Hakone Autumn Train

When I was a kid, I used to play with HO trains. My dad built me this cool track on a diorama with mountains and a small town. I added trees and all sorts of HO scale elements, but it never looked as perfect as what I saw in the magazines.

There were all sorts of hobby magazine for folks trying to recreate some pastoral scene around a railway track. The most memorable part was the photos of real life scenes from relatively rustic places in the US and Europe. I never could make anything remotely close to those photo spreads.

We visited Hakone last Fall, and I was really struck by the gorgeous Autumn colors. In Tokyo, you don't really have these kinds of changes. The leaves fall off quickly or not at all. However, some mountain areas like Hakone have the sort of leaf color I grew up with. This particular shot remindS me of those idyllic images from the model train magazines of my youth.

Coral Up Close

This photo was taken underwater with my old Olympus C700 this year in Okinawa and the macro attachment on my DIV housing.

I like the very clear definition in this photo. The polyps on this coral are rather large, and they stand out very nicely. I can dig up the species name if anyone is interested.

BTW, you can even count the number of tentacles per polyp. The true corals have 6 or a multiple of 6 tentacles.

Bise Point Sunset

I lived for 2 years in the northern part of Okinawa Island, the largest island in the Ryukyu archipelago of Japan. Socially it wasn't an easy life, but I had some wonderful experiences when I was out diving (research) or reef-flat walking (enjoyment!).

Bise point is one of the places I liked the best, as I could spend all afternoon skin diving there in search of shrimp, and later enjoy a gorgeous sunset. One such evening, there was a super low tide coinciding with dusk. It was surreal, with the exposed intertidal zone and orange colors on a hazy day. You can even see Iejima's cone shape in the background.