My laptop, where I do all my photo work for the last couple of years, is in the shop, so I'm having to dip back into the old Lightroom catalog on my old desktop machine, where I have photos from the 90s through the end of 2010. I hadn't looked at them in ages, and wow, the quality of my pics from back then is pretty bad, so there's slim pickings for blog posts until I get my laptop back.

But these two pics aren't so bad, relatively speaking. They're "October Cherry" blossoms from an early-autumn (Nov 9th) trip to [...]

You probably can't see the cute little stick bug unless you know what you're looking for....

Continuing in yesterday's vein of revisiting old outings, this one goes back to late in last year's cherry-blossom season where I came across a little stick bug.

He eventually wandered off to a leaf...

A pair of blossom shots, sans bug...

The shot above is similar to this one of a less-bloomed blossom. I tend to try that kind of edge-on shot with this lens (a Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5), with other examples that come to mind including this, this, and this. The one above [...]

Dipping into the several metric tons of pixels that I want to post but have yet to barely even look at myself, a short trip back to late April, to a visit to the Joshoko-ji Temple (常照皇寺, more properly transliterated in English as "Joushoukou-ji") with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin. It was an amazing place, though the harsh sunlight of the hot spring day made for photographic challenges.

I did post just a few shots the day after the trip, in "Pretty As a Peach Blossom", and some time later some shots that happened to be from that outing to [...]

First there was the walk to lunch ("On The Way To Lunch: Eastern-Kyoto Stroll"), then lunch ("Delicious Yuba Lunch at Junsei"), and now the walk home...

We came across an ultra-fluffy yaezakura cherry that comes out late (a variety seen five years ago on my blog in "10 Gallons of Blossoms on a 5-Gallon Branch"). It seemed all the more fluffy set off by the new-growth green of the trees around it...

It was a pleasant day in a pleasant area...

One property we came by had a bunch of trees that seemed to glow in an unearthly way [...]

I had an amazing outing yesterday with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin, to a far-off temple in the mountains of north-west Kyoto. On the way home, we stopped in the "Mountain House" restaurant Yama no Ie Hasegawa (山の家はせがわ) that I wrote about a couple of years ago (here and here). Upon pulling in, we were immediately drawn to a row of blossoming trees that had quite a different vibe from cherry or plum. It turns out that they were peach.

They were on an embankment, so we could view them from above, below, and on the side... it was a [...]