Two weeks ago I visited an ikebana (flower arranging) exhibition and posted some pictures of arrangements done by kids (aged about three to eight). Today I'll follow up with shots of a few of the many (100+?) other arrangements.

I wrote in that post two weeks ago the problems with photography at the event.... the backgrounds, the lighting, the positioning... all were elements that I couldn't control, and all were horrible from a photography point of view.

I'm about as uncultured a clod as you'll find, but even I could tell that the whole concept of an ikebana exhibition seems to go against everything that ikebana seems to be about. Here's a great example:

The light-hearted bicycle thing is not part of your average ikebana display, but the “out of place” here is that this arrangement would be at home in the small garden off a quaint little country cafe, not here naked on a cloth-covered card table bathed in a mixture of fluorescent and incandescent lights, sandwiched between two other arrangements as different from it as can be, yet equally out of place themselves.

Trying to enjoy these arrangements the way ikebana are meant to be experienced is like trying to listen to a fine string quartet in a seedy grunge bar.... while 10 other bands blare 10 other kinds of music at the same time.

I didn't notice this at all when I came to the same exhibition three years ago, so I felt slightly more cultured having noticed the discord this time. I ran into an acquaintance who is rather high up in the ikebana world and mentioned my feelings, and she looked at me as if she had no clue what I was saying. This is likely because she had no clue what I was saying (my Japanese is not always the best), or it might be because I was way off base.

Thinking about it now, it could be that anyone with sense knows that these are meant to be viewed while the mind is in the proper spot appropriate for each piece, or that they're here not to be “enjoyed” at all, but rather, they're gathered all together in one place to demonstrate techniques and trends among the practitioners.

I dunno.

Anyway, I tried to capture what I could, and tended to find the best balance by getting in sort of close...

Here's another pair:

There was an area with a strong Jakartian theme, bringing in some feathers....

My Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 macro couldn't resist the feathers, but with the plane of focus thinner than the thickness of the feather and my inability to use a tripod or brace against anything, it was really difficult to hit focus while just hovering. (Most of my concentration was directed at not touching anything!) The only thing really in focus in the next shot are the stripes toward the left of the frame...

Some arrangements were huge floor displays, difficult to find clear among the teeming crowd...

I particularly liked this one arrangement...

There was a similar piece further down the table...

... but I preferred the first one because it matched the environment I imagined for it better than the second matched the environment I imagined for it. (This, of course, is more of a statement about my imagination than about the relative merits of the two pieces.)

The second piece certainly did have a nice flower, though...

Here's a piece by someone way high up that I liked a lot, but looks like nothing in this wide shot....

But my lens liked the detail... here are two views of the same little area:

It's difficult to tell without context, but the mushrooms were huge for being matsutake, comparable to those I mention in “Feasting Like Indulgent Royalty on Matsutake Mushrooms”. They would have cost hundreds of dollars.

There was another table of “junior” entries, by older kids than those that appeared in the previous post...

The rest of this post is a collection of random one-off shots illustrating some of the other arrangements...