Japanese garden
Visited the Japanese garden last Sunday for a hanami (花見) and thought to share the photos that I made that day.
While it luckily didn’t rain, unfortunately next to the cold weather it was rather overcast with thick cloud cover which the sun could barely penetrate.
Would have preferred sunny weather with a spotless deep blue sky for such a day out.
Reputedly the largest of its kind in Europe, the Japanese garden in Hasselt sports a ceremonial house, a tea house, a waterfall, several ponds and of course it is filled with many cherry trees.
Created in cooperation with the city of Itami from the Hyogo prefecture in Japan, the Japanese garden is quite the sight to behold.
Recommend that any fans of Japanese culture or those of you who like seeing such striking garden flora do visit it if they get the opportunity.
Considering I took quite a bit of photos, decided to divide them into two separate posts. This post focuses on snapshots of the Japanese garden while the next one will be filled with photos of the blooming cherry blossoms.
All photos were taken with the Canon 450D, mounted the 15-85mm lens I recently got, equipped with lens hood and polarizing filter.
Took a tripod along but only used it to make the below long exposure time shot of the waterfall, shot freehand the rest of the time. At 1,6 seconds it was the longest exposure time I could manage of the waterfall before it became overexposed.
Although might have been better to use the tripod more as the cloud cover and low ISO did bring exposure times up to 1/60 to 1/40 for many shots, even with IS Image Stabilization, feel should have done more to get sharper results.
Upgraded my Flickr account to Pro, so you can see larger versions of these photos with a higher resolution that the 1024×683 I was limited to before.
The different ponds had many koi swim in them, most were rather large fish and these seemed accustomed to be fed by the visitors as they came quite close whenever anyone approached the shore.
Even though the weather wasn’t terrific there were plenty of visitors, trying to make panoramic shots without people walking into them was challenging.
Next up is a full set of photos of the cherry blossoms or sakura (桜).
Wow, I love it! That’s quite a sight!
Wait for cherry blossoms post! Did you go for yozakura too? (that “yozakura” word reminds me to D.C.)
Thanks for the sharing ^^ I hope that I will can go to Hasselt Japanese garden soon ^^
@Wolfheinrich
Thanks. ^^ Look forward to the photos of the blossoms!
@TaikutsuJoker
Alas no, the garden closes at 6pm.
@Leonia
I can only recommend you do, it’s really worth it! ^^
But best time of year is probably cherry blossom season (which is about over), fall or maybe just a picnic day in summer when it’s not too hot.
Love the koi and the waterfall shots. Such a pretty garden,complete with its own Asian styled structures.
Really makes you feel like your in japan ne?
=)
mmmm love the silky look of the waterfall ^^
i can’t hold my camera still for the life of me so i’m glad i can (generally) live with higher iso settings and speed up the shutter. for figures i get all picky though and must shoot iso 100, but i’m also controlling the light there ^^;
so yeah if you’re getting these sorta results with 1/60 and 1/40, i’m insanely jealous
ps no exif data? ah well, i’m probably weird always wanting to see everyone’s exact shot settings ^^;
@Yi
Thanks.
@Fabrice
Well it does increase my desire to make a trip to Japan.
@meronpan
Well for the waterfall I used my tripod, though without a tripod one could manage such shots too by propping the camera on a nearby wooden fence in front of the waterfall.
Well I resize the photos and add a logo using Photoshop, maybe there’s a setting I can use to have it keep/save the Exif data?