In one sense, photographing an ikebana display can be like shooting fish in a barrel or hunting game in a zoo... everything is sitting right before you just waiting for you to point and click, but on the other hand, having to choose what to photograph -- how to frame it, from what angle... how to expose it, where to focus it, and how thin or thick to set the depth of field -- raises things to a whole new artistic challenge. Offer the same floral arrangement in the same situation to 10 good photographers, and I'd guess you'd come [...]

As I mentioned the other day in "More From the Rice Harvest", I made a quick trip back on Monday to the farming villages that I'd visited the week before to offer prints to the nice farmer lady I'd had the pleasure to chat with.

On the way there, I went through the tiny village with the wind-damaged rice crop seen here. All that rice had now been harvested...

I was shocked at how the color of the spider lilies had changed. Just a week earlier, they were deeply powerful red (as seen here), but now they were starting to [...]

A few more shots from last week's rice-harvest mountain scooter ride. I returned to the area yesterday to give some prints to the nice farmer lady, but the shots in this post are from the original trip last week.

The seed heads were all pointing toward the sun, directly away from the camera, except one small one. It's just as well, as they give me the creeps...

Back to the more traditional gardens and rice, the rows of dried rice were always picturesque...

The small combine, a Yanmar Ee213, runs about US$22,000 new.

I'm not sure why this rice isn't [...]

In yesterday's post I talked about the highlight of a recent scooter trip into the mountains of rural Nara Prefecture, meeting a friendly farmer lady. Prior to meeting her, the highlight was enjoying the scenes of rice harvest, so today's post is few shots from various places prior to meeting her. Most are from the very rural edge of Katano City, Osaka Prefecture, just prior to crossing over the pass to the equally rural edge of Ikoma City, Nara Prefecture. As always, the photos have map links under them.

In the photo above, I was going for the same vibe [...]

As I mentioned yesterday, I went on a scooter ride into the mountains of Ikoma in northern Nara Prefecture. The highlight of the trip was chatting with the lady seen above, at some rice paddies and vegetable fields in the mountains near the border between Osaka and Nara prefectures.

We got to chatting about all kinds of things, including how nice it was out in the country, and what a perfect time it was to see the rice fields, as they're brimming with mature rice waiting to be harvested. She even laughed at my jokes, which is rare among people [...]