Late February. It was a little early for the peak of the Japanese plum blossoms this year, but I went to Yushima Tenmangu Shrine with my Lumix S5 in my bag to see the plum festival.
At the Tenmangu Shrine, you can get quite close to the flowers without restraint, so the LUMIX S 20-60mm lens is sufficient. I also took out the PENTAX smc FA 77mm limited lens for the first time in a while, along with the K-mount adapter.
Without further ado, let’s first take a look at the power of the K-mount “Queen of Bokeh” 77mm limited lens, which I haven’t used in a while.
Being able to use the 77mm Limited in its original full-frame angle of view like this is a joy all its own, and it’s a different kind of joy to using it with the PENTAX K-3III.
Since AF couldn’t be used through the mount adapter, I had quite a struggle trying to get the focus right with MF at near-maximum aperture. The focus didn’t always hit exactly where I wanted it to, but the soft bokeh effect made the photo itself come together somehow.
Also, I should have known that this lens is not one that can get very close (minimum shooting distance 0.7m), but I found myself freezing in surprise more than once when I got too close and missed the focus. This is a mistake that can only be made in the Tenmangu plum garden, where you can get as close as you like.
Here are some other shots of the plum garden taken with the 20mm-60mm lens on this day.
I’m not sure if this is the right way to describe a garden with a variety of plum trees, but they were roughly 50% in bloom. Even so, it was the middle of the plum festival, so there were quite a few people there.
Even if 50%, they look really atmospheric when you take a photo with Yushima Tenmangu Shrine in the background.
At Yushima Tenmangu Shrine, I always try to avoid including unsightly buildings in the background of my photos as much as possible, but on this day, a friend of mine whispered something surprising to me.
“No, the historical Yushima Apartment House itself is valuable. If you take a photo of it while it’s still there, you can look back on it in the future and say, ‘Look, in the time of the Yushima Tenmangu Shrine, there was a retro building like this next to it’”;
I thought that was a good point, so I took a photo.
I should have taken a photo from the front of the main shrine… but then I wouldn’t have been able to take a photo of the Japanese apricot blossoms.
I’ve found a new subject/sub-subject for photography, so this is a research topic for the future.
