Considering that my last blog post was more than five months ago, I guess it's safe to say that for the most part I'm taking a break from blogging. But having recently came across photos from a last-year outing to temples in Shiga, Japan, I thought I'd post a few.

I'm on a visit to my folks in Ohio, and while digging through my photo archives for some pictures for them, I came across a bunch of "abstract art" photos I took on a different trip here five years ago, so this post is a sampling of those.

The somewhat fuzzy ice crystals above were from the same frigid day that produced "Pretty Frost Pattern on a Window" and its followup.

This drill was fruitful fodder for my favorite macro lens, the Voigtländer 125mm/f2.5.

The end of the drill bit appeared here, but the chuck is my favorite, visually.

One reason that I don't blog so much these days is that when I do go out with the camera, the places I visit are so overwhelmingly beautiful that I get choice paralysis in deciding what to work on, and what to write about. I start to work on one set of photos, only to get drawn into a hundred side channels for things I want to share, and in the end I share nothing because nothing finds its way all the way to a blog post.

So with the intent to fight agsinst that, I set out this morning [...]

I had a lovely walk today, with Paul and Akiko, who's in town taking a break from crazy international travels as a professional photographer. I put up a few photos at Strava until I can do a proper blog post.

One bummer from the day is that my camera came unscrewed from its strap, as I apparently didn't tighten it well enough. I first noticed the problem when I saw my Nikon D4 bouncing one way, and the bulk of a $1,000 Cosina Voigtländer Macro APO-Lanthar 125mm F2.5 SL bouncing another way. Oops.

The impact was taken by three screws [...]

I went on short photo walks yesterday afternoon and this morning, at a cluster of temples near my place. It was quit pretty. I'd never been to the small Eisho-in Temple, and went yesterday on the recommendation of Tal (seen on this post) and found it to be exquisite at the height of fall colors.

I went back this morning with Damien, and we had the place all to ourselves.

I'll write more about it all later, but for today just a few representative from both days' ramblings. (You can see the paths I walked on Strava, here and here.)