The Artful Engineer

Sixteen posts on one trip is a lot, but it was a two-week trip, after all, in new places with lots of time to photograph lots of new things. I ended up with a little over 2,500 images and have now published 119 of them on this website. Of these, 102 were taken with my workhorse lens: the Nikkor Z 24-120mm f/4 S. Most of the rest (13) were taken on a single nighttime walk in Tokyo when I left it behind in favor of the Nikkor Z 85mm f/1.8 S. I’m going to have to deliberately do things like that more often, especially in urban settings. When I’m in more of a landscape mode, the pace—usually involving a tripod—is slower, so swapping lenses isn’t a bother. In a place like Tokyo, I will often bring a modest shoulder bag along with a few extra lenses, but the overall pace makes swapping between them feel a lot more inconvenient, especially because the 24-120 is more versatile in that setting than any other lens, so I usually feel like I’ll inevitably just be switching right back. The predictable result is that it gets the lion’s share of the work despite the fact that I enjoy using other lenses. Clearly, I need a plan to change that.

This trip had a wonderful variety of photographic subjects. Tokyo is made for colorful nightscapes, like the one above, but there were so many other things, too, like this creative fabric display:

Japan doesn’t have cathedrals like Europe. Instead, it has temples. These are intriguing from an architectural standpoint, and tight views like this can capture interesting patterns. They also make it easier to avoid random people—of which I was admittedly one—being in the way:

For as well-maintained as the temples were, lesser buildings were often considerably less so. This rusty corrugated building with the overly-complex drainpipe arrangement is fascinating for entirely different reasons than the temple above:

Here is a well-maintained and well-decorated building, but in this case there is a certain sense of futility about it:

And, finally, I can’t imagine seeing this anywhere other than Japan:

Japan was a remarkably fun place to visit, both in general terms and as a photographer. I barely scratched the surface and look forward to visiting again. Lucky for me, my daughter lives there return visits will likely happen.

As is my usual practice when I finish up a series of blog posts on a major trip, I add a page to the website that has the entire sequence of posts in order of publication. You can get to it from the home page or under the “Journeys” menu at the top of every page. (Or, you can click here.) There is also a gallery that has a selection of images from the entire series of posts, plus some others.

I already have a rough outline of what’s coming for the next three months, and with one exception they are all unrelated to each other. After catching up on these, I will probably start a fresh series on my recent trip to London and Rome. I like have a few months to work with the images from a big trip before I start blogging them, anyway, so the timing should work out well for this.

Thank you so much for visiting! If you know anyone interested in photography that might enjoy my blog, I would be grateful if you shared it with them.