Ajisai Season -In All It's Glory

I took advantage of Hydrangea (Ajisai) Season recently.  It gave me a lot of wonderful opportunities to work on my photography skills.  I've attempted to use the Manual setting on my camera for several months now.  Taking pictures of flowers are fairly easy subjects.  They don't turn around and walk away from you or run by.  The wind is a factor sometimes, but basically, they are gorgeous and stand still.  I'm going to take a portrait photography class this next week.  We will see how I do.  

I had two different opportunities to take pictures of beautiful hydrangea gardens.  This first one was in the Nagoya area, so just a short subway ride away.  

I loved this old, distressed map of the garden.

We met friends there and so I got Ken to join me.

 This next stop was an hour and a half train ride away.  We left in the afternoon because of schedule conflicts, and we also wanted to get the afternoon light which is better than mid day.

My photography friend likes to get down low.  

I tried it and it definitely gave some fun and interesting results.  

 I tried some new angles.  I had fun with these two photos, using my screen while I held the camera down low.  I have yet to perfect my focusing skills doing this.  The effect is fun for something different.  The photo below would've been even better if we would've had blue skies to contrast.

 Another "different" perspective shot.

We stayed until the lights came on and got a few fun photos with them.  We left around 7:30 to go home.  When we got to the subway we eventually discovered that all the trains in the area were cancelled, due to an "accident" on the tracks.  It's a very real problem in Japan.  Many choose suicide by train as the solution to their problems.  It took quite a lot of thinking to get home.  We ended up taking an expensive cab to a station two stops away.  When we arrived there a train was arriving that was two hours late which is unheard of in Japan.  When at another stop, we could tell we were being instructed to move to another more express train.  I ended up taking four different train lines home after the taxi ride, finally arriving at 10:30 pm.  I'm so thankful my friend speaks Japanese!