This is my 4th Japan trip so far, and first prospect of seeing the highly acclaimed flowers. 1 big difference in this trip is the subtlety in weaving in photo opportunities into the itinerary. I still had to keep it mostly like a family trip, right? :)
Anyhow, roughly, the itinerary covered Hakone, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Nikko, and Tokyo.
I will start off with some pictures from Hakone first.
Hakone
The few items that are must dos in Hakone are: see Mt Fuji; take the myriad mode of transports through the mountain area; enjoy Lake Ashi.
This was taken from the pirate cruise ship that take tourists from 3 ports off the banks of Lake Ashi: Hakone Machi, MotoHakone, and Togendai. At the edge of the hill side is the Tori advertising the Hakone Shrine, within walking distance from MotoHakone-ko. This was taken at 200mm. 1 thing I learned in this trip about landscape photography: tele lens is extremely relevant in big landscape. This is unlike Singapore where it is mostly cityscapes, and what's left for natural landscape is very limited. Tele lens is needed to zoom into the feature of the landscape. I dare say tele lens was used 50% of the time for landscape shots in this trip compared to others.
The original RAW file is in portrait orientation. I did a square crop as the excess foreground (water) and the sky does not contribute to the composition. In this frame, the Tori Gate stood out well against the natural element - the woods.
In post process, the darker portion of the forest was processed in 1 part, while the lighter forest and the sky is process separately, and then blended together. This is to bring out sufficient details and reduce clipping in the sky area. Apart from that, standard unsharp mask was applied to sharpen the image.
That's it for my first entry. More to come on my Japan trip in the following posts.
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