Last week's “The Effect of Shutter Speed on the Appearance of Flowing Water” post reminded me that I had not finished the story I started a year ago in “On The Way From The Kuuya-taki Waterfall”, so I'll go ahead and do that now.

In that story about my first visit to the Kuuya-taki waterfall (空也滝), upon returning to the road, Nicolas Joannin and I found another path going up a different direction and decided to take it to see where it went, and soon came across this sign:

The temple's name means “Ring/Circle of the Moon”.

The path was easy, but often steep...

After a half an hour of unrelenting ascent, we came across a bench and a sign that took the wind out of our already-slumping sails...

We were pretty much wiped out by that point, so decided to leave the temple for another day.

On the way down we caught sight of someone else descending the mountain, but they weren't on the path...

Set back but not defeated, I returned a few days later to try again.

The road that leads there doesn't go anywhere else (it dead ends), and is pretty dangerously thin/steep/crumbly, so even though there's something that might be called a road, you feel already in the middle of the wilderness by the time you start on the paths to the waterfall or the temple. So it was with some surprise that I came across a mailman...

We chatted a bit... it turns out that the post office makes normal daily delivery service to the temple an hour up the mountain, and to another temple an hour further beyond that. Wow.

I had a head start on him because he had to change to his hiking clothes, but he caught up to me quickly...

The estimate of an hour for the climb was dead on... 60 minutes exactly after starting up on the path, I broke out into the clearing at the temple, and received my first nice view...

To provide a bit of context, when clicking through to the larger version of the photo above, you'll be able to see two bridges near the center of the frame. The bridge at the sharp bend in the river to the left of center is the one I was standing on when I took this shot last December:

That was the lead post in “Revisiting December’s Arashiyama Outing: Dynamic Vistas and the Suzumushidera Temple”. The hike to the Tsukinowa-dera Temple is, I'm guessing, up one of the taller mountains in the background.

The other bridge, just south of the center of that frame, is Arashiyama's famous Togetsukyo Bridge (渡月橋), seen previously over the years on my blog here, here, and here.

Back to the hike up the mountain...

Unfortunately, after having hiked the hour up, there wasn't much of interest to my camera... a few rustic buildings, and that's about it.

The temple is at the red dot near the center, 60 minutes from the waterfall (highest dot on the river) and 50+10 minutes from the Atago Temple (which is on the highest peak overlooking Kyoto). I never did see that postman again, so he had probably continued up that way.

I've been busy lately on a couple of new Lightroom plugins. Today I'm releasing “Workflow Delete Options”, which helps address a couple of issues with how Lightroom handles delete requests.

In some situations Lightroom silently deletes more than you ask for, and in other cases, less. This plugin lets you be alerted to these situations so you can make an informed decision about what to do.

Details and download link are on the plugin's home page.

I posted some water-flow pics the other day in “A Drenched Visit to the Kuuya-Taki Waterfall” (空也滝), taken during an outing in which I'd hoped to miss the rain, but found a rare Kyoto thunderstorm. Since I had my tripod with me, I did some tests on the effect of shutter speed on the feeling of water flow.

Swabbing the mouse from side to side over the image above (and all the images below) causes different frames of each test set to come up, with the shutter speed in seconds showing in the lower right.

I would have liked to have all tests done with every major shutter-speed increment between 30 seconds and 1/500th of a second, but I guess I was just too miserable in the downpour to think that far ahead, and so the collection is rather haphazard. I'll have to go back on a nicer day with stronger focus.

Still, I made the tests, and they're at least partially useful, so here we are.

The stick is not in the 2.5-second shot because it's the last photo in the set that I took (though it appears first when sorted by shutter length), and apparently it's at that point in the set that I decided it was worth it to climb down and get rid of the ugly stick. So, it doesn't appear in the next set, nor in the set that leads this post, which I photographed after this set.

The “flow” effect is directly related to the relative movement across the frame during the exposure, so distance from the camera and water speed play as direct a role as the shutter speed. Next time I go I'll have to try the same scene from different distances (or with different zooms) to help bring those important factors under the umbrella of “experience”....

It's been ages since I've been out with just me and the camera, so I took some time for myself yesterday to visit the Kuuya-taki Waterfall (空也滝) in the mountains of western Kyoto. I first posted about it a year ago, and have since posted many updates, such as here and here.

(As always, the “nearby photos” link under any of these shots brings up other photos taken over the years in the same area.)

It had been raining recently, so yesterday I hoped to get lucky with a large flow of water over the falls, and also lucky to miss rain while I was there.

I was not as lucky as I had hoped.

I had hoped for the best, but had prepared for the worst, so I had rain gear, umbrella, etc., so I could still try to make some shots, but it was a miserable time.

Since I was there, I wanted to try to make the best of it, but I seemed to not be able to get into a groove. The shot below seems to completely lack a reasonable perspective, despite having been taken from a spot that offered such a great view...

The huge (6-story tall?) waterfall in the far background looks tiny, and so do the logs in the foreground. The big stone gate is almost invisible.

The other day someone contacted me asking whether they could use one of my photos to illustrate a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson:

"On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock."

The photo in question was of pretty bad quality, so while I was out there I looked for an appropriate scene. I took a bunch of shots that I've still yet to check out, but the shot above (and the shot at the start of the post) are two attempts.

Continued here...

I visited the gardens of the Heian Shrine (平安神宮) the other day with Aeron. The shrine's garden is best known for its cherry blossoms, and it looks pretty nice when it snows (which is rarely), but it's quite pleasant any time of year for those who take the time to enjoy it.

On our visit, we weren't the only ones enjoying the many colors of hydrangea. This little hoverfly seemed to be enjoying his all-you-can-eat pollen buffet.

I didn't expect to get much of a shot of the little guy... he was far enough away from the path that I really had to lean over just to try to get close, so I was unstable to begin with, and this is all hand-held in the shade. On top of all that, with the close-up macro of the Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5, the depth of field was razor thin.

But I took a lot of shots and hoped to get lucky, and did to some extent.

The colors were exquisite, but they get washed out when adjusting for the hoverfly. Here's the same flower from further back, sans bugs:

I also came across a less-obliging insect, a bee, who fritted here and there more quickly.

In the shot above, even though the bee's choppers are in focus, the focus feels wrong because the eyes (or what seem to be eyes to the non-entomologist) are out of focus, and it seems to be a pretty strong rule of composition that if eyes are in the frame and anywhere close to the focus, they should be in focus because as humans, that what we focus on first. I guess.

Still, I like the “small world made big” feel of the shot.

Continued here...