I heard from a friend today that the plum blossoms at the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine (北野天満宮) in northern Kyoto are at their best, so I thought I'd revisit my went-too-early visit from two weeks ago, last written about here, with more of the same.... blossoms blossoms blossoms.

I prefer the white ones over the pink, so let's start out with some of those...

I'm always amazed at how a tiny change in perspective or composition can make an otherwise similar photo feel completely different. Maybe it's just me, but this next shot, almost identical to the one that leads this [...]

I'm not sure what's with the bull near the entrance of the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine (北野天満宮), but people come up to rub its snout.... perhaps for good luck, I suppose.

Yesterday's post was about the temple's plum orchard, but there's plenty to see in the free open areas of the shrine. The tree near the bull is the closest to the entrance, so I usually start my visit there.

I actually can't always tell the difference among the blossoms (plum, peach, apricot, and cherry). There might be some peach here, I dunno. Lots of variety...

This shrine allows tripods, quiet [...]

As I mentioned in my previous post, the plum is starting to bloom in Kyoto. One of the famous spots for it is the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine (北野天満宮), which has a large orchard that you can visit for 600 yen (about US$7). It's not worth paying to see the orchard yet, though, because the blossoms are pretty sparse. I got my calendar confused, so paid to go in...

Close ups on individual branches are still fruitful, but you can get plenty of that in the free open area of the shrine. It's when the orchard is brimming with blossoms that [...]

It's still quite early for plum blossoms, but having apparently been quite confused, I went to the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine (北野天満宮) today expecting them to be in their prime. Most trees were still bare, but there were still ample blossoms to be found here and there.

I seem to have bad luck with this temple... my first visit five years ago resulted in a blog post titled "Late to the Party: Plum Blossoms at the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine", where I talk about how past their prime they were.

Then the next year I stopped by in January expecting to find [...]

Since my main computer (a laptop holding my photos for the last two years) is still in the shop, I'm taking random walks through the 90,000 photos in my desktop-computer's Lightroom catalog, dating through the end of 2010. I'm taking the opportunity to delete a lot of cruft, but occasionally run across shots I want to share because they're pretty or interesting or respond well to "weird" processing...

Photos on this post date from 2007 (with a Nikon D200) to 2010 (with a Nikon D700). But, at least, they benefit from 2013-level processing in the name of Lightroom 4 and, [...]