Wishing you a peaceful Monday. . .

Sharing another one of my favorite photographs from my trip to Japan. I love the reflected clouds and shadow of the tree, as well as the koi. It's a dreamy dream that touches my soul. Hope this gets your week off to a peaceful start.

Snap! Interesting Japanese Folk, Part 2

I really enjoyed photographing the people in Japan, as well as tourist attractions, architecture, and nature. The bottom row are typical workers. The top row includes people dressed up to work with tourists: a group of Samurai that stopped for ice cream and to take a selfie and someone willing to transport tourists in a rickshaw. Linking up with Helena's Snap! photography meme this week.

Snap! Interesting Japanese Folk, Part 1

When we travel, I try to do more than just take photographs of the standard tourist attractions (although I do take plenty of those shots). I also enjoy taking photographs of interesting people I see. So, I thought I'd share a couple groupings of interesting Japanese folk as part of Helena's Snap! photo meme. I took the first photo at the Inari temple, spied the second pair trying to decide which bus to take in Kyotoa, and the last two at a baseball game. More interesting folk coming next week.

A Visit to the Deer Park (Nara, Japan)

One of the delightful places we visited in Japan was Nara, home of a temple and a large park where the deer are considered sacred. They wander among the tourists (including large groups of Japanese school children).

They are very tame, and they have even been trained to bow if you offer them a deer cracker.

One of the things I did on my vacation was to keep a travel journal, where I wrote about the day's activities and added simple water color drawings and sketches. Here's the page I did about Nara.

I really enjoyed the process of sketching during the trip, and I"ll be sharing more pages, along with photos of some of my favorite places in Japan.

Snap: Japanese Street Hole Covers

While traveling in Japan, the variety of street hole covers caught my eye. I decided to take pictures of them in the hopes of turning them into an entry for Helena's weekly photo meme called "Snap!" that features a visual set of photographs. The first photo was taken in Tokyo on the street where our hotel was located; the second features deer and was taken in Nara, home to a park full of wild, sacred deer (blog post coming sometime this summer).The third was taken near an amazing bamboo forest (blog post coming sometime this summer); and the last was a fairly typical one taken in Kyotoa (but I loved the characters).
Thanks Helena for hosting this meme. It's something that I do think about and have created other sequences for almost every week, even if they didn't make their way to my blog. 

Did I mention I went to Japan?

Yesterday I wrote about how I've been away from my blog as part of the ebb-and-flow of the creative process. But, there are other reasons - like work and kids and travel. Yea for travel!
Paul and I went to Japan for two weeks (one week based in Tokyo and one week based in Kyoto). It was amazing. I will no doubt blog more about the trip over the next few months, but I wanted to share one of my favorite photos, taken in a temple garden in Kyoto.
Have you been anywhere lately?
Got any trips planned for the summer?