I was perhaps a week or two late and off-peak color; thees things tend to be heavily weather-dependent and extremely difficult to time with any degree of reliability. Worse, when you’ve got to travel many thousand kilometres to get there. But I think few will complain. There’s something fundamentally unnatural about such intensely red leaves, but at the same time something hugely enthralling about watching the seasons change and mark the progression of time; more so for somebody who’s spent a large portion of their lives in the tropics, where the only seasons we have are ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ – often in the same day. If you have to find an ‘ideal’ location to view the leaves in Tokyo, I’d point you to Rikyugien and Nezu – the latter of which is much more intimate and a little less manicured/planned, which gives the place a much more natural feel. Being coupled with an exceptionally good cultural museum funded by the eponymous railway mogul Nezu-san and designed by Kengo Kuma doesn’t do any harm, either. MT
This series was shot with a Canon 100D, 24STM and an X1D-50c and 90mm. Post processing was completed using the techniques in the weekly workflow and PS Workflow III. Learn more about capturing the essence of a location with T1: Travel Photography; we also visit the Nezumuseum in How To See Ep.2: Tokyo.
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Prints from this series are available on request here
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More info on Hasselblad cameras and lenses can be found here.
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Images and content copyright Ming Thein | mingthein.com 2012 onwards. All rights reserved
Ming Thein | Photographer 
Fantastic series; I really enjoyed it. Autumn is one of my favorite parts of life. I’ve really been enjoying your abstract images on Instagram, too.
Thanks Sean.
Images 4 and 5 appear to be identical but for one being slightly darker. I’m surprised
that f5.6 was sufficient to get DOF from water surface to tree tops. How did you decide where to focus?
Oops, they are identical – my bad…
It’s not all critically in focus, but you can’t tell when downsized – and the water isn’t a ‘hard’ target anyway.
especially love pictures 3,4,5 with the koi, beautiful photos
Thanks.
Isn’t nature wonderful. Deciduous trees rule!
Yes – living in the tropics, I really miss seasons…
Brilliant photography, Ming – thanks for sharing it with us 🙂
My pleasure.
Beautiful work, Ming. A lovely post to start my day.
Thank you.
painterly+ just lovely. The koi photos are such a superb mix of colours, golds and purples, in those glassy shapes.
Thanks!
the fish in the tree , Ming , too nice . thanks
Thanks Richard.
good reflections with good réflexions.
Haha, thanks.
Living in beautiful surroundings where the four seasons actually do exist I have a soft spot for autumn colours by the waterside.
You might have been a bit late for the colour peak, but then that gave you more light coming true the branches. I love what you did with this series. The colour depth is amazing. On screen the difference between the two cameras, as someone noticed on you’re Flickr page, is negligible. If I would be ordering a print I think I would be checking which camera was used tough… Are the differences actually noticeable on your prints, or are we talking ‘splitting hairs’ here? Just wondering.
Love the koi swimming true the branches!
Thanks Roel. Remember that what you see on the web is down sampled from both cameras; colours and details are much better on the Hasselblad when viewing full size files (and prints) though – you’re talking 15MB raw files against 100MB…there’s a lot more data in there.
Point taken!
Now, do I need to train my eye to see a difference between the downsized images of both cameras? Or will even the die hard professional only notice a significant quality boost in full size or big enough print?
No, the differences will be in dynamic range and color – aside from that, no way to tell (and it’s supposed to be that way, at least that is the intention of my workflow…to make multiple-camera solutions seem homogenous).