I had a fun outing this morning on a temple tour led by Joshua Levine, who wanted to lead a test tour in preparation for offering tours by bicycle as part of his “cycle cafe” NORU, scheduled to open near the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine at the end of the month.

Unlike the cafe whose target demographic is cyclists, the tours merely use bicycle as a means to move around freely, so they're cute highly-adjustable easy-to-ride little bikes. Riders ranged from 153cm to 192cm (5'0 ~ 6'2) and we all had a great fit. The bikes were surprisingly easy to ride.

The test subjects consisted of some cycling friends (Kumiko, Manseki, Michael who had to leave before this photo was taken, and me), and two non-cycling acquaintances of Joshua visiting from Switzerland, Sara and Dino. They fit the demographic for this kind of tour, and if their reaction is any indication, it will be a great success.

The next stop was the Ryouanji Temple...

(The sort of yellowish-green tone to the back room screams “fluorescent-light white-balance problem” to my gut, but it was actually that way in real life, green flooding in from the overhanging trees out the door seen in the background.)

The temple's grounds are gorgeous in the autumn, gorgeous in the spring, really just quite nice any time. But it's most famous for its Zen rock garden. It seems that I've never posted specifically about it, which I find hard to believe, but all I can find are one-off pictures of it, here, here, and here. Perhaps it's telling that all three are provided as desktop backgrounds.

The next spot, the Toji-in Temple (等持院), was new to me and by far the highlight of the trip. Unlike the Golden Pavilion which was mad-house crowded, and Ryouanji which was normal crowded, Toji-in was almost empty, yet the garden was prettier than both.

It as brilliantly sunny, which makes it difficult to get shots that don't feel washed out. I had my polarizer filter (which makes a huge difference) and so it helped, but with many of these shots I had to be sufficiently aggressive with post processing that they start to edge toward an HDRish feel (what I call single-shot HDR). I don't care for HDR, but it's a “lesser of two evils” situation.

The shot that leads this post was created with Lightroom 6's new HDR photomerge feature, combining seven shots that I created in rapidfire with a bracketed-exposure burst (handheld). I just selected them, invoked “Photo > Photo Merge > HDR” and let it do it. It corrected for the slight movement among the shots, and came up with a great result without any further input from me.

On the other hand, the next two highly-similar shots are of the aforementioned “single-shot HDR” variety...

Another two-methods pair, one from a single frame and one combined from multiple frames...

The tour continued on to other places, but I had to bow out early for a prior commitment, so this is where the story ended for me.

I'm surprised that no one seems to make bifocal sunglasses for use in reading a phone or tablet screen. I'd think that this would be a popular product among the technically-savvy over-40 crowd.

I've been trying this pair of bifocal sunglasses for a few weeks, and while they may be great to read a book with, they're literally worse than nothing when it comes to reading my iPhone screen because the reading-glasses part is also shaded. The darkness of the screen makes it less readable than the poorness of my eyesight.

My ideal sunglasses would be clear and unpolarized for the reading-glasses part, and strongly shaded (and unpolarized) for the main part. (I don't care for polarized sunglasses when cycling because the road close up looks different for each eye, and it makes me a bit queasy; for scooter or driving, polarized is nice.)

In searching both US and Japanese websites, I found one pair like this for pilots, but the shape/style wouldn't be appropriate for cycling. Otherwise absolutely nothing.

Anyone know of such a product?

After including the above photo on “Thoughts on the Venus/Laowa 60mm f/2.8 Super-Macro Lens” in February, it was pointed out to me that the coin includes some visible security features that I'd never noticed.

At the bottom of the zero in the middle, the lower-most horizontal line is flanked on each side by a letter “P”...

This shot was taken with an 8:1 macro setup that falls into the “stupid tricks” category, using extension tubes and a teleconverter. The accumulated chromatic aberration turns the cold monochromatic metal into a squishy field of splotchy color. But it was fun to try.

