So, the other day, I posted the above photo without a title, soliciting captions. Almost two dozen suggestions later (all of which were kept hidden until after I posted this followup, so as not to influence subsequent suggestions) and the overwhelming theme is "layers" and "strata".

Of course, the wonderful banding of different colors and textures is what prompted me to take the photo in the first place. It took it from my balcony, looking across the little stream next to our place to the path on the other side. I've lived here for four years and never noticed it [...]

I was going to post this with a caption that I had in mind while taking it, but when I asked a friend how he'd caption it, he came up with something on a completely different tack that surprised me. So before I bias you with my caption or his, I thought I'd request others' thoughts, too.

So as not to prejudice later readers, I'll hold all comments in moderation for a day or so.

UPDATE: subbmitted suggestions are now showing below -- Thanks! -- and my followup post has desktop-background versions of the image, as well as my thoughts [...]

This post – #1,392 on my blog – is by far the longest I've ever endeavored to write, and yet at the same time one of the least fulfilling to present.

Great vistas like the Grand Canyon or an old palace find their magnificence in the wide view, in the sum of their parts, but the gardens around the workshop of the centuries-old Nishimura Stone Lanterns find their magnificence in an attention to detail. A wide view can help present a context for something of interest, but this site is definitely a case where the sum of the parts is [...]

As I mentioned yesterday, the visit to the workshop and gardens of Nishimura Stone Lanterns (a fifth-generation hand stone-carving business) and their back garden was an amazing, overwhelming, mentally draining experience.

I haven't even given my photos a first-pass inspection, but soon after taking the photo above I knew it was emblematic of our time there, and knew that I would post it early.

Here's a photo by Paul Barr of me taking it...

As you can see in Paul's shot, the leaves are resting on a fairly simple square column, with a few adornments at the top, ending with [...]

It was more amazing than I could have possibly imagined. It was overwhelming. I am so exhausted (from it, and from not having slept last night trying to build a plugin for Adobe Lightroom to import face-recognition data from Google's Picasa photo app) that I have not even unloaded my images from the camera.

But Paul, who has never used Lightroom, wanted to give it a try, so I loaded his images and gave him about a minute's instruction, and let him loose. Having been inspired by some of Stéphane Barbery's recent work – such as his Jidai Matsuri shots, [...]