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.

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.

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.

Here's a desktop-background version with framing I like better:

That was the last photo I took on Saturday. Sort of in keeping with the timeline nature of my recent "was a busy November!" post, I'll show my first photo from the day, taken from a bridge after a hurried stop and fighting to cross traffic to get to the appropriate side of the bridge in time:

This was 2½ hours earlier (and 1.6km south) from the intense rainbow that I posted the other day.

Continued here...

November was a busy month for photo outings for me here in Kyoto. I took 8,954 photos during the month, though perhaps 1,500 of those were in the pursuit of wigglegrams. Still, that leaves about 7,500 to wade through, a task I will probably never complete.

Here's one photo from each place I went with the camera during the month, in chronological order. The "nearby photos" link under each photo brings you to other photos taken in the same area, perhaps on the same outing as the photo in question, or from other outings throughout the seasons...

I'm going to [...]