The Artful Engineer

Morioka is a little over 300 miles north of Tokyo. My daughter and I only ended up staying there because we had a one-night gap to fill between our hotel in Tokyo and our hotel in Aomori even further north. So, it was essentially a layover in our shinkansen (bullet train) journey and we spent an afternoon and a morning exploring a little on foot.

We spent most of our time wandering around the ruins of Morioka Castle, which is next to the shrine pictured above. The grounds are now a pretty park, and the first week of November had the leading edge of fall color:

Japanese maples are always beautiful when the color turns:

There were some incredibly gnarled cherry trees which (based on an internet search) look truly spectacular in the spring. It would be worth a return visit just to get this tortured fellow under a canopy of pink blossoms: as it is, he looks like a cross between Atlas and a gnome.

The periphery of the castle had great stonework. This is a little different dry stone construction than I saw in Yorkshire last year. The only thing I am not crazy about in this image is the way that the moss on the large rock is abruptly cut off on the left side. It just doesn’t feel well-balanced. I think it would be better if it petered out (or at least started to peter out) before reaching the edge. Perhaps some aggressive dodging-and-burning would do the trick.

[Well, after finishing this post, I decided that I couldn’t let that last statement stand without trying it. I do think this is better, but your thoughts are welcome:]

I have an image of another section of stonework that makes me sad because it is a better composition than this, but was taken when it was almost dark the evening before and it is not sharp at all—I needed to crank up the ISO more than I did. It is probably barely sharp enough for the resolution that I post images here, but no more than that. Maybe one of the AI-sharpening tools can salvage it. I have never had much luck with those, but who knows?

This last image is interesting to me from a technical standpoint because I had to expose for the sky because it was so bright. The resulting raw image was incredibly dark, so I had to boost the exposure 4.5 stops (~ISO 11000 equivalent!) in Lightroom. Despite the fact that I was carelessly on ISO 500 instead of ISO 64—oops—the camera’s sensor and Lightroom handled it with aplomb: no multiple-image HDR blending required.

I enjoyed our brief stay in Morioka and it deserves more. Next week’s post will be the first of three from Aomori Prefecture, as far north as you can go in Japan without crossing over to Hokkaido.