This is turning into a spectacular week of exploration and discovery. On Monday I spent the day scootering in the mountains to the south-east of Kyoto, discovering an amazing temple and other photogenic delights I've yet to find time to post about. (I did post about some tiny bridges that were a bit geometric, but otherwise not too interesting.) Then yesterday I tag along with Stéphane Barbery to the amazing Kongourinji Temple (金剛輪寺) an hour away in Shiga, and I came back with 619 photos, mostly amazing and also now in the queue for posting. On the way home yesterday, he'd recommended that some day soon I should visit the Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺), an hour's drive the opposite direction in the mountains of the far south-western corner of Kyoto. So, this morning, I headed on over there.

As I approached the mountain, I could see some temple buildings poking out from the trees, right of center in this photo...

It felt like they were very far away, even zooming up with my big zoom...

...but looking on the map after the fact, I realize that I'm just about a mile from those buildings. I also realize that they're not part of the Yoshiminedera Temple (it's down the slope to the left, visible if you really look carefully in the larger version of the “View from the Valley Floor” photo), but of the neighboring temple.

Anyway, I scooter up the winding road and arrive at a bus-parking area and realize that I'd been here before, maybe 17 or 18 years ago, while just checking out isolated-looking roads on the map. I recall using the bus-parking area to make a U-turn; back then, I wouldn't have cared about the beauty of a temple or fall colors, which was a shame.

But no U-Turn today, and I was eventually greeted with...

I used today the same three lenses I've been using all week, and took 678 shots overall, changing lenses 58 times. Most of that was at the Yoshiminedera Temple, which is as equally amazing as yesterday's Kongourinji Temple, but in a completely different way.

For the time being, today's take will mostly have to wait in line behind all the other stuff building up in my “want to post” list, so for today I'll just post a few shots about the views from up on the mountain.

The Yoshiminedera Temple is splayed over a large area of the mountain, so it has many levels and many different views of the valley below, such as...

It was sunny when I arrived, but soon became partly cloudy, then overcast, then eventually rained a bit. It was still partly sunny when I arrived at this minor-side-path spot, but Kyoto City off in the distance was fully engulfed in cloud, and despite waiting for quite a while, it never lit up, and so even with my Bigma, the resulting shot (though 10 kilometers of blustery atmosphere) is muddy at best...

It's interesting to note that the sight line from this spot to Kyoto Tower continues past and cuts almost exactly through eastern Kyoto's Shogunzuka overlook, from where I'm apt to try to catch the sunset. So, in views from Shogunzuka, such as found here, here, and here, this temple is in the mountains on the opposite side of Kyoto Tower.

I also tried to find my place, and sort of succeeded:

The very top of the huge orange main gate of the Heian Shrine is dead center of the shot above, but you've really got to look for it (in the larger version you get when clicking through). It's almost 10 miles away from here. That big orange gate has been featured on my blog a hundred times, I'm sure, including this, this, this, and this. I live a stone's throw from there, but the shot is so muddy that I can't tell whether I can see my place or not.

Some of the closer communities were still in sun, and sort of pretty (if not crowded looking)...

Due to the dynamic nature of the Yoshiminedera Temple complex, there were plenty of dramatic views close to home, such as this...

There were almost no visitors to this place of visual splendor... sometimes I'd go for half an hour without seeing someone else. It was a real treat, but like I wrote above, the real story of the temple will have to wait for another day.

The twisty mountain road to the temple actually continues deeper into the mountain. It was traversable by scooter, but the narrowness and unbelievably sharp and steep turns would have made for a white-knuckle attempt by car.

After a mind-dizzying twisty climb up the mountain, I followed an even more minor path (I hesitate to use the word “street”) down to find that it ended at the Sankoji Temple (三鈷寺), which is adjacent to the Yoshiminedera Temple that I'd just come from. This is the temple visible from “View from the Valley Floor” above. Here's the reverse-angle view from the middle of the three buildings shown in the close-up below:

The little incursion of houses above frame center is where I was when I took the “View from the Valley Floor” shot.

I retraced my path back to the tiny road and continued in to the mountains, eventually coming across the first house I'd seen since leaving the valley floor:

But next two it were a few lived-in houses, and one had a door open to the street, with a table offering sweet mini green peppers...

Further down the road was an area large enough and flat enough to farm...

The road was really pleasant (though less “fun”, with the ultra-steep cutbacks left behind), and about this time I thought to stop and take a photo every so often...

