This is a nice area at any time of year, but especially so in the autumn and spring when you have either fall leaves or cherry blossoms to look at. The empty patch you see on the left of the photo is the corner of the rock garden, by the way. They don’t rake it as often as the ones in Kyoto, so it often looks like a mess, but you know… still a rock garden.
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There is something special about these stone lanterns. I love the look of them. The specific kind photoed below is Oribe-dōrō[^1]. It is said to have been designed by Furuta Shuigenari, often called Furuta Oribe, a retainer of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi[^2] and student of Sen no Rikyu[^3], who became known as the top tea master in the country after his teacher’s death.
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Today’s photo is another Shirakawa shot. A farmer working one of his many fields.
This is the same guy who I snapped from overhead while on the mountain that overlooks the town.
Shirakawa is such a nice, peaceful place. I really need to get back there sometime.
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Today’s photo is a building with a face. Does it look like a smile to you?
I suppose it could just as well be frowning, or even just chilling out and not making any expression at all. It’s a face, at any rate.
You see faces in the strangest places when you look for them. There are entire websites dedicated to the faces people find in ordinary everyday objects. Here’s the first google result I get.
There is even a wikipedia entry for it. Hidden Faces.
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Today’s photo is a pleasant scene from a rice field with the multi-colored light from the sunset poking through and highlighting the clouds nicely.
If you look closely, you can see a bunch of people walking in the photo. Towards evening, many drive to the rice fields just in order to take relaxing walks through them. I’m sure this amuses the farmers to no end.
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Today’s photo is a nice sunset I caught a while ago.
Sunsets always look better in HDR. I’ll repost a few other older sunset photos below.
Long time visitors will notice a few new links below the photo. I have gotten a number of requests to purchase prints, so I added it. I tried to keep the price reasonable. It looks like this may be limited to our US visitors, but they are adding more currencies soon. You can also buy postcards and send photos to friends as ecards (free).
My photos are still completely free to download, this is just for those of you who want a print and/or want to help support this site.
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Today’s photo is a group of Buddhas all gathered together trying to look cool.
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Today’s photo is a close-up of a marigold. Marigolds are just as popular in Japan as in the rest of the world, and even go by the same name (マーリゴールド).
I haven’t played with textures in a while, so I added some here. I like how it came out. What do you think?
Be sure to check out yesterday’s post for my HDR slideshow. It’s about 2 minutes long and includes some of my most popular shots.
Goes out in just a few hours (around Noon Japan time; 1am Eastern time) so be sure to sign up quickly if you want it. It’s free 
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Today’s photo is of some interesting clouds over a traditional Japanese home. I haven’t done a black and white in a while, so I went for that here.
The house you see the top of here is to date the only traditional home I’ve seen built from the ground up. Most modern houses are constructed very cheaply; they are shipped out with everything precut and go up in a few weeks to a month. I watch these being built all the time. Last I checked, they are only rated to last about 20 years. By contrast, this traditional house took a full year of daily work to finish. I’m going to assume it will last a little longer. (I think it’s also a safe guess that it cost a lot more)
This is a slideshow I made with some of my more popular photos. It is the first slideshow I’ve made, but I think it turned out pretty good.
I encoded it in 720p, which is considered HD. I’d recommend letting it load (sometimes YouTube loads fast, sometimes slow… Just depends on how busy their servers are at any given moment, I guess. Hope for the best!) and watching it that way. Any lower and it won’t look so hot.
What do you think? Like I said, this is my first real experience making one, so if you have any hints or suggestions please let me know.
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