Happy Sunday! This week, on Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #268, Tina from Travels and Trifles has posed quite a challenging topic – Pick up to 10 of my favorite photos and write about why I chose them.

I was at the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka, Japan yesterday, where I shot this photo. When I imported this photo from my camera’s SD card to Lightroom, I fell in love with this photo at once. I didn’t see it when I took the photo but I saw it when I was editing. “Love Forever,” it says.

I know it’s weird but I feel like I took this photo for a reason because a few hours later, I put 100 Yen and drew a fortune at the Osaka Museum of History. I thought, why not, it’s my birthday. When I translated the fortune, it read, “True love will come.”

Coincidence? Of destiny?

I have come to love this photo more and more in the last few days after making it my laptop background despite the top of Mt. Fuji being hidden behind the clouds. I have last grown cosmos successfully in 2021 and have been trying in 2022 and this year with no success. I don’t know why. I did a direct seeding in 2021, started indoors as well as direct seeded in 2022, and direct seeded this year.

My cosmos are this exact variety. So when I saw this field of cosmos in Kawaguchiko – a resort town near the foot of Mt. Fuji – I fell completely in love. Cosmos are one of my favorite flowers and to see this field of pink, white, and orange cosmos, let’s just say I didn’t want to leave this place.

I love to practice taking portraits, unfortunately, I can never find a subject. My mom doesn’t like closeups. She always wants large backgrounds, tiny person, and straight edges. This young lady took a picture of us in Glasgow, purposefully tilting the phone at 45-degrees, she deleted it at once, hating the skewed picture.

My only willing participants seem to be wild animals.

We were in Nara Park three days ago, which is well-known for its wild deer population. I went crazy that afternoon, taking pictures of every deer within my camera distance and it’s quite a large range since my lens is 18-400 mm. Of all the picture, this is my favorite. This poor old deer is just sitting here, looking off to the distance. I wonder what he’s thinking.

These next two are of the garden variety. As I’m writing this post, it will soon be day 12 of my trip in Japan and one thing I’ve been impressed on this trip has been residential garden. I think I see more by wandering around residential streets than in any temples and museums.

I’ve seen some pretty amazing gardens on this trip like the one in the first photo. Both photos were taken in Kyoto. The first photo is particularly amazing because those plants are growing out containers. Most of the front yards I’ve seen are small and concrete.

Finally, I mentioned this photo being one of my favorites a few days ago. I showed it to my mom and she asked me, “what was there to like about it?” She didn’t like it but why does it matter when I like it. It’s my photo, right?

I like this photo because I love all sunset photos. Sunrise and sunset seem to be the only time of the day when the light isn’t this boring white color but a golden color. With the skies being consistently cloudy throughout my trip so far, it was a welcome change to see a golden sunset.