Rice paddy sunset on the Sea of Japan

This shot (click here) at sunset of a rice paddy on a cliff overlooking the ocean was taken on the Noto Peninsula (能登半島）, which is located on the Sea of Japan in the prefecture of  Ishikawa-ken (石川県). Noto is one the most picturesque areas along the western seaboard, rich in variety of coastal and mountain scenery. Its history is also fascinating; for example, the kitamaebune (北前船) trading vessels made frequent use of ports such as Wajima (輪島) as they traveled between the Setonaikai (瀬戸内海) and Ezo (蝦夷), making the region a focus of not only commerce but also cultural exchange. Once of the most famous scenes in the region is the “senmaida” (千枚田) rice paddies. (Click here if you want to see a picture of ”senmaida” in my International University of Japan Japanese landscape photography gallery.)

The scene is in early May, which is suggested by the recently planted rice seedlings just breaking through the surface of the water. The silhouette on the far edge of to the paddy is what the harvested rice is hung on to dry in the fall. It is late in the day while driving between Wajima and Monzen (門前) — probably the best time to be driving along the west coast if you enjoy sunset and silhouette imagery, because scenes like this pop out at you endlessly. It is almost impossible to concentrate on the road; luckily the area is very remote so there is almost no traffic, and you can crawl along and take it all in.

If you roll your cursor over the image, you will see that I took this picture on my Hasselblad with an 80 mm lens. I was kind of rushing when I took this (to keep going and take in other scenery before the sun slipped behind the horizon), so I quickly set up the tripod on the edge of the paddy and hastily framed the shot looking through the finder. The way I focused, however, was not looking through the finder but by stopping the lens down to f22 and aligning the infinity mark on the focusing ring with the aperture mark. This way I could focus on the light and metering the scene properly. I use this focusing technique a lot with broad compositions and when pan-focus is appropriate.

You may be tempted to think I used a filter or played around with the colour after scanning. Not at all. The original slide looks exactly like this. Given the lighting conditions and the haze in the early evening sky, I knew that I could achieve a really saturated colour by under-exposing just a little (or, to look at it from a different point of view, by exposing for the highlights). I did this by spot metering with my hand-held meter on the surface of the rice paddy half-way between the left edge of the frame and where the sun is reflecting on the water. I double-checked my reading on several other areas of the paddy and the sky to make sure everything was within an acceptable range of brightness. If there had been less haze in the sky, there would have been more contrast between the really bright areas and the really dark areas of the scene, and I could not have achieved such even colour and detail. The conditions (for me) were perfect, actually.

It was difficult to leave this spot — it wasn’t just the beautiful view, it was also the croaking of the frogs in the rice paddy, the fresh breeze coming off the ocean and the total feeling of tranquility that made it such a special place. But other parts of the coast further south beckoned, so within 10 minutes the gear was back in the car and I was off again. This is the dilemma I face doing landscape photography in Japan — sometimes I just don’t get enough time to savor it all there on the spot — there is too much to see. Luckily, during this trip to Noto, I was camping on the shore with my brother visiting from Canada. We had several days to relax and take it all in. (It’s in Japanese, but check out this site for further scenes from Noto.)

This entry was posted on February 14th, 2009 and is filed under English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.