In contrast with the last post, yesterday's weather was pretty amazing. I had the entire day off work. Put two and two together and get a day walking around with the Digilux 2 and the X-Pro 1 with both lenses (the 35 and 60). Throw in a spare battery for each and it's still not very heavy.

Sometimes you can walk around for a day and not get anything, either because you're not seeing, or for some other reason. Other days you can get a lot of nice stuff. Yesterday was the latter kind of day. I shot around a hundred shots with the Digilux 2 and got nine or ten keepers (and by which I mean shots I will regularly look at again and again) and a slightly higher hit rate with the X-Pro 1.

The Digilux 2 shots first... a couple of through-the-fence pictures from a local (ish) station.

Temple. 

Lots of blue here. This is where the digilux 2's zoom range came in useful.

Sometimes you have to wait a bit to get the shot you're after. This is one of Nagoya's major temples, and there are always lots of pigeons around (you can buy cheap feed and they'll literally fly into your hands to get it. And onto your head). Now and then they fly en masse here and there, and that's what I was waiting for.

Japan's the kind of place where you can leave a box of wine outside your restaurant as an advertising method and not worry too much about it getting stolen. They could be fake bottles, of course; I didn't check, but they looked pretty authentic.

Great light here, and a bit of tweaking in photoshop makes it even nicer

Negative space

In good weather with reasonable light, the Digilux 2 really does go above and beyond its spec sheet.

Onto the X-Pro 1, a mix of 60mm and 35mm shots

Colour for the sake of colour here

The man's shirt fit the overall scene so well that I just had to get this picture

The chair here stood out so much. I wanted to create the same effect with the picture, so I used some vignetting and the darken/lighten centre effect from Color Efex.

This was just to see if the colours from this camera are strong enough to carry such a minimalistic picture. I find that they are.

This is a small garden near where I work. It yields some nice pictures if you're willing to get bitten by a thousand mosquitoes.

I haven't yet learned how to predict when a colour picture will or will not look good as a b/w conversion, but this one seems to

I call this thing the "stone mushroom" because I don't know its correct name.

Again, this one seemed to work well as a black and white shot also

Similar to the shot with the Digilux (see above), but tweaked with Silver Efex to get an almost deliberately dark look to contrast with the wispy smoke.

Same temple, blatant DOF shot

There are dozens and dozens of temples around Nagoya, some big and some small. It's not hard to find one, even if you're not looking. This next one is a little way out from Nagoya's busiest area.

Once again, I used darken / lighten centre to try and keep the lightest part of the picture in the middle. The focus on this is not quite right, but I like it enough to overlook this.

Just in front of this display is a grate into which people put offerings.

Same temple

On top of all this, when I got back home I noticed that for some reason or other, Nagoya Castle was being illuminated in pink. Couldn't let that slide, so grabbed the X-Pro 1 (for the high ISO) and went for a jog. A lot of photographers around, needless to say. This is not a great shot by any stretch, but for a handheld attempt at 6400 and f1.4 - f2 or thereabouts it's not bad, and photoshop's magic tidies it up quite nicely (apart from the purple edges on the moon, but I can live with that given the tricky circumstances of the shot).

Thanks for looking, feel free to comment!