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.

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.)

I had quite the photogenic day on Monday, with a local outing in the morning to see a nearby temple's fall foliage, then a ride into the mountains to see by bicycle some of the places seen during the weekend's "First Taste of Kyoto’s Fall-Foliage Season, 2017 Edition" post.

Today's post is about the bicycle ride (view at Strava).

The photo that opens this post is the entrance path to the Koetsu-ji Temple (光悦寺), which I pass on the edge of town just before entering the mountains and making the climb toward Kyomi Pass. We first saw it on my [...]

This picture is from the same snowy outing almost two years ago that produced the three-part "Kyoto At Night During a Heavy Snow" posts (part 1 - part 2 - part 3). This shot mimics the one that leads Part 2, but this one was taken five hours later (at 4:42am) after the snow had long stopped falling.

Anyway, it's just a random photo to accompany a recommendation for users of Adobe Lightroom to read Victoria Bampton's "Lightroom Catalogs – Top 10 Misunderstandings" article. New users may find some misconceptions cleared up, while veterans will find a good resource to [...]