Things have been pretty crazy since I moved to the Gunma Prefecture, so I’m not producing podcasts as often as I’d like. However, I have reached for my camera when possible, and today, I thought I’d give you an update. I’m sharing eleven photos from a number of small shoots I’ve done, ranging from July to October, and updating you a little on life in general as well.

Settling in to the new house has been a lot of fun, but also taken longer than I expected. It was nice to rip up the artificial lawn in our back garden in August, although the heat was always going to be against us. We bought 114 10kg bags of stones to replace the lawn, and carted them from the home center across the road in around 10 to 12 journeys, some with and some without the help of my wife, as she had other things to do. On the first day, when I ripped up the turf and did around four runs fetching the stones, I started to feel a little heat-stroke coming on, so decided to call it a day, but the following morning, with lots of help from my wife, we got the back garden finished, with some nice rustic stepping stones among the small, mostly white stones, making our somewhat Japanese themed garden.

My brother and sister-in-law visited us for the first two weeks in October, and spending quality time with them for the first time in eight years was lovely. It started to cool down nicely during their visit as October set in. We took that opportunity to plant a Japanese maple tree in our back garden that will go red in autumn. Still, its leaves had been scorched at the garden center, so I’m not sure we’ll see much good-quality red this year, but the cooler, mostly shaded areas it now lives in should help to provide some pretty leaves next year. I’m looking forward to doing some close-up photographs of the leaves when the time comes.

Another reason I’ve been more busy than usual is that I was selected to join the archery team for the Maebashi City in the Gunma Prefecture games on November 10. So, I have been trying to improve my game in the hope of not shooting an embarrassingly low score and holding the Maebashi team back.

Anyway, the first photograph I wanted to share with you is from July, when we visited Mount Akagi, an andesitic stratovolcano mountain that we see to the North of our new home every day when we open the curtains. This isn’t the mountain itself, but rather the foothills and sea of clouds that we saw from a place that we stopped during our visit.

I’ve obviously converted this to black and white, and enhanced the contrast, but it was a nice surprise to see this sea of clouds on our first visit to the mountain, the presence of which played a significant part in our decision to move to this area.

In August, we visited a friend in Sendai who had lost her husband, another friend of ours, in June. We’ve been friends with this couple since before they got married, and they visited us in England on their honeymoon during our brief stay there between 1997 and 2000. It was a massive shock for us to learn that he’d passed away, but I can’t imagine how difficult it had been for the family he left behind. If you watched to the end of the video I released in September sharing my new studio, you’ll have noticed that I dedicated the first third of my rendition of Debussy’s Clair de Lune to him, and the story behind that had me in tears when we pieced everything together.

I have loved that piece for many years but decided it was time to learn how to play in one day in June. At the time, there was no more reason for me to start my new musical endeavor other than a love of the piece. When we talked with our friend’s daughter during our visit, we heard that they’d played Clair de Lune at our friend’s funeral, as he’d requested, shortly before he passed away. At the same time, I felt an impulse to learn how to play that very same piece. I can’t help but think that he’d swung by my studio on his way out of this world to give me a prod, so as I continue to learn more of Clair de Lune, I keep on dedicating each wonderfully composed note to my friend, who I will miss dearly.

It also turns out that their daughter is a keen photographer, so during our stay, we drove out to Matsushima, a town on the coast close to Sendai. I shared some long-exposure techniques with her, which she seemed to enjoy. This is one of the photos we shot together, showing a line of distant islands off the coast, and some bamboo sticks poking out of the sea.

It was a 60-second exposure to capture the moving clouds and smooth over the sea’s surface. Here is a closeup of the bamboo pole in the bottom-left corner of the previous shot. This was a two-minute exposure, though, as I didn’t have to keep the highlights of the sky under control in this second shot. Otherwise, the settings for both images were the same, at ISO 100 and an aperture of ƒ/14.

After that, the next time I was able to shoot some images was during a visit to Nikko, which is now just an hour’s drive through the mountains that you saw in the first photo today, and I captured some details in one of the many beautiful shrines and temples there.

For this image, I’ve added a vignette to darken the corners and used an elongated circular mask to throw a little more light onto the white dragon gargoyles which I found the most appealing, although the detail across the entire structure is spectacular.

While there, we drove up the mountain to see the Kegon Falls, which I’ve photographed in the same way several times, but I decided to share these photos again in case it’s new to anyone. This was a five-second exposure, which is a little longer than I would usually shoot a waterfall, but I had gotten my 3-stop and 10-stop ND filters stuck together, so I had to use my remaining 6-stop filter for this shot instead of my preferred 3-stop filter.

I also did something that I have done many times at these falls. I made several frames while panning downwards with the flow of the water. The first of the two, on the left below, is slightly sharper, probably because I kept my camera closer to the speed of the water falling. I like that shot for what it is, but the second shot, to the right below, has what looks to me very much like the face of the dragons like the gargoyles in the shrine photo that I shared earlier.

While my brother and sister-in-law were here, we also drove over to the lava fields known as Onioshidashi, on the Gunma prefecture side of the relatively active volcano, Mount Asama. Here is a photo including the plain extending further from the lava field’s edge.

On our second visit to Mount Akagi, we found a beautiful little spot with some great-shaped trees and several Suffolk sheep, which is relatively uncommon for Japan but made for a few nice shots. I actually don’t like this first image as much as the second, but I’ve included this to make a point about the importance of the quality of light that falls on our subjects. There was a lot of patchy cloud on the day we were here, and that gave me the opportunity to shoot this image with full light across the scene.

As well as this image, where the sun was only illuminating the foreground trees and sheep, creating much more contrast, mood, and atmosphere. This second image is by far my favorite of the two.

To end with, here is one last image from Mount Akagi, which is just a warm, friendly scene, of the local people enjoying this beautiful mountain. This is Konuma, or Small Pond, which is one of a number of caldera lakes near the summit of the Akagi Mountain.

OK, so we’ll finish there for this update. I will be back again sooner this time, as I have a few spots that I’m hoping to visit as the autumn color sets in here in the Gunma and neighboring prefectures.

Before we finish I wanted to let you know that we have a few spaces left on my January 2025 Hokkaido Landscape Photography Adventure, if you’d like to join us. You can check availability and jump to the tour page from our main tour page at https://mbp.ac/tours. I hope to see you there.

Show Notes

Check our tour availability here: https://mbp.ac/tours

Music by Martin Bailey

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