

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/1600 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Thick Bark
very thick bark
Sorry for the lack of interesting posts lately... I've been going all out working on my Lightroom plugins lately, and seem to have no time for blogging. The plugins are like black holes.... I've got a new one in the works, and the nearer I get toward being able to release it, the more energy I devote toward reaching that goal, sucking energy away from, well, pretty much everything else.
Anyway, today's (uninteresting) post is about a tree I noticed on the grounds of the Kyoto Imperial Palace park, during a family bike ride two weeks ago. It was a fairly large tree, but I neglected to get a shot with something to show scale, so here's the best I happened to have:

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 28 mm — 1/1600 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
The bark was all cracked into sections, like an ice floe breaking up. Except it was clear that this is how it grew. Some of the fissures were two inches deep....

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/800 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 31 mm — 1/320 sec, f/4.5, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
I've no idea what kind of tree it was (and in retrospect, had I had any smarts, I would have taken a picture of its branches / leaves).
Odd.
Looks like pine. We have pine trees in Finland and they all have that nice bark on them. But those pines that we have dont have so big craks…
That bark reminds me of the bark of the Cottonwood tree of the Dakotas that is so favored by woodcarvers. (Only coming from fallen trees, of course) I’ve carved some whimsical birdhouses, etc. from it and it carves easily, almost like soap. It does tend to chip off in flakes if the knife catches it wrong. Jeff, do try to get photos of the leaves/needles, branch structure or something for a better identification. Maybe we’ll hear from Peter.
Peter’s never far away, in fact just back from a brief holiday !
My first thought was, like Teemu’s, that it is a pine, perhaps Pinus thunbergii or P. densiflora but, as Grandma Friedl says, we need more evidence !
Looks like Cedar to me.
In the last photo there seem to be some pine-like leaves at the top left part…Out of focus, maybe, but they do look like pine needles