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.

It's really beautiful, but hard to get a nice picture of because although in real life one [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

I applied to renew my visa to stay in Japan, today. That means that we've been here almost three years now, which on top of the 8 years I spent when I was just out of college, adds up to making me feel old. 🙂

What a difference it is dealing with Japan's version of the INS compared with the American version (now called something I can never remember and thankfully, no longer need to).

When applying for Fumie's green card in 1998-1999 in San Jose, California, we had to go to the INS office numerous times, and it was [...]
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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 [...]