I'm finally back in Kyoto.

My blog posts about my transpacific trips are normally simple affairs, such as (for example) this Kyoto-to-Ohio post from 2007, but the return trip from my trip to Ohio this year has been quite the ordeal, covered so far with:

Doh! Got to the Airport a Day Early to Find my Flight Delayed Four Days Finally Got My Return Flight Rescheduled Continuing Saga of My Return to Japan: Flight Canceled Again To No One’s Surprise, United Blames My Non-Weather Cancellations on Weather Halfway Home: Overnighting in San Francisco

The first four posts were of dread [...]

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Here are some more frost patterns from arctic Ohio, following up from the one I posted the other day. It was -10°F (-23°C) with strong biting wind when I took these, by hand, outside in the wind, up hill both ways. According to the image data, I lasted two minutes 10 seconds before I couldn't stand the pain in my fingers any more and gave up: considering that I had heavy insulated gloves, it's a testament to either just how very cold it was, or how very wimpy I am. Probably both.

I tried a variety of processing on these [...]

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Despite having heavy insulated waterproof gloves, I could handle the camera for only three minutes outside in the -10°F (-23°C) deep freeze that Ohio and much of the US had yesterday. It was just too painful for my fingers. The heavy, gusty, biting wind certainly didn't help.

(Today was different; 20°F (-7°C) never felt so warm.)

Continued here...

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I was supposed to be visiting a dear friend in Milwaukee today, but the cold snap hitting most of The States created havoc with the air system and so I'm still at my folks' place in Ohio (where at the moment it's -12°F / -24°C with strong gusty wind). So today between trying to (and failing to) contact the airline to figure out my schedule, I tried shooting the birds out on the back deck again, as I did the other day. It was cold.

I was in all-manual mode today, with both focus and exposure. The Voigtländer 125mm has [...]

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The other day I posted some Goldfinch photos that I took on my folks' back deck. I included that post's lead photo on my Google Plus "Select Blog Photos 2014" photo album, where I put a photo or two from most of my blog posts.

Google Plus has an "Auto Awesome" feature that can automatically do things to copies of your photos if you opt in, and in this case it decided to add the snowfall to a copy of the goldfinch photo. It's a simple snowfall animation that repeats every 4/5th of a second. Simple but nice.

They've since [...]

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