenically-endearing leaves from the paths. But on the [...]