The other digits have two letters each as well: the other zero has “O” and “N”, and the five has “N” and “I”...

Together they spell “Nippon”, which is one way to write “Japan” in roman letters.

Then you have the hatchmarks that fill the two zeros. Depending on the angle of view and the angle of light, you might get just hatchmarks filling everything....

... or you might get proper zeros with a center...

... or you might get the phrase “500円” written top to bottom....

The rear of the coin also has some of these kind of things, but they're much more difficult to see there.

I'd like to try taking these photos again more carefully, but I'll wait until I get a 500-yen coin in better shape than what I could find around the house the day I took these.

最近の記事はサイクリングと撮影ソフトばかりので、やっと僕の基本に一雄戻ります。

I've been posting mostly cycling and Lightroom stuff lately, so time to return a bit to my roots with something Kyoto...

Last November I took a tour of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, and at the time posted “A Few Photos From The Start of a Visit to the Kyoto Imperial Palace”, but got sidetracked, as I often do, before posting more. So today I'm picking up from there with a few architectural shots....

Let's start with a simple wigglegram of the courtyard that ended the previous post...

Looking through, the columns and doors on the wall on the right are pretty...

Looking straight through to the opposite entrance, I waited quite a while in hopes of a shot with no one present, but this was the best I could come up with....

Here's a look at the same roof seen in the previous post, but at different apertures...

The shots were done handheld, so there's a slight change of perspective among them that I find unsettling, but perhaps it somehow gives a sense of 3D?

This impromptu depth-of-field comparison joins half a dozen others I've done in the past, with a bridge railing, tea and sweets, cherry blossoms, bamboo, tiny mushrooms, and moss.

And finally something a little softer than all these architectural details...

These are, of course, the ladies from “A Wigglegram of Three Lovely Ladies in Kimono at the Kyoto Imperial Palace”.

I led my recent post about inaccuracies with consumer GPS devices with the photo above, but I'm repeating it here to tell a different story...

In the photo, taken by a passing hiker at the summit of Mt. Otowa (音羽山) in Kyoto, my fingers are lightly resting on the bike frame. When touching the bike that way as I was posing for the shot, my fingers felt a kind of buzzing vibration sensation, which I thought was odd. The wind was strong, but I didn't think the gusting would hit the bike's resonate frequency or anything.

Later, when moving the bike around I got some pretty nasty shocks, which also seemed odd because I was a long way from the nearest electric outlet. I eventually realized that the smaller the contact between my skin and metal from the bike, the larger the pain. But unlike a shock from, say, static electricity, it was ongoing. I quickly learned to not touch the metal parts of the bike.

The reason is apparent in once sense if you see the view in another direction. Here's looking north toward the city of Otsu:

This view is remarkably similar to this Google Earth view from my article about Strava the other day, except that this photo is worse because of the horribly hazy day, and because of the ugly power-transmission wires.

They led to a tower right at the peak of the mountain. Retreating down the mountain a bit and snapping a photo toward the top, you can see my bike in the lower right...

The lines simply pass over the mountain and do not in any way seem to be required to be there, running up and down the most exposed ridges for no apparent reason other than to destroy the maximum amount of natural beauty when viewed from either side of the mountain. This is a skill that Japan seems to excel at.

Anyway, the mere presence of the lines near the bike was enough to give it a shocking amount of, well, shock. I suppose the flowing electricity creates a magnetic field, which in turn turns partially back to electricity in the presence of metal like the bike frame? I wonder whether my iPhone was getting charged at the same time, as well as my credit cards getting wiped?

I'm not kidding when I say that shocks were painful. I wonder what would happen to someone with metal implanted in their body (bone screws, pacemaker, dental filling, etc.).

Apparently nothing, though. A web search reveals articles about the phenomenon (such as this and this), and apparently it's just an inconvenience. Still, a painful one, so I'll take more care next time. Or maybe I should just switch to a non-metallic bike... a good excuse for a carbon-fiber bike! 🙂