Japanese Gardens

A bit of traveling back in time, when I used to travel often to Minneapolis to meet my wife .. The thing that struck me was how cramped your lifestyle becomes if you dont have a car of your own, and the next thing was that Minneapolis is a really green. Lush green describes it the best.
During one of my visits there, went to the Como Zoo and Conservatory. The Zoo itself was pretty good with the Tigers, Orangutans and the Lone Polar Bear providing some good challenges to capture them at their best.
Next to the zoo was the conservatory which has a couple of gardens, the Sunken Garden and the Japanese Gardens.
Japanese Gardens are pretty famous and has its roots in Buddhist and Tao philosophy. It is a place to sit and reflect, to meditate. Usual Japanese Garden objects would be the Waterfall, Pond, Rocks, Plants and Bridges.



The shot shown here was taken from a friends camera, borrowed a new Canon SD300 and he was yet to get his memory card. So was using the one that comes default .. 32MB .. so was taking snaps at low resolution. But was impressed with the Camera. Excellent Colour Quality, above par Sharp images and ease of handling. But there is a major minus, for me personally, that it has only 3X or 4X optical zoom. Else I might even gone ahead and bought it. Still hoping that they release an SD model with 8 - 10 X zoom.
Coming back to the Pic, when I had taken it, I looked at it and was like WOW, because it had captures the Japanese Garden as it actually was. I could see the ripples in the water, standing still, the kind of atmosphere that the garden is supposed to evoke, of stillness, quite and peace, where you can sit back and look inside you.
Another view of the garden below