A few days ago in "Kyoto Cherry Blossoