Looking over photos from the Ikebana show I mentioned yesterday, I came across this shot with not a single thing in focus, but somehow I really like its mood. The closest edge is the least out of focus, but everything being out of focus makes the whole thing seem dreamy. I tend to be partial to the "sliver of focus" effect (as seen here, here, here, and here), but this takes it even further by having the "in focus" part not even in focus. It's almost like a painting.

This has only a little post processing, in Lightroom. I set [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I've got enough backlog of photos I want to share to fill a year's worth of posts, and my running post rate for the last few years is about one post a day, but lately I've just not been interested in writing, so my posts of late have been infrequent. We might, however, get a spike in posts for a while, because today I took a scooter ride into the mountains of northern Nara Prefecture (south of Kyoto, between Kyoto and Osaka), and had a great time, both photographically and personally.

As you can see, there were a bazillion flowers [...]