Visit to Ashikaga Flower Park -1

I have been wanting to visit Ashikaga Flower Park for a long time.

Welcome to ASIKAGA FLOWER PARK | Ashikaga Flower Park
Each year can be roughly divided into eight thematic chapters. Several hundred flowering plants and trees display their attractive hue......

I went in late April to visit the park before the flowers were in full bloom during Golden Week, but it was quite a challenge because the visitors were already more than enough. It was the season of the “Grand Wisteria Festival,” the most popular event of the year at the park.

So, this time, I would like to write about the Ashikaga Flower Park “-1 Daytime shots”.

As soon as you enter the West Gate, which is a high season temporary entrance, you will see the wisteria trellis of the Oh-naga-fuji wisteria.
The Oh-naga-fuji trellis is one of the park’s biggest draws. As you can see, the wisteria trellis is so magnificent that you can’t help but take pictures of it, but in fact, the flowers are still in the process of growing and the best part is yet to come.

There are many different types of wisteria trellises in the park, including Oh-naga-fuji(large & long), Oh-fuji(Large), Shiro-fuji(White), Usubeni-fuji(light red), Kibana-fuji(yellow), etc. Each trellis reaches its peak at a slightly different time, so that no matter when you come from late April to mid-May, you can see some wisteria in its best season.

On this day, the wisteria trellis of the Oh-fuji was at its peak.
Photographs of wisteria flowers inevitably involve looking up from below at the wisteria trellis. Especially on days when the park is crowded with visitors, it is tempting to exclude the shadows of people, so the photos tend to be composed in this way.

It is good to be able to express the beauty and the volume of the flowers, but I have to think this way and that to avoid monotony.

Tunnel of white wisteria. I used a telephoto lens to show the distance between the front and back by including the heads of the visitors, while using compression to increase the density of the white wisteria flowers, which are near their peak.

I wondered whether it would be better to brighten the image to give it a more “white” look, but I decided to go with a natural look that was close to what I saw.

Next, as is often the case, I included the trunk of the tree from which the wisteria trellis is made in the composition to create a sense of “all branches spreading out from here”.

What a vitality the great wisteria tree has!
I tried to add a green front blur hanging down as an image of “vitality”.

By the way, since I arrived there in the afternoon, it was not possible to take pictures in the soft morning light, and I had a hard time dealing with the contrast created by the strong early summer sunlight.

When the camera was turned up a little, the strong light leaking from the top of the wisteria trellis made the color of the wisteria relatively dark. It is quite difficult to get this right.

I tried this on a wisteria trellis of Usubeni-fuji to see if the contrast itself could be used as a subject, but the shallow wisdom of an eternal beginner did not work.

There were also many wisteria trees planted independently in the park without hanging trellises, each with magnificent flowers. It is generally said that light overcast is good for photographing flowers. However, it is also good to see the flowers in full bloom in the sunlight.


Since you can get as close as you like to these trees, you can do something you don’t usually get to do: take a big picture of the wisteria petals.

I was surprised to learn once again that wisteria flowers are quite elaborate in shape.

I took these two photos in the distance at the end of the daytime session.

In fact, my personal goal of the day was to capture the “night view of wisteria flowers lit up + water mirror”. I arrived in the afternoon and entered the park on the assumption that I would stay until evening time, so I walked around the park taking various photos to check the blooming status of wisteria in various locations and to see if there were any locations where I could capture the waterscape.

In conclusion, I thought the “bridge of light red wisteria” in the last photo above was the best place to shoot on that day, so I found a good location and took a short rest waiting for the sunset.

I will continue with the “Evening time” in the next issue.

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