I went out again to the Kyoto Higashiyama “Hanatoro” Lightup event last night. The word “Hanatoro” is made from the characters for “flower”, “lantern”, and “road”. The event had plenty of them all.

I used a tripod for all my shots, with shutter speeds ranging from half a second up to 30 seconds.

The cherry tree above is perhaps the most famous in Kyoto, although here its branches are still bare. In a couple of weeks it will be breathtaking, although sadly, you won't be able to enjoy it then unless you like loud, drunk, smoking hordes.

The big five-story pagoda is of some random temple, while the tower a mile and a half away in the background is Kyoto Tower, across from Kyoto Station.

Yesterday was a national holiday (vernal equinox) so the crowds were heavier than when I went the other day, but still not too bad. I'm sure they'll get bigger during the weekend. The event ends on Sunday.

A longer exposure helps to melt the people away. This next shot uses a 25-second exposure (the one above is 4 seconds). It's taken from the same spot as the one above, but pointed up the street the other way.

The roads were mostly closed off in the lightup area, but sometimes active roads cut through, so there were traffic guards with flashing vests and glowing batons.

There were lanterns of all types everywhere, but they were so much brighter than most anything else, so it was impossible to get a wide shot of them that showed their detail without turning everything else black.

So, here's a closeup of one of the lanterns. It says “Kyoto Hanatoro”.

There were ikebana (flower arrangements) displays every so often, but they were surrounded at very close range by high-powered lights. This made it fine to look at, but current camera technology lags far behind God's whole state-of-the-art “eye” thing, so the lighting made for horrible photographs of the ikebana, with powerful “hot spots” and fast falloff to darkness. I didn't even try.

The Kiyomizu temple (daytime pics) represented the southern end of the lightup zone. It looked quite nice from outside, and I'm sure it was even better inside, but it was getting late and I was getting cold, so I deferred.

The lanterns in the entire zone were turned out at 9:30, after which the crowds quickly dissipated.

I ended up staying out for another hour or so, until both of my camera batteries were out. I got only about 350 pictures between the two batteries, which is far less than I normally get from just one. I'm sure it's because I had the “image review” feature turned on, via which each photo shows up on the camera's LCD screen just after I take it. I normally have that turned off, but when I do long exposures with the tripod, I turn it on so I can judge whether the results are even close to okay.

(Normally I'd write more about the event and augment that with more links, but I've got a pounding headache this evening, so today's post is a bit short on details.)