Discovering Kyoto’s Wonderful Toji-in Temple on a Tour with NORU

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Basin Above the Garden

at the Toji-in Temple (等持院), Kyoto Japan
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I had a fun outing this morning on a temple tour lead 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.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 26mm — 1/320 sec, f/5, ISO 100 —
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First Stop

Hirano Shrine (平野神社）

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.

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Compact Parking








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Always Impressive

with how many tourists can be crammed into the Golden Pavilion








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Kumiko · Joshua · Sara · Dino · Manseki

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.

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Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — 1/1000 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 —
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Running Commentary









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Sort of Freaky View

of the top of the Golden Pavilion (金閣寺) poking above the trees
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Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 45mm — 1/800 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 —
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Off to the Next Spot

taken while moving at 16 kph (10 mph)

The next stop was the Ryouanji Temple...

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Garden-Viewing Room

Ryouanji Temple (龍安寺）

(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.

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Off to the Next Spot

taken while moving at 8 kph (5 mph)









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Bicycle Parking

Toji-in Temple

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.

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More Running Commentary








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Enjoying the Garden








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Enjoying Tea








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Enjoying Each Other








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Tea House Above the Garden

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.

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Kitchen Roof

pointing out that the littlest rooflet sticking up would be above the kitchen

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...

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Wood and Bamboo

corner of the tea-house veranda floor








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Private Garden

It seesms that the guy in the room at right was the only other person there at the time
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Hallway
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Another two-methods pair, one from a single frame and one combined from multiple frames...

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Room All To Themselves










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Not Quite Alone

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.