Sachi and I returned to Rikugi-en Park recently. We were there last November at about the same time, and each time it’s lovely. I will let the images speak for themselves. First, Sachi leading the way in to the park:

A lovely spot–everyone paused here to take photos of each other against the background.

A nice bridge, with an even nicer view from within the woods:

Closer:

Everywhere the trees were of different colors; Sachi on the bridge, from a different perspective:

The next two photos I liked enough to link larger versions to, if you’d like something larger for your personal use…

Photoshop, I should say, works beautifully in cleaning up images. I recently found out about the “Shadow/Highlight” feature in the “Image” menu, under “Adjustments.” If you have a shot with a mix of bright and dark, something in shadows, a badly exposed shot, that Photoshop move might help make the image a lot prettier, and fast.

To show you how Photoshop helps, here’s the un-retouched version of the above photo:

That’s not even the best example of how the Shadow/Highlight helps, but it’s a hint. If you’ve ever had a photo where some people are in bright sunlight and some are in dark shade, that feature helps immensely. But it also helps in a lot of dark shots to bring out detail, brightness, and color. Most of the shots here don’t use that, but when the original just didn’t cut it, I was still able to get something from the image.

More images from the park tomorrow.