Kawabata Street in Fukuoka Japan

This photo was taken down at Kawabata Street in the downtown city part of Fukuoka Japan. It's near Canal City and the Kushida Shrine where they were having the Shichi-Go-San ceremony. This is a celebration of the growth and well-being of young children. So what happens is parents will dress their three, five and seven year old kids up in little traditional Japanese outfits and take their pictures near the shrines. It was cool. 

The Kawabata Street itself is a strip of all different kinds of shops under this dome roof. If you're into checking out some Japanese stores and culture this is the place to go.

Taking a photo of this place was pretty straight forward. After looking at photography so much you start to realize right away that there is often really only a couple good ways to take a photo of a location. With this one it just meant standing in the middle with my wide angle lens pointing up and shooting. I shot this HDR handheld then combined the photos in Photomatix to align the separate shots and create a tonemapping between the different exposures. And then I did all the rest in Lightroom and Photoshop.