Portland Japanese Gardens - May Edition
I recently played catch-up (yet again) on Bruce Percy’s recent blog posts. One of the points he emphasized was the importance of returning to the same places again and again and again to photograph. Not only do you gain a sense of intimacy and understanding of the place over time, it also forces you to work harder to create distinctive images and helps build the type of slow growth that is essential to improving one’s photography. Well, if returning to the same key places time and time again is good, Ann and I had more of a good thing as an early start to the Memorial Day weekend.
We headed up to Portland for the day to visit the Portland Japanese Garden, pick up some of the repaired camera gear (though not quite everything and, as we were to find out, one item was not quite repaired . . . ugh), and lunch at Piazza Italia.
We started out doing our counter-clockwise loop, taking it slowly because, as you can see, things were in leaf and in bloom. Ann bought me a macro lens for my birthday, which I’ll eventually use to copy my old 4x5 and other film into digital, and I wanted to at least make a couple of images with it this trip. It didn’t take me long to find an image to do just that.
It’s a moderate telephoto lens as well and, as is the case with telephotos, It was hard to get a wide depth of field, so I had to work to get a focus point that gave a nice image, even though it wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for. Still . . . it gives a real feel for what the Japanese Gardens are like in May!
I revisited the rock formation I’d photographed earlier in the year - this time blanketed with branches in leaf. As usual, the drastic change in form and structure called for a somewhat different composition.
We spent quite a while photographing from the veranda of the Pavilion. Again, the trees in leaf and bloom add splashes of color and life to areas that were barren in the winter images.
We eventually wandered down and around the lower pond, blocked at the bridge by giant sprinklers spraying all around, but eventually looping back around to cross it from the other direction. I didn’t make any images that I felt were successful until the end of the loop. There’s a tree I photographed in the winter, from almost this exact point, where I had the bare branch leading back to the exposed trunk. This time that branch was totally covered in that beautiful red-green color mix of young Japanese Maple leaves, so I had to shift over to the right a bit to hint at the twisted structure in the background.
We then continued the figure-8 loop and headed down to the falls that we’ve photographed so many times before. Given the early season growth and the overcast skies, it gave us new looks at a familiar scene.
It was getting to be late morning so Ann and I were far from being alone. There were three people, two writing in journals and one watercoloring, sitting on the benches right in front of the falls. You’d never tell it from these images though - all I had to do was raise my tripod high enough to clear their heads for the shot!
As we hit the zig-zag wooden boardwalk that first crosses and then runs along the strolling pond garden, I became quite frustrated with photographing the Koi. The overcast skies cast a white sheen on the water that led to poor images. After a few tries and concluding nothing could effectively remove the sheen, I turned my camera off and closed the tripod legs, though keeping them extended, to just enjoy the Koi and being in such a beautiful place.
After wandering to the end of the walkway and sitting by some falls for a bit, I decided to stroll back one more time to check out the Koi. I followed one of my favorite Koi, a yellow one with elegant flowing fins, as it made its way along the walkway. It then turned left to suck something from the edge of the shoreline and, when it entered the shadows, I could see it clearly. I then saw a shiny golden Koi approaching and realized I might have an image, so I powered up the camera as the fish kept moving and immediately made an image before there was nothing. No time to do anything but point, shoot and pray you have an image.
I’ll talk about my next few minutes, and why I hung around for a bit, in another post. But suffice it to say that, despite my thoughts that I wasn’t going to get any Koi photographs that morning, I was wrong.
After awhile, Ann came over to join me and as we looked up and saw the steady flow of people coming down the walkways, wedecided that it was time for us to leave. That, and we were both hungry and wanted to get to lunch as soon as possible!