Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/100 sec, f/1.4, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos

Animatable Wigglegram (11 frames) — slowly sweep mouse from side to side to view 3D effect
クネクネ写真：写真の上をマウスであちこちにゆっくり動かすと「３D」な感じが出ます。

The Appropriately-Named Fallen Leaf Shrine
Iwato Ochiba Jinja (岩戸落葉神社), Kyoto Japan

Here's a wigglegram (which I hereby dub in Japanese as「クネクネ写真」) from an outing a few days ago to the “Fallen Leaf Shrine” (岩戸落葉神社) in the mountains north of Kyoto.

That's at the same place as my first try at the whole “stereo photo” thing earlier this month, a vist first seen in “A Slightly Early Visit to Kyoto's Fallen-Leaf Shrine”.

This subsequent visit is after an additional 11 days of leaf fall. Despite how beautiful they are, it's rare for a temple or shrine to let fallen leaves accumulate; they clean them every day or multiple times per day. But this place is different, and so by the mere act of not bothering to immediately tidy up, a small, remote shrine is transformed from “obscure” to “popular”.

I intend to post more photos from this visit another day, but until then, you can get a general sense of the small shrine via “Carpet of Yellow at the Iwato Ochiba Shrine” from two years ago.

Also different from 11 days prior is that I now have a bit of experience with wigglegrams, as the “Wigglegram” category on my blog shows, so this should be nicer than that first attempt. (The most recent wigglegrams prior to this are of lovely ladies in kimono, here and here, but this time we get only Damien Douxchamps).

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — ¹/200 sec, f/1.2, ISO 220 — map & image data — nearby photos
Entrance Steps @ f/1.2
at the Sourenji Temple (宗蓮寺), Kyoto Japan

On the outing the other day that produced yesterday's “A Few Pretty Pictures from Kyoto's Middle-of-Nowhere Sourenji Temple” post, I brought along a 50mm f/1.2 lens. I don't use that lens much and need to learn how to use it... my limited experience to date has been chronicled in “Impossible Photography: No Light, No Tripod, No Hope. D700 and a 50mm f/1.2” four years ago, and “Artsy-Fartsy in Kyoto, at f/1.2” five yeas ago.

I'm about to head out this morning for some more fall-foliage photography, but I thought I'd quickly post this pair of shots at different apertures.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — ¹/200 sec, f/5.6, ISO 3200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Entrance Steps @ f/5.6

This is probably not the situation where one gets much oomph from going super wide. I'll post a few more-appropriate shots another day...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/160 sec, f/1.4, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Unretouched
back corner of Kyoto's Sourenji Temple (宗蓮寺)
Straight out of the camera.
(except for white balance, set in post via a gray-card reference shot)

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As I mentioned in this morning's post, I went on a drive to the northern mountains of Kyoto yesterday. Our first stop was the middle-of-nowhere Sourenji Temple (宗蓮寺).

It was cold and the light was lush. On the way from where we parked I snapped this picture, which unfortunately has a local farmer going by in his little truck and Paul Barr caught mid step, but the richness is almost unreal...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/400 sec, f/4.5, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Rich
just outside the Sourenji Temple (宗蓮寺)
Kyoto, Japan

There were a bunch of very oddly pruned trees whose bottom half looked like large bonsai trees, with tall super-thin shoots doubling the height from there...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/400 sec, f/4.5, ISO 3200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Grotesque

The style does not appeal to me at all (they make me think of grotesquely large Chia pets). I've seen a similar style at Shouzan, but those were the size of large bushes... these were full-on trees reaching multiple stories tall.

Here's one where you can sort of see the scale...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/100 sec, f/4.5, ISO 280 — map & image data — nearby photos

And here's an abstract something-or-other that I just sort of like...

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 2000 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — ¹/160 sec, f/4.5, ISO 2500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Entrance Steps
Paul Barr up top, Damien Douxchamps down below

Here's what Paul was looking at in that shot...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/50 sec, f/10, ISO 5600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Steep and Colorful
and not more than a little visually overwhelming

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I'll share shots from the relatively-small temple area in another post, but for now I'll end with this pleasant little alcove on the opposite side from where the stairs above end...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/80 sec, f/1.4, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Back Corner
of the Sourenji Temple (宗蓮寺)

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Walking to the fence at the end and turning around to face the camera, I took the photo that leads this post.

Normally I end up doing something to every photo I take in post processing (in Lightroom).... nudging exposure, contrast, noise reduction, white balance, etc., because I'm simply not careful and patient (and skilled) enough to get it right in camera. I could never be a film photographer.

The image quality can generally afford this post-processing step because I shoot in raw format; it both affords great latitude in post processing, and can save me from disasters.

To some extent I've embraced this lazy unskilled approach to save me time with white balance. I just leave the camera at “Auto” and don't care about it while shooting, then set the white balance later in bulk via a reference shot of a WhiBal card (like this and this) or from a color chart (like this).

You can never really say “straight out of the camera” with a raw-format image because the result you get necessarily depends on the raw converter and its particular quirks, but other than setting the white balance via a neutral square on a color-cart shot, the lead photo is just as it appeared when first loaded into Lightroom. Just amazing.

Continued here...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/400 sec, f/9, ISO 3200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Recognize This Place?

Five and a half years ago — 1,609 blog posts ago — I posted “Kyoto’s Road to Nowhere”, about a bridge that led straight into the rocky face of a mountain:

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/80 sec, f/4.5, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Bridge to Nowhere
5½ years ago

On a mountain fall-foliage-photography drive yesterday with Paul Barr and Damien Douxchamps, we came across the same bridge, now with the addition of a tunnel (the Oofuse Tunnel; 大布施トンネル))...

Nikon D4 + Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm OS @ 140mm — ¹/400 sec, f/9, ISO 720 — map & image data — nearby photos
Kyoto's Road to Nowhere
Now goes somewhere
京都市左京区花脊大布施町
( sorry for the over-the-top processing; I was just playing around in Lightroom )

It's still a monumental waste of money, considering the expense that two bridges and one tunnel must have cost, and the total lack of apparent benefit in bypassing a few hundred meters of pleasant road.

One can hope that it's merely the first step to some purposeful multi-decade plan to turn the almost-unused lazy mountain road into some kind of life-giving transportation artery for some far-flung population of taxpayers languishing in dire need, but it's much more likely that the local ward had to expend the money one year or risk having next year's budget cut by the amount unspent. As wholly unfathomable is it sounds, that's apparently how it works in Japan. (And by a quirk of Kyoto geopolitics, the “local ward” of this far-flung place an hour's drive away is actually the same ward that I live in, so it's my tax yen paying for it. Ugh.)

I've still not driven on the bridges or through the tunnel; we opted to spend the extra 30 seconds to take the more pleasant long way around.

Sorry, no wigglegrams this time.