A few random pretty pictures from various outings last year. If you're interested in the context for the shot, or other pictures from the same area, see the "nearby photos" link under for photos and posts from the same location.

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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.

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Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — 1/80 sec, f/4.5, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos Garden-Viewing Room at the Daihouin Temple (妙心寺大法院) Kyoto, Japan Desktop-Background Versions 1280×800  ·  1680×1050  ·  1920×1200  ·  2560×1600  ·  2880×1800 Nikon D4 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — 1/125 sec, f/1.4, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos Green Tea and […]
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I stopped by the Koutouin Temple the other day, in the Daitokuji complex in north-central Kyoto. It wasn't quite peak of its fall-foliage colors, but it was quite. (I stopped by two years ago at a time when it was at the peak of color and it's quite nice then as well.)

One of my personal favorite photos comes from the first time I visited this temple, of a lady in kimono on this path.

Anyway, here's a wigglegram to give you more of a sense of the view...

And for good measure, here's a vertical-background view...

Sort of odd, [...]

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My Friday was almost an exact repeat of my Thursday: a slow morning, a nice lunch, an afternoon of photography with Paul Barr among Kyoto's lovely fall foliage, a few hours of family time, then drinks and snacks and some Lightroom photo processing at the surprisingly-tasty hole-in-the-wall A's Bar near Shijo Kawaramachi.

The only real difference was the location of the photography, this time at the gardens of the Shouzan Resort, which visited two years ago.

First looking at the day's photos with Paul at the bar, we jumped around and picked sort of randomly ones that seemed to be [...]

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