I visited the super-duper unbelievably amazing Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) today, in the mountains above the Golden Pavilion temple in northwestern Kyoto. It was my first visit since the photoshoot with John and Ai two years ago.

This time I went with Eric, Gigi, and Damien just to practice portraiture. Gigi wore a kimono she bought yesterday.

I can not begin to tell you how wonderful Haradanien is. When the blossoms are at their peak, such as now, it's 100× better than any other garden I know of, anywhere.

金閣寺の近く、原谷苑、は今メチャメチャメチャ美しいです。 行きにくい所ですが、今週はおすすめです。今日は全然満開でした！

I wanted a different kind of shot of Gigi than [...]

One day of rain changes everything with the cherry-blossom petals. It was lovely yesterday with trees full of blossoms, but today's rain knocked many of them off.

A few days ago, the area seen above looked like this:

Not all areas/trees are affected the same... I think it depends strongly on where each specific tree is in its blooming cycle. Another cherry tree not far away seems unaffected by the rain...

Some varieties of cherry haven't even started to bloom yet, so there's still much awaiting those arriving in Kyoto today (such as Gigi and Eric; Gigi arrived today to [...]

After a day of uneventful flying, we've ended our month-long RV trip across the US and now we're back in Kyoto.

ただいま！京都に戻りました。

Now comes the daunting task of unpacking, processing my photos, checking a month's worth of email, dealing with a month's worth of blog comments about my plugins, and doing my US taxes. If I can complete all this, I'll need a vacation!

(Recent posts have been filled with fall colors, so for some balance, I'm dipping into my cherry-blossom archives)

For the last few years I've had a Synology DS1511+ NAS unit... an always-on "network drive" that sits in a closet at home that I can access on my home network from all my computers at home. I use it for local Time Machine backup, as well as a local CrashPlan repository for various backups. (I also use CrashPlan to keep backups offsite.)

The Synology unit has five drive bays, which I initially populated with 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives.

That was a [...]

I'd prepared a few other "off-season spring-blossom" photos that didn't fit into yesterday's post, so I thought I'd just post them today. All but the last two are from April 2013.

This was from the same trip that produced a wonderful bonanza of pictures that I've barely scratched the surface of.

The last few are from the amazing Haradanien Garden (原谷苑), which I've posted about at length in the past starting here.

I haven't done all that much blossom photography over the last two years, but I did snap this shot of the late-April blossoms on our recent trip to [...]