Sakura and the Main Gate of the Heian Shrine
We ran out of milk at lunch time, and in stepping out the front door on the way to the convenience store, for some reason the view struck me in a way I hadn't noticed before. So I got the milk, then went back to take a picture.
Living so close to it, the gate certainly has appeared plenty of times in photos on my blog, including: Two views (snowy and sunny) of the main gate of the Heian Shrine Fire Department Parade, and my new D200 Camera The main gate of the Heian [...]
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Pleasant Sidestreet in Kyoto
We took a meandering drive today to see some blossoms, and then a nice ride up into Kyoto's northern mountains. Some of the areas we visited were so beautiful it just hurt, because I wanted to capture the beauty and I knew there was no way I could. So, instead, I took a few pictures, and just tried to enjoy it.
We drove along waterways for a long time, up the Kamo river, then the Takano River, then across to the Kamo river (the 2nd “Kamo river” being written differently than the first). The whole way was lined with cherry blossoms in [...]
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Easter Evening in Kyoto
After a day of cold drizzle yesterday, today (Easter Sunday) was glorious: sunny, warm, and cherry trees laden with blossoms. The area were I live was crazy-crowded, but I didn't have to endure it much because I was out most of the day.
I attended Easter Mass at 10am, which was full of mixed emotions because when I got there, I found out that the head priest, Fr. Asada, passed away this week. Every time I carried Anthony while going to receive communion, he'd pause to bless Anthony, then pat him on the head with a kindly “good kid.” He'd been sick [...]
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It's not only cherry blossoms that add color to spring in Kyoto. Kawabata Street, which parallels the Kamo River as it slices north-south through the eastern part of Kyoto (kawabata means “riverbank”), is lively with botanical color. There are blossoming trees of some sort or another pretty much its whole length, and also vibrantly green wispy weeping-willow type trees, and on top of that, the hedge that separates the walkway from the road becomes fiery red for a short time in the spring.
The Many Colors of Kawabata Street
It's really beautiful, but hard to get a nice picture of because although in real life one [...]
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I tried some long-exposure shots in the same quaint area of Kyoto — Gion — in which I got some night cherry-blossom shots last week. All the photos last week were hand-held, short-exposure shots, so today, I thought I'd try a followup to the nighttime long-exposure shots from my previous post.
Cobblestone Street and Cherry Blossoms
It was much more crowded now that the blossoms are in full bloom. Pretty much everyone in Japan who owns a camera was there with their camera. But despite the crowd, it was really nice. The only people who didn't have a camera were the geisha and maiko who were walking [...]
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I went out late last night to try a few nighttime long exposures of some cherry blossoms. This was my second attempt at long-exposure shots, the first having been a year ago with some long nighttime shots of the river that runs beside our place. This time I had my Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 (rather than the Nikkor 18-200VR), and also a remote-shutter release with a timer, so I could make exposures longer than the camera's 30-second limit.
Kyoto Biwako Canal by Night
The image above is a 32-second exposure, boosted a further 2.31EV during post processing in Adobe Lightroom (meaning that it's equivalent to an un-boosted exposure of [...]
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As part of the process of renewing my visa to stay in Japan, I had to make an unplanned trip to Hirakata City Hall (about an hour's drive south) to pick up a copy of Fumie's koseki (family registry). On the way back, I came across the Yodogawa Kasen Koen, the Yodogawa River “Rivers Park” in Yawata City (Kyoto Prefecture), a mile-long raised berm in the middle of where three rivers join to create the Yodogawa River (which empties into Osaka Bay twenty miles later, a good mile in width by that point).
The park — the mile-long raised berm — is lined with hundreds of cherry [...]
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The little path by the river next to my place is not heavily traveled, although foot traffic explodes in this whole area during cherry-blossom season, and so these days a fair number of people walk by. In particular, it doesn't hurt that some the cherry trees lining the river are already half in bloom — the ones lining the canal will be much nicer, but they haven't yet come in. (Here's an old photo of the canal lined with cherry trees, where the canal runs in front of our place.)
Because I'm always behind the camera, I don't see how silly I look always running around [...]
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The dinner party I went to yesterday was right in the middle of Gion, Kyoto's traditional area for maiko and geisha.
We ate at a simple okonomiyaki restaurant on the Shirakawa river (the river that runs next to my place, but a kilometer downstream), just off a street whose name translates, literally, to “Cherry-Blossom-Viewing Lane”. The immediate area has a lot of traditional architecture, cobblestone streets, and the river overhung with cherry trees just starting to blossom, so you can imagine the photographic potential.
So can everyone else, which is why I was surprised that it wasn't super crowded. I'm sure that'll change next week as the blossoms [...]
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Continuing with my cherry-blossom pics from last year, here are more from my trip to Daigo Temple last April.
