I'm pretty tired today, so just a few simple shots from a trip to Kyoto's Shisendo Temple (詩仙堂) a month ago. These are from the same outing that produced "Portrait Practice Among the Fall Colors".

I can't decide whether I like the shot above or the shot below better, so I'll just put them both.

The focus on both is a small bunch of dainty purple flowers amid some bamboo grass...

I don't know why this was done, but my guess is to provide a form of frost protection for the bulbs, using the plants own leaves wrapped ornamentally.

More portraiture practice with Paul Barr, slightly less impromptu than those portraits we did three weeks ago, but with similar results. These are from the same day last week that he shot me.

In the shots of me that Paul took, some folks liked the last shot but not the first, which is perhaps a little odd because it's the same photo with a different crop. Maybe it's because the tighter crop gets rid of the silly turtleneck. Anyway, here's a tighter crop of the first shot above, but also with a few processing differences...

I don't feel that I [...]

I braved the cold and sleet (and crowds) last night to make my first visit to Kyoto's semi-annual Arashiyama Bamboo Forest Lightup. According to that link, the whole area was having a lightup event, including the famous Togetsukyo bridge seen in last week's "Intense Rainbow Over Arashiyama", but I was able to avoid most of the crowds by scootering into the fringe of the event from the opposite direction from the train stations.

(Of course, once it started, the crowds came to me.)

The cold and sleet weren't the only thing to put me out of my comfort zone... I [...]

More portraiture practice, today for the first time with Paul Barr behind the camera. I did some very impromptu portraiture practice with Paul the other day, but today he tried it with me.

When Paul stopped by, I happened to be wearing a long-sleeve Uniqlo shirt that I'd picked up yesterday so that I had something longsleeve that actually fit. It's cold outside in Kyoto these days, but I didn't want to wear my normal bright yellow winter coat, so grabbed a black leather jacket, and when I realized just how pretentious the combination looked, also grabbed some reading glasses [...]

A couple of years ago I borrowed a friend's little camera with a very fast lens, a Voigtländer Nokton 25mm, which sports a rare f/0.95 aperture. I took a few snaps of some weeds with it as tests, but I didn't care for the electric viewfinder (I like the real optical viewfinder I'm used to), so quickly returned it.

I couldn't load the photos into Lightroom at the time because it couldn't handle the sub-f/1 lens, but I submitted a bug report and somewhere along the way it was fixed, so I could eventually load the images with metadata intact.