I'm fundamentally a city person. I've lived most of my life in cities of various sizes, and the place I call home now is one of Japan's larger cities.

This shouldn't be taken to mean that I dislike the countryside, though; I spent a year in the countryside of Nagano prefecture when I first came to Japan, and it was an interesting experience.

This is just to introduce this week's post as a kind of postscript to the last two "opportunities" posts; it is a collection of shots from what can only be described as 田舎 in Japanese, their word for countryside (the neutral word, at least : I recently came across the word 僻地 which the dictionary defined as "the backcountry, the sticks". So I don't know if that's meant to be positive or not).

In any case, hope you like these.

Coincidentally, these were all shot with the Sony RX-10, mainly because it was extremely bright on the day and the in-camera HDR function came in very useful, as did the zoom range.

More to come, so keep an eye out and thanks for looking!