Splash! Finding the Art

Last night I was preparing the photos I took recently at the Portland Japanese Garden, continuing my posts about the 2014 Garden Bloggers Fling. I wasn't with the group on what should have been the second day of the touring, but my wife and I visited a few of the destinations from the itinerary anyway -- the Japanese Garden seemed like a nice place to spend a couple of hours on this hot morning.

We coincidentally arrived at the Japanese Garden a bit after the bloggers did. We saw some of them in the garden but were several minutes behind most of the group, and we stayed here about 90 minutes -- I only point this out because I may have been in the right place at the right time to snap the photos I'm showing you today. Had I been with the group I might have missed this.

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I'll post about the visit itself soon, but for now you just need to know that most of the Garden is in shade, wonderfully refreshing on a hot day but so very dark for those of us with older, less light-sensitive cameras. It's also situated on a hillside, so there are lots of stairs involved both at the entrance and in the back "Natural Garden".

On one of the stairway paths in the Natural Garden you discover a small fountain: a simple stone basin with just a trickle of water falling into it. As my wife and I approached it, a beam of sunlight managed to fight through the dense tree canopy, spotlighting the center of the pool.

It was just enough light to make the splashing water sparkle and dance, so I moved in with my macro lens and snapped away.

What you see here is pretty enough, but the more I looked at these images last night, the more captivated I became. After playing around with the contrast of the images a bit more to try and recapture the "diamonds on black" that I originally saw, they really started becoming beautiful, especially with some additional cropping:

This is what I love about gardens and nature: there is almost endless beauty and variety found in an area the size of my palm or smaller (the field of view in these shots). Just try to imagine how many palm-sized areas of wonder this five-acre garden (or any garden or natural area) contains!

My mind reels.


This is why I always look closely when in a garden.

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