Kiyomizu-dera Part 2

From part 1 ....

From the fountain, you could either took a hike up a small hill where more shrines were located. Halfway up there was a pagoda. We ventured there but unfortunately, the pagoda was closed for repairs. We then took an alternative route to the main exit, taking us round the base of the verandah of the main building around lakes and shops. I then realised how old the buildings were. The base of the verandah was made purely of wood, and these were huge and sturdy.

Say what? No photographs? But .... but ... but ....The base of the verandah. All wood!Fancy some tea?

There were tea shops along the route to the exit if you fancy some drink …. or even some meal. Since we were on a schedule, we gave these a miss and continue on towards the lakes. A small one but the reflections of the sakura tree made taking photographs just irresistible. And since the crowd were still light, it was an opportunity not to be missed.

Through the exit, it was time to shop. The small shops here sold cute little souvenirs, and I soon found myself spending equivalent to RM500 on these cute little stuffs alone! Not cheap.

I must say that it was a great idea to get here first and enjoy less of the hassle. The place really looked crowded but he time we flagged off out cab for the next destination ….

The first part of the entry here. More photos from this visit on my SmugMug site of Flickr site. Alternatively, click here for a slideshow within this blog. More write-up on the Kyoto trip here.

Kiyomizu-dera Temple

Heading abroad to attend a conference sounded more relaxing that it actually ever was. Not only that the traveling could be a haul, trying to stick to the schedule once you arrived at the destination was another thing. For the Kyoto trip, I actually traveled in late - the lectures were already starting on the morning I touched down in Japan, and I actually missed the last day since my flight was early morning on the Sunday. It couldn't get any tighter than that!

So, I decided to make my escape on one of the morning when the schedule was a bit lax, and I was lucky that the weather was gorgeous that morning. Only one morning, that was the only time I could afford to do the sightseeing, and the rest was all business. And I hooked up with my current and previous bosses for the quick trip. According to the plan, there would be three shrines that we would be dropping by - at least according to my "Top 10" book on Kyoto which I bought before going to Japan.

The first spot - it was well before the place was crowded was the Kiyomizu-dera temple. A big complex housing dozens of shrines, and should you only have only one place to visit here in Kyoto, you could not go wrong with this one!

The main entrance complex "deva" gateMessages for good luckMy two bosses by the entranceWe set off from my boss' hotel near Kyoto Station, and the taxi ride took about 15 minutes. Alighting, we had to walk up a small hill lined by cute little gift shops - they were yet to open on the way into the temple. We quickly shuffled in and snaps some photos by the entrance. And the place was huge.

The entrance took us to the main complex where there was a huge verandah overlooking the city centre, and on this sakura season, the scenery was heavenly ….

Looking down on the fountainOne have to realise that this was a Buddhist temple after all

The main complex also housed a temple with a big Buddha statue. From here, one could just exit or venture further in. This would take you down the valley where the otowa-no-taki was located. This was a fountain with soothing water coming down the hill. Legend has it that it would give calmness to whoever who took a sip and true to the Japanese etiquette, there was a queue to get to the fountain.

More on part 2. You can see the slideshow of this trip here. Alternatively, you could also enjoy the photos on my SmugMug or Flickr sites. The blog entries for the whole Kyoto trip is hosted here.

My Output Flow

It took me a few days to get all the photos from Kyoto sorted out and uploaded to my server, Flickr and Facebook. I was yet to blog about them though. That would be another week. I would need to do a bit of reading for that. Otherwise, I was pretty happy with the snaps. Happy that I stuck with the X100 rather than a bigger camera. The low-light performance form the camera was fantastic especially during the night walk capturing the sakura at the of Gion district.

So, what did I do with the snaps from the camera? I captured jpg on my X100. The on camera processing on a Fuji is excellent and I don't think that I would be able to get any better result tweaking a RAW file, not to mention the time saved. I then uploaded them onto my Mac, ran a program called Photolinker which would geotag the photos as well as keyword insertion. A straightforward but powerful program which I had been using for the past 5 years.

Once that was done, the photos were transferred onto Aperture for sorting and selection, followed by post-editing. Once the colors were tweaked, the files were exported into the final jpg via module called Border FX. This was how the frame was inserted as well as the final resolution of the images as well as the watermarks, both in prints and the metadata. The captions were also inserted before the export within Aperture. As a result, I was able to maintain the same captions no matter which service I uploaded the photographs to.

The first thing I did once the final jpeg were produced was to upload the photos onto my SmugMug server. For this, I used MacDaddy, another simple program which did the job very well. For Flickr, I used Flickery, and Facebook just the plain old web uploaded. No hassle there. This had been my method for the last few years. Simple, but effective. And if I had the time, I could breeze through all the photos within a few hours. But not this time. Work was in the way.

Notice Board!

One of the things I picked up during my travel to Kyoto recently was a new notice board for Irfan. Remember that he liked to post up handwritten notices on the door when he was not impressed with something? Now, he has a proper board to write on.

It was written in colourful ink, and completely wipeable using a piece of wet cloth. Perfect! He has yet to put up any notice in anger so far. More entries from my Kyoto trip here.

And the Editing

On my count, I snapped around 800 frames during the four days I was in Kyoto. I decided to only bring the X100, and I think it was the better choice.

Before anybody argue that the level of the snaps won't be of dSLR quality, you'd better think again. The jpg coming out of the camera were things of beauty, and combined that with the size of the body, it made for a great little travel camera.

Good thing that I brought the charger along since I had to charge the batteries twice. Reaching home, there was the little matter of sifting through the whole collection and doing some post-editing. I only managed to rummage through half of them so far. I've already geotagged and added the keywords onto the metadata. Next would be the grading and selecting which ones should be picked for post-editing, the actual editing itself, captioning then exporting into jpg with watermarking. Then came the uploading to my SmugMug server and Flickr. And of course at some stage, Facebook.

That would take me to the weekend I thought at the rate I was going. So, for the moment, Happy Editing!