This is an alleyway off of Kawaramachi between Sanjo and Shijo. There is a lot going on here, and the thumbnail doesn’t do it justice. I also jacked the colors up to 11 because the scene seemed to call for it, especially the reds and yellows. Japan can be so cartoony, and to me this little alley shows a little bit of that.
Haven’t done many of these lately…
Here are a few more pics from the shrine I mentioned in yesterday’s post. As you can see, it was a place of pristine natural beauty.
As photographers in Japan soon learn, judicious cropping goes a long way.
And, of course, some leaves:
A few days ago Jeffrey and I went to go photograph Himukai shrine (日向神社) before the autumn leaves all fell. It was a small, unobtrusive and unpretentious shrine tucked into the foothils surrounding Kyoto, and I liked it a lot. Here are just a few pictures from the trip.
(Again I find that no matter how many lenses I take anywhere, the photos I end up using are invariably the ones taken with the Zeiss 100.)
There was a little sub-shrine off to the side with a wonderfully rotting torii, or gate marking off the sacred area. I think we spent more time photographing this than everything else.
These last two photos are meant to be facing each other in a diptych. I arranged them that way in the hopes of bringing them to my photography group, which met today, but Genbo with the flu and some pesky patients at the hospital conspired to prevent that. Guess I’ll have to try again in two months.
I don’t know why, but I just love this picture of Genbo and me.
I’m just starting to go over all the photos I took back in the States, but these two grabbed my eye immediately. They were taken at the SF zoo. Both are, in their way, examples of fortuitous timing. In the first, I managed to catch the flamingos at just the moment when the center one was catching some great sunlight while all the others, somehow, were not.
And here, just the right angle of setting sun manages to make these few leaves and some stray spider silk into (what I think is) a beautiful image. That, and my trusty Nikon 70-200, a huge hunk of glass that photos like this make me glad I persist in carrying around.
It’s very good to be back home. We were away for three weeks, the last two of which was just the kids and me, so a large part of being glad at being home is relief that I am no longer solely responsible for their care, feeding, and entertainment. Even the flight home, which was 11 hours from San Francisco to Narita, a 3 hour layover, then another hour to Osaka, was not nearly as bad as it could have been. They behaved pretty well. Not all of it was the sweetness and light you see here, but it was still fine.
I didn’t get much of a chance to blog, but I do have a bunch of great photos that I will be putting up from now on.
We’re having a very good time of things here in Sausolito/San Francisco/Palo Alto. The first week was the best, when all four of us were here (including for Halloween), but I have managed to keep things from becoming miserable for the remaining three of us after Maki had to go back to Japan for work. Helping me has been many of my extended family, who have flown in from various parts of the US to see my kids (definitely not me!).
Anyway, here are a bunch of pics from the second week of our stay. I unwisely unloaded the first week’s pics onto a friend’s computer, then forgot to get them back before I left their house in Palo Alto. Lucky for me I’m going back there before we leave. These pictures are un-edited in any way. I haven’t even had time to go through and make sure I am selecting the best pic of each series. But, I wanted to get something up here before too much time had passed. Hopefully in a couple days I’ll post some of the best of these individually.
(To view full-screen, first press the Play button in the center, then place the mouse over the slideshow to view the control bar on the bottom, then press the symbol in the lower-right corner.)
