Spring and Fall are Kyoto's glorious seasons, and although this season's foilage is said to be weak, it seems that I'm getting loads of great pictures every time I go out (and am going out a lot, since it's so nice and there are so many wonderful places close by).

I'd posted many nice photos when I wrote about our summer trip to Ryouanji. Ryouanji (龍安寺 — the Ryouan Temple) is a small temple tucked in near the mountains in the north-west part of Kyoto, near its more famous tourist-spot brother, Kinkakuji (金閣寺 — the Golden Pavilion).

A week ago when the fall colors were in their peak, we went back and were re-astounded at how beautiful it was. My previous post of a wonderful fall scene at Ryouanji is from that trip, and this time I'll show a few more.

We were also astounded at how uncrowded it still was — compare with the madhouse I described in an earlier post about Nanzenji.

Comparison: Summer and Fall at Ryouanji

Here are a few pairs of photos, from roughly the same vantage points....

Many Beautiful Scenes

It was a bit hazy, so the lighting was weak, but just look at the range of colors above these steps. A small tour group of mostly elderly ladies had just passed us.

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At the mini shrine on the island in the middle of the lake

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Fumie & Anthony looking through a gateway to some spectacular colors. (My previous post showed the view through the gate). Note the pattern in the gravel path leading up to the gate? The criss-cross pattern is made by the gravel having been wetted down. I'd love to see how they did it so perfectly neatly. It's a suburb effect.

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Anthony at the gateway

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Fumie & Anthony at another type of gate, on the other side of the lake

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Above the path leading out

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Perhaps I'm easily self-impressed, but there are so many shots I like that I can hardly contain myself. Also, don't miss the summer version as well.

Next up: climbing Mt. Daimonji in eastern Kyoto.

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It's fall in Kyoto and that means lots of little trips to see the magnificent foliage. Anthony and I took a long walk last week with Katsunori Shimada, my good friend of 10+ years. We went to the Kyoto Biwako Canal Museum (about the canal built in the 1880s that brought water and Japan's first electricity to Kyoto), then up the Kyoto Incline and into the mountains and temples and paths back behind it. (Five pages of pictures here.)

Our day was mostly uncrowded until during our return we descended from the mountains into the rear corner of Nanzenji (南禅寺 — the Nanzen Temple). There, it was an absolute mad house of tourists jockeying for position to take photos of the stunning foliage. I live pretty close, and so had known for some time by the mind-numbing traffic what to expect, which is why Nanzenji was a path to get home and not our actual destination. The photo at right (of part of the aqueduct bridge, lengthwise) shows some of the crowd even at this remote corner of the temple area. Still, Shimada-san was able to take the photo above, which I think is just fantastic. It'd make a wonderful computer desktop background.

This temple in the mountains behind the Kyoto Incline was just as beautiful as Nanzenji, but wonderfully uncrowded.

The only way to travel! The paths through the mountains in this area are fairly easy, and even Anthony could walk most of the way (what a trooper!) Toward the end, I carried him on my shoulders for a while, and then he got a special treat: a piggyback ride from Shimada-san.

Adobe's Photoshop is one of the most amazing pieces of software ever written, and I aspire to learn at least one percent of its functionality.

I've gotten pretty good at being able to touch up a photo to remove unwanted items, as with this photo shown at the end of my previous post (mouseover the phrase “the original” below the photo to see the original version).

The real roadblock with me and Photoshop is that even though I might learn the mechanical functionality, much of that functionality requires artistic skills to put them to good use — skills that I've never had in me. Consider, for example, one of the simplest image-transformation features in Photoshop: the filter.

A Photoshop filter is one which does a certain kind of process to the image, usually making the image look as if it had been created via a specific artistic method (e.g. with colored pencils, watercolors, stained glass, charcoal, etc.). Below is a small crop from this picture — mouseover the buttons below it to view it with various filters applied:

Original   -   Water paper   -   Sponge   -   Rough pastels

mouseover a button to see that filter

The results aren't particularly pleasing when zoomed up full size like that, but if you look at the uncropped picture reduced in size to fit a screen (as with a desktop background), the effects are much more pleasing. Here are links to the full images: Water paper, Sponge, and Rough pastels. (Try the large or massive links on each page.)

Anyway, continuing with filters, the first problem I face is shear numbers: my version of Photoshop has over 100 different filter types: neon glow, smudge stick, plastic wrap, spatter, ocean ripple, chrome, bas relief, mosaic tiles, despeckle, speckle, blur, sharpen, twirl, etc. etc. etc. Half of the problem is just remembering the name of a filter whose effects I like.

As I was composing this post, I thought that gee, there really should be a book about these filters. A split second later I realized that there must already be such a book, and a quick check shows that coincidentally, my publisher just published Photoshop Filter Effects Encyclopedia. I'll surely get a copy.

In any case, the 100+ filter count is only the beginning of the problem. Each filter has various parameters which you can vary (sometimes two or three parameters, but sometimes many more). Some parameters are intuitive, such as “size of mosaic tiles” on the mosaic filter, but many seem opaque to me.

Consider the “Distort / Glass” filter, which has three parameters: distortion, smoothness, and texture (which itself has two sub-parameters and an “invert” checkbox). Here is a smaller crop from the same picture as above, and three applications of the glass filter:

original: duck sitting on a rock	distortion=1, smoothness=1, texture=frosted glass, scale=100%
distortion=5, smoothness=3, texture=frosted glass, scale=100%	distortion=4, smoothness=6, texture=tiny lenses, scale=110%

They're all quite different; I don't see much rhyme nor reason why the parameters act as they do.
And these examples only scratch the surface of this filter.
And there are 100+ filters.
And filters can be combined any number of times, in any number of ways.
And filters are only the smallest fraction (and one of the most simple fractions) of what Photoshop offers.

In playing around with filters, I also made some nice desktop-quality artistic impressions of the following (the location is described in my previous post):

If you're interested, follow the links on this page to see them.

I'm in awe of anyone who really knows Photoshop well. Arthur Clark's observation certainly still stands:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”