We made it to the Japanese Garden in Portland just after noon. We had lunch and then spent the next four hours photographing Portland’s Japanese Garden. There is no shortage of subject matter there and the question to be answered is how to frame the objects in front of the camera. When photographing a place such is this the photographer is the last in a line of artists. The designers, architects, constructors, gardeners and the maintenance people have all made their art well in advance of the photographer’s arrival. It is our job to do homage and honor these people through our photography and not to muck it up the beauty with some poorly selected compositions.
The Garden was crowded because it was a lovely day and rain was predicted for later in the week. In Portland, you have to take advantage of sunny days because the perma-rain will soon be here. Just about everyone in the Garden had a camera, be it a smartphone, point and shoot or a big bodied DSLR. Everyone was enjoying the beauty around them and felt it necessary to capture the beauty around them. While we were all restricted to the walking paths and the same vantage points, we did not make the same images. Portland’s Japanese Garden clearly demonstrates what one sees, not the device used to capture the image is the most important part of the creative process.
This was a fitting end to Photo Safari XXXII, starting with the wild, rambling and unstructured land of Eastern Oregon and finishing with the perfectly laid out, compact and populated landscape of the Japanese Garden.
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