Hanami
We went for our annual “hanami” (flower viewing; though mainly cherry blossoms) in Tokyo yesterday, as the season is here proper. Friends and family back home in Europe are lamenting the snow, rain, floods, and generally awful weather… whilst we sit in the cool spring breeze and drink home-made plum wine, and eat strawberries and yoghurt. We’ll miss this place, some day!
Everyone picks a place, and has a picnic. There were a few rowdy children (unfortunately, Westerners, sigh), but aside from that, it was rather peaceful. The elderly couple next to us were playing a game of Go, which I have no idea how to play.
The weather wasn’t exactly amazing; it was overcast with generally poor light. We didn’t let that deter us, though.
After falling asleep in the cool breeze, I awoke with a little bit of a headache (blaming the plum wine), and had forgotten I’d left my camera in JPEG mode, and not RAW. All these photos are OOC (out of camera) JPEGs.
I’m not particularly disappointed. I prefer to have RAW, mainly for correcting the white balance. However, the NEX-7 did pretty well and the white balance was rather pleasing.
The park/garden is officially supposed to close at 4pm, but at around 3:50pm, the sun decided to break through a few clouds and people grabbed their cameras and all we could hear were cries of “beautiful” and “great” in between the furious sounds of shutter-snapping.
We joined in. Avoiding the park officials who politely ask people to pack up and leave, we joined groups of people scurrying around to get some shots in the gorgeous light.
Busy is an understatement; but as the park closed, people dispersed and we were greeted with a few pleasantly empty scenes.
A group of elderly Japanese photographers, probably part of a club, were dashing around with more energy than most teenagers. They put us to shame! They weren’t expecting me to be able to converse in Japanese, and we managed to have a little chat whilst looking down the barrels of our lenses.
From the noise of the cameras, you’d have expected Lady GaGa to have just walked through the park in a bikini.
It’s almost too hard to choose which photos to post, but I hope you enjoyed this collection!