I’m still in Oregon attending a conference. Today, at about 3 pm, I decided to visit the Portland Japanese Garden. It was an incredible, magical place. All you need to do is aim your camera in a random direction and a beautiful photo would result. That’s what happened over and over. I’ve never been to a more beautiful place. The first 5 photos are from the Japanese Garden, and there final three are from a walk through Washington Park, my second visit to this extraordinary tree-filled wonderland (The Japanese Garden is located in Washington Park).

I took this photo of Mount Hood from an overlook at the Portland Japanese Garden. All of these photos were taken in the late afternoon and early evening.

This is an example of the overwhelming color and spatial beauty you can see at the Japanese Garden.

And here’s another. I left a person in the background, above, to give an idea of the dimensions of the plants. Click on these images to fill up your monitor!

Here’s a photo that I worked hard to get right, because I was really attracted to the visuals. I shot directly down into the pond. You are seeing the sky reflected upward, but you also see leaves on the surface, fish underneath and shadows of trees and me taking the photo.

The colors were dazzling throughout the Garden. Here are a few thumbnails to illustrate more of the many colors.

Many of the spectacular things I saw today were small things. But I equally enjoyed the large things. Check out the size of these trees!

This is a scene I tried to take two days ago from the same overlook in Washington Park, but it was too hazy. You can clearly see Mount St. Helens in today’s version. If you squint, you can almost see snow-capped Mount Ranier.

This trip will end too soon for many reasons (the consumer law conference is excellent too!).

[All photos were taken with a Canon SD1100SI. I made only minor edits, such as cropping and brightness, and these were done on a fantastic free photo library/editing program: Google’s Picasa3].