I mentioned in yesterday's post that the late-afternoon view was quite dynamic from eastern Kyoto's Shogunzuka Overlook, and I wasn't kidding. I'd never seen such a variety of conditions, much less over a mere hour and a half.

The view above is from when we got there an hour or so before sunset, toward Osaka. The air is crisp enough that you can see the picket-fence silhouette of Osaka's skyscrapers 30 miles away, yet somehow hazy enough in areas to be punctuated by colorful sunbeams. It was nice.

Yet, panning toward the right to look northwest instead of southwest, the [...]

I often make the short drive up to the Shogunzuka overlook to catch the sunset or just enjoy the nice view, but it's usually to the public overlook, and only a few times to the actual Shogunzuka gardens next door (500 yen to enter... about $6). I should go more, because it's quite pretty in its own right, and the views are wonderful. Last time I went was about two years ago when my friend Ram was in town. I went today, and though it was quite pretty, you could definitely tell it was two weeks deeper into spring than [...]

My best friend from college, Ram Kulkarni, was in Japan for business, and so stopped by to visit in Kyoto this evening. I saw him previously about a year ago in Tokyo, and prior to that was likely about 11 years ago when he was Best Man at my wedding.

Last time he'd been working at a think tank as an advisor to a former prime minister in Finland, but now he has a much more demanding boss: he's started his own company in Bangalore, India.

I brought him up to the real Shogunzuka Overlook, which I actually entered for [...]

I'd planned to write up a bit about the fun of spot metering, but have run out of time for today.... it seems that I'm extra busy lately. I did take a moment yesterday to run up to Shogunzuka in hopes of catching a nice sunset. It was pretty dull, but through the magic (or mistake, depending on your point of view) of spot metering, some of the photos of it came out okay. [UPDATE: here's the post on spot metering]

I tend to like this kind of silhouette shot at this location, as the nearby photos link shows, including: [...]

As I've been doing lately in hopes of catching a great sunset, I headed up again the other day to the overlook at Shogunzuka, which offers a commanding view of downtown Kyoto.

The sunset was not particularly interesting....

While waiting to see how the sunset would develop, I occupied myself by practicing to track focus on crows as they flew around....

I had a 1.7× teleconverter on my 70-200, and with the resulting big zoom, I knew I could isolate the little bit of color the far-away sky did offer, so I tried to catch a bird in front of [...]