There's a certain appeal to things which are neat. Nice, round numbers, especially when they fall into a pattern.

There are several reasons why my PADing has fallen off lately. The principal one is my primary lens (the 24-105) being off for a $480 stay in the camera hospital again. I've borrowed the 28-135 from the 300D at work for the 40D with the 300D being reduced to one of its kit lenses. But even then, the issue is that during my photo-every-day phase earlier this year lugging a DSLR around every day got old; the 40D simply isn't built to be an every day camera unless your job is photography. Using the 300D at work at lunch time was OK up to a point, but there's no getting around the fact that I'm shooting in (generally) the worst light of the day. Although I'm not wild about the idea of trying to master two different camera systems (much less spending yet more money on camera gear), I'm seriously looking at the Olympus Pens as a solution to this.

Another far less rational reason is that at the time I took this shot I had a curiously "neat" set of numbers on my summary page, which I didn't want to disrupt by uploading another image. 5 guestbook comments, 500 general comments, 700 images. (Slightly spoilt by a distinctly un-round 39 galleries.) Of course the logical me knows that there's nothing particularly significant about round figures any more than any other ones. But as I said, there's something... primal, for want of a better word... in seeing patterns. In the case of this shot, a pattern which was finally disrupted, just as mine was when I started uploading again. (Not that the coins seem quite so neatly stacked when you're looking down on them with a 50mm prime.)

This was taken with the 430EX flash off camera. A direct fire made the coins too shiny and dulled the background, so I bounced it off the white ceiling in a darkened room.