I went here on 2013-11-26 at about 4pm (always in a rush before sunset!). I was in Tachikawa before that and had to make an executive decision whether to do Mizuho in a rush or sometime in the distant future. I think it was worth it. Also my camera (Panasonic Lumix LX-7) is awesome. The pictures it takes is better than the human eye for night vision. All those pictures of the pond were almost night time already. A disadvantage is that it doesn’t actually take what you see. I could tweak the settings, but I’m not an expert and also the default photos are almost always better anyway.
I screwed up with taking the path leading up the hill because I was trying to take the scene at the beginning of the anime and thought it was facing downhill but it’s actually more facing the side without a view of the path. Partly because of that, I didn’t take enough uphill photos which were the ones mainly used in the anime, but also I went a different way up and only walked downhill on that road. The road is a lot shorter than I thought, with only two curves. I didn’t try to figure out the exact places on the hill beforehand because I thought the path was too generic. However, being only two curves, you always know where it is by the direction of the curve, and most of the scenes use the same curve at lower part of the path because there aren’t as many features at the top.
The tunnel under bridge is my favourite photo. I stumbled upon it because I saw a pond and wanted to explore, not expecting there to be any scenes from the anime. From there a path leads to the top and that’s the reason why I didn’t head up the road.
For the mobile phone tower, it was really hard to find the screenshot for it (I knew it was there from one of the sites I used as a reference). I was looking through every episode and realised that Tomoyo doesn’t appear in most episodes but even then I couldn’t find it. I finally found it (with a bit of help from a reverse image search) in After Story episode 1 where they were trying to find members for their baseball team.
Even though I took my pictures at sunset, I could never get that yellowness that KyoAni does. It could be the season, or it could be the clouds, or an animation effect, or maybe I just missed it. For the fountain, it alternates between small and big around every 5 minutes, but I couldn’t figure out which one they used in the anime.
In the first pair of pictures, it is actually the wrong bridge. There is another one about 100m down the river. I managed to take a wrong turn walking from the station and missed some of the buildings on that road too.
Not many pictures, but I only had an hour and I covered the main parts that I wanted to (the hill and the pond). I really needed more preparation to find the other places, and more time to walk to the other places (it would take several kilometres of wandering).
436 Petabytes 
So how’s Japan? I always wanted to go there. And by the way, how it feels to be in an anime location? Does it make you feel like you are a part of clannad.
At the moment I’m not going anywhere except school and home, so Japan feels the same as anywhere else.
I mentioned it an another post, but being in an anime location doesn’t feel any different for me because the locations are just ordinary houses and parks. However, it’s satisfying to discover new locations. Also rewatching the anime, you get more of a sense of what the city is like rather than just random backgrounds. If an anime themed event is held, it’s more interesting than when the place is normal.