For some time I’ve admired the photos of the Kyoto area posted by Jeffrey Friedl in his blog. In particular, his images of Japanese gardens have a wonderful dreaminess to them.

I was recently reminded that Adelaide has a Japanese garden tucked away in a corner of the southern parklands, less than a kilometer from the centre of the city. The garden was planted out in the mid-1980’s as a sister city project between Adelaide and Himeji, a city of some 500,000 persons in the Kansai region of southern Honshu island.

I visited the garden when it was quite young, and recently went back with camera in hand. It is now some 25 years old and has matured considerably – the garden, not the camera, that is!

The excuse was to try out a brand new lens – the Pentax FA77 F1.8 Limited – one of the royalty of Pentax’s lens line-up.

So, over to the photos.

To Learn More

Entry to the garden is free and it is open daily.  A brochure for the garden can be found here.  The garden is only a fifteen minute walk from the city centre, and is worth a visit. Step inside for a moment of tranquility and allow the hustle and bustle of a busy city to quickly fade away.

Jeffrey Friedl is an American now living in Kyoto, Japan.  This is the link to his blog.  A computer programmer/developer, he has developed numerous plug-ins for the Adobe Lightroom photo management app in his spare time, which is how I stumbled on his site.

Jeffrey regularly visits the temple gardens around Kyoto, and is fond of shallow depth of field images.  His magic weapon is a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 lens which imparts a delightful softness to the out of focus areas.