Last year's cherry-blossom season was pretty bad in the sense that the trees didn't all bloom in unison, but each at their own straggly pace. In the picture below, you can see that many of the trees on the right side have yet to bloom.
Outside the Daigo Temple
The area around Daigo Temple was very crowded, yet oddly nice nevertheless. This is in contrast to the ugliness some areas become during cherry-blossom season (the subject of one of my very first blog posts). At Daigo, the crowds [...]
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I mentioned two weeks ago that I'd post some cherry-blossom pictures from last year, as we await this year's season, and so today I begin. To help get me in the mood, I'll start with a picture from my balcony of the trees across the river, and then two from ground level. These were taken on April 7th last year.
I'm not very confident of their color balance — they seem to have a redish tint to me — but the sun was heading down, so perhaps it's deserved.
Looking Down
Looking Across
Looking Up
I like these because they show the fluffy, cloud-like nature [...]
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Yesterday we went to some very old, semi-famous mochi shops in north-west Kyoto, near the Imamiya Shrine. We took the opportunity to walk around the shrine a bit, and in doing so, found a plum (I think) tree just starting to blossom. This was especially surprising because this part of the city is known to be generally colder than the main areas, by a non-trivial amount, so I would have expected it to be later than our area.
In any case, my first blossom-related post is quite a bit earlier this year than last year (April 8th) or the year before (April 7th).
Buds on a (Plum?) [...]
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I know it's not the season for cherry blossoms (except in the Southern Hemisphere?), but I'm finally getting around to processing photos from last spring and ran across two blossom photos that make fantastic desktop backgrounds. They perhaps don't look like much in the small versions shown here, but follow the links to the large sizes for gorgeous, delicious desktop-worthy images.
Here's the first one:
       Widescreen:    1280 × 800   ·  1440 × 900   ·  1680 × 1050   ·  1920 × 1200   ·  2560 × 1600
The 1,600×1,200 size is appropriate for any standard 4×3 desktop (e.g. 1,280 × 960, etc.). A first with this post, I've included widescreen versions in native sizes appropriate for Apple [...]
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Here's a photo which I think captures a lot of Japan:
Cherry Blossoms, a Cemetery, and a Ramen Noodle Joint
I took this near Daigo Temple in Yamashina, Kyoto, Japan, after visiting the temple during cherry-blossom season last month.
The big yellow sign says “Ramen” (as in “noodles”), and is for a shop on a major street that you can't otherwise see in the picture. The thing that looks like a cemetery is a cemetery, although there are no bodies, just monuments and likely some ashes.
As a bonus quintessentially Japanese thing, in the very upper right, you can see some futons hanging over someone's [...]
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This picture doesn't look like much when it's small, but click on it for a larger (1,600 × 1,200) version suitable for what I think is a lovely desktop background. It's from our trip to the Takaragaike Children's Park, mentioned in the previous post.
(click to expand)
UPDATE: more cherry-blossom backgrounds from the same trip.
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Today we went up to the Takaragaike Children's Park, a wonderful playground with lots of fun things for young kids (those older than elementary-school age are not allowed in unless accompanied by someone in elementary school or younger).
It's in a cooler area of Kyoto than we are (they get a fair amount more snow during the winter, for example; as the blog of Nils, who lives up there, will attest). Being cooler, some of their cherry blossoms are peaking and fading a bit later than ours.
Here's a tree right between the “petals fallen” and “leaves grown” state:
(click to expand) [...]
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When a cherry tree starts to give up its petals, it does so in great bursts and flurries. A puff of wind will come along, and every darn petal will spring into the air in a veritable supernova of off-white pink that becomes a localized blizzard as it swirls and dissipates in all directions. Gravity eventually wins, and the ground becomes a thick bed of blossoms sometimes several inches thick.
It's beautiful and mesmerizing, but the most amazing thing about it is that after every petal has been lost to that breeze, the tree remains as heavily laden as ever. It's as if the blossoms for [...]
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It's a lackluster cherry-blossom season this year in that for whatever reason, the trees are not blossoming all at once but each at their own pace. Looking out the living-room window, for example, I see one tree that has been in full bloom for almost a week and the one right next to it just barely starting.
Yet, similar to the popular bumper-sticker adage “a bad day at golf is better than a good day at work”, it's still a pretty darn lovely week. This morning I needed something from the convenience store, and when I stepped out the front door, had my [...]
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As I've said before, Spring and Fall are Kyoto's glorious seasons, and this spring seems to be no exception.
(click to see map)
These times bring out photographers like flys to honey, and in that regard I am obviously no exception. Yesterday on the way to the gym, Katsunori Shimada and I stopped by the outside grounds of a small temple in the Yamashina ward of Kyoto (the Zuishin-in Temple) to see their plum blossoms.
Plum blossoms bloom a bit earlier than the cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms are brilliantly fluffy and white, while plum blossoms are more pink (sometimes a very deep pink), and less [...]
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