After this the road joined a larger road, but everything's still relative: the “larger road” was indeed big enough to have road paint, but it was still a tiny twisty little-used mountain road...

I took this photo from a cutback (spot where the road makes a very sharp turn as it dives further down the mountain) that had a sort of wide area to pull off. I immediately recognized it from stopping 20 or so years ago to enjoy the view (back when this was a far journey from where I lived in Takatsuki). It's the cutback mentioned in last year's ᾮWestern-Kyoto Mountain Drive: Bamboo, Nostalgia, and More”. Glad to have finally re-found it.

Then further down the mountain...

I eventually found myself passing the Konzou Temple, which I once wrote about during cherry-blossom season. It was getting late and light was fading, but I stopped in for a quick look around...

This, too, will have to wait for another day for a proper post.

Back on the road...

I was dumped back into civilization on Route 9 in western Kyoto, leaving a 30-minute ride home. As I was waiting at the light, a truck went by returning boats to Kameoka, that are then used for pleasure rides to Arashiyama.

Anyway, it was a great day, the third so far of the week. I've got plans for tomorrow that should make it great as well, so I guess I've got to think of something for Friday to make the week complete...

I'm guessing the sparse white puffs in the foreground are cherry blossoms, the jyuugatsuzakura (十月桜, “October Cherry Blossoms”) I first ran into at the Himukai Shrine a year ago. I'd not seen them since.

Today I accepted an invitation from Kyoto friend Stéphane Barbery to accompany him on a visit to the Kongourinji Temple (金剛輪寺) in Shiga Prefecture, an hour's drive away on the far side of Lake Biwa. As I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to continue to give the pain in my arms a rest from computer work, so I joined him and ended up having a deeply emotional experience at this temple. I'll write another time about why this particular temple can be so evocative, but while the 619 photos I took are loading in Lightroom, I thought I'd share a few from the very front of the batch.

Even though the fall foliage season has come and gone for much of the Northern Hemisphere, it's always much later in Japan; for us, the colors have just started to turn. A few trees are fully engulfed, as we saw in the background of the first picture, but the shot above reflects the current status better: most maple still haven't even started to turn, punctuated by fiery sections of those that have.

We were quite the early birds at the temple; it was very uncrowded, to the point of being deserted. Stéphane had been here before and so went ahead at his own pace, and for much of the time I was completely alone. (In future posts when you see how spectacular this place was, even this early in the season, you'll be amazed it could be so empty.) It was very peaceful.

The weather was much better today than yesterday, but the sun was still mostly absent. When it did pop out from behind the clouds, there was much rejoicing and shutter snapping. Here's an early burst of light...

... and moments later, the sun was gone, leaving everything with a vastly different feel...

It was unfortunate that the sun was so shy today, but it was still an amazing place to visit, and to photograph.

Like yesterday, I brought only three lenses, all primes: Nikkor 24mm f/1.4, Nikkor 50mm f/1.4, and a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5. Judging from the image data, I changed lenses 65 times. I hate the bother of changing lenses, but c'est la vie. My camera bag was a Think Thank Speed Racer and I just kept the lenses sitting in it without front or rear caps, so I could change lenses in a quick jiffy.

You won't see it in this short post, but this place blows away anything Kyoto has, including even the stunning Eikando Temple (seen in many previous posts, including “Holy Cow, the Gardens at Kyoto's Eikando Temple are Gorgeous!”, “Teeming Throngs Enjoying the Colors at Kyoto's Eikando Temple”, “More From Yesterday's Trip to the Eikando Temple”, and “More From the Eikando Temple Foliage Lightup”). Like the many dynamic views at Eikando, here at Kongourinji one finds numerous scenes with many visual layers.

Prior to this visit I'd never even heard of Kongourinji, and had asked Stéphane not to tell me what it was like, so at this point I didn't know what to expect. Still, I would have been plenty happy even if what I'd seen so far was all there was, because even these ancillary areas were gorgeous.

But it turns out that the large temple complex has two main areas of beauty, and I had yet to reach either. I'll post more once my photos have loaded and I have a chance to actually look at the rest of them.

To be continued....

On the way to visit my brother-in-law and his wife last week in Suzuka Japan, to deliver the photo book of their wedding that I wrote about in the previous post, I took the Shin Meishin Expressway (“New Nagoya Kobe Expressway”), a nice section of highway that was opened just a couple of years ago. Because of it, what would have been a four hour drive became an hour and a half. I was quite glad for the new road.

It goes through some mountainous terrain, so has lots of long tunnels and bridges, the longest tunnel on this section being 4km long. About half way there, immediately upon exiting a mile-long tunnel, I crossed a short but high bridge, and for the short moment it took to cross the bridge, I caught a glimpse of a picturesque valley below, and had an urge to visit it.

I didn't have the time to visit that day, but because my arm pain returned yesterday, I thought I should take it easy today, so after seeing a doctor this morning, I gave in to my wanderlust and decided to scooter over to see the valley.

It wasn't as picturesque as I had remembered, though the situation wasn't helped by the weather, which was very heavily hazy, sometimes sunny, but always threatening rain.

The bridges make for some pretty pictures, but they absolutely destroy the tranquility of the little valley. It's difficult to see in the photo above, but there's an old lady working a small rice field immediately below the 2nd-from-left support column. (Like the old lady seen in this rice-harvest post, she's wearing a towel over her head). You can see her better in the next picture...

There's an entrance to the expressway very close to here, so the expressway connects them to the world for the first time, but one can imagine people living in the valley (and the dozens of similar valleys along the route) were not wholly enthusiastic about the project.

Anyway, the valley was less photogenic than I had hoped, but since I had taken my scooter through the mountains to get there (I couldn't take the expressaay on a scooter, and wouldn't have wanted to when small mountain roads awaited), I had ample opportunity to immerse myself in a variety of serendipitous photographic delights, so another half dozen posts have been added to the long backlog of recent stuff I'd like to share...

For a while I was posting installments in the story about my brother-in-law's wedding last month, with the most recent installment being “Shogo and Namiko's Wedding: Reception, Part V (Entertainment)” three weeks ago. I stopped putting up new posts midstream because I suddenly had the idea to make a photo book of their wedding as a gift, and so dedicated a lot of time to it, and also because I wanted to hold back the rest of the photos until I could present the book.

The photo above is probably the best photo I've ever taken, except using “photo” and “taken” is probably not as appropriate as “result” and “accomplished” because I did some post processing in Lightroom to isolate Namiko from the background. The original is actually the first photo of this post.

All the post processing was in Lightroom, which doesn't allow me to extend the black background to the right; I'd think it'd look better to have her on the left side of the frame rather than the right. I could do it in Photoshop, but I'm too lazy.

In the photo book, though, I placed the photo square in the left-side page of a full two-page spread (the last two-page spread in the book), and added some pinstriping and fleurs, so when you open the book, it looks like this:

I dropped it off with them on Friday...

They enjoyed it; it was gratifying to see their reaction.

Posts about the wedding are continued here; I've written up a post about how I create photo books, here.

Yodobashi Camera, a small chain of large camera/electronics stores, opened a new branch in Kyoto on Friday. They have about 20 branches around Japan now, with the main store in Tokyo's Shinjuku said to be the largest camera store in Japan. They have a branch in Osaka 45 minutes away by train (which I mentioned five years ago in an early post on my blog), but mentally it feels much further away, so it's wonderful for me that they have a branch in Kyoto. It's in the building immediately north of Kyoto Tower, which itself is just north of Kyoto Station, the heart of Kyoto.

The new store is absolutely huge. I went on the evening of the grand opening last Friday, and was stunned by the breadth and depth of what they carry. Got to play with a $13,500 Nikkor 600mm f/4 monster prime they had sitting out mounted to a D700 on a tripod, and a Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 as well. I probably won't buy lenses here (even with the dollar so weak, they're somehow much cheaper in The States; the same $13.5k lens sells in The States for more than $3,000 less), but it'll be great for accessories like bags or lighting gear.

The nine-story building (seven above ground, two below) has everything from a supermarket in the basement to upscale eating, massage, clothes, etc. in the upper floors. (Yodobashi Camera, per sa, is only four of the floors, but it all feels connected.) There's a huge toy section that will certainly be Anthony's (want-to-) go-to spot. In the upper floors there's also a BørneLund (store with expensive European toys), though without the fun play zone that the store on Kawaramachi used to have.

Oddly, in the camera section there was a long cooler full of photographic film, as if it were still the 20th century, and enlargers and developer chemicals and stuff. It's difficult to believe that there's enough market to include this in a new store built from scratch, but there apparently still is. I suppose it might seem quaint to some, but just seems yucky to me. I have nice memories of my time in a darkroom doing my own film, but I have no wish whatsoever to repeat it.

Anyway, happy day for Kyoto camera geeks!