The Artful Engineer

My last full day in Japan was spent in the city of Kofu in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo, and my daughter was back to work that day so I was on my own. I decided to take a 40-minute bus ride out to Shosenkyo Gorge. I knew that the bus left from bus stand #4 next to the Kofu train station, but after looking at the buses listed on the sign there, I wasn’t confident which bus was mine. So, I went to the information desk and asked. The lady looked it up and told me “bus four”. Hmmm.

“Bus stand four?”

“Bus four, bus stand four.” Ah. Out of the scores of bus routes leaving Kofu, that’s probably the only one where the bus number and the bus stand number happen to match, but fortunately her English was up to the challenge of alleviating my confusion.

Shosenkyo Gorge has high billing online, and it was indeed very nice. There were a few trees getting a jump on fall color, but most were still waiting. I’m never going to turn down a situation where everything is bursting with reds and oranges and yellows, but the advantage of isolated trees being red is that they contrast with their surroundings, as does the tree above.

Because the foliage was so thick, including alongside the road I was walking along, it was difficult to find anything resembling a wide view that worked compositionally. Consequently, almost all of my images were tighter views. The cliffs and rocks were spectacular, but I don’t have many clean views of them. I’m more used to the American desert southwest, where a scene like this would only have a few trees, if any, so this makes a nice change:

This next image is an interesting composition that is almost an inverse of the first image, above. In that image, the red leaves were all in the center; here, they are everywhere else.

Here, the light yellow-green of the foreground tree is framed against the underside of its larger neighbors. Again, these scenes are on the busy side because everything was so densely packed.

Here I managed to find some graphic elements to anchor a composition. There was a lot of contrast which presented some challenges on the post-processing side, but there are a nice collection of shapes and colors and textures.

Here is a tight view along the creek. I had to remove a few plants from of the right side of this image in post-processing to give it this clean of a look. I wouldn’t rate this as wall-worthy, but I like the way the bright edge of the rock echoes the edge of the tree.

For sheer beauty, I think Senga Falls, below, was the highlight of the gorge. The light was changing a lot—which is generally a good thing—and I was trying various compositions, too, but I didn’t end up with every combination of composition and lighting. In the end, I think this was the best overall combination that showed the entire falls. I would probably invest a little more effort in post-processing before putting it on the wall, but it would hold its own there.

There is another view of these falls on the home page this week, too. (After this week, you can find it here.)

Next week is going to be my last post on this trip to Japan. As is my usual practice when wrapping up a trip series, I’ll add a page to the site that lists all the posts in this series (there will be sixteen in total) and put together a gallery, too. I hope you have been enjoying my recap of Japan as much as I have enjoyed making it, but I have more than a dozen posts planned to catch up on other topics before I start the next big series.

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