Night scenes

Last night I made my first attempt to use a tripod and photograph night scenes.  A tripod has way too many levers and screws and knobs for me to figure out.  But for some reason we had a very old tripod around and Tetsu found an newspaper information blurb announcing that a local tourist site was having an evening three hour open-to-the-public special event.  Armed with the tripod that I still didn't know how to use, I took pictures to my heart's content.

The park we visited is called Tobu World Square and it is full of miniatures of architecture from all over the world.  Last night only the Japanese part of the square was lit and open to the public but it was enough to enjoy sites familiar to Japanese.  On a nice day, one can spend quite a few hours visiting New York, the White House, the Great Wall, Buckingham Palace, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican and the Egyptian pyramids to name just a few places!  This piece of architecture is Japan's Sky Tree that opened in Tokyo in 2011.  It is the tallest tower (not the tallest structure) in the world.  I haven't seen the real thing.

 I love looking at the little miniature people.  I can always imagine some story going on with the figures.

 Everything in the park is scaled to 25th real life size.

 Some shots are unique to Tobu World Square...  A farmhouse with the Sky Tree in the distance.

 Or the Nagoya Castle which is actually located in Nagoya, nowhere near the real Sky Tree.

This is a model of the Todai temple in Nara (which I visited last year, but didn't get to see at night.)

And here is another temple, in Kyoto, which I'll probably never see at night.

There was also a nice rhododendron section that was beautiful to walk through.

But I still liked the miniature towns the best.  Here is Tetsu's finger trying to give you an idea of the scale...

But he had no idea what I was trying to photograph and kept taking his hand away before the shutter closed (on very slow shutter speed) and this resulted in a ghostly image of his hand!  Well, that's an interesting effect!

By 8:00 the park was closing and I had gotten a good lesson on how to use my tripod and camera settings.