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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]