Mum Lights

We live in the country on our small slice of the world. This means that while there are still houses everywhere, we do have quite a few fields of various crops, some animal pens and some roosters all very near by. Most of the crops are this wonderful purple sweet potato, sugarcane, or mums. They grow mums here and send them up to mainland for sale. The interesting thing about the mums is that they use grow lights on them at night to increase their growth time. My understanding is that this causes them to not only grow faster but also grow straighter and longer (which is apparently ideal for the market in mainland Japan).

Since we live the in the "country" we get to see a lot of the processes involved in all of these different kinds of crops and the mums in particular have this very cool feature (at least to me). On certain nights after 11pm or so, the farmers turn on the grow lights. So you are in pitch blackness and there are fields and fields of lights hanging from wires drapped over all these mums lighting them up. On balmy nights, it is so amazing to see. There isn't a sound but these lights, and it is just serene and beautiful all at once. I always have to stop and admire them on my way home if I am out and the last two times I have seen them, I have tried to put my new camera to work.

This picture is from the first night I tried to capture them. The camera automatically lowers the light intensity but I thought the picture came out well. The lights are very bright and this pictures is definitely muted but it kept the feel for me so that is why I like it. I took a bunch of other pictures last night with the night feature on my camera and while they are more realistic of what it looks like, the feeling was not captured like it was in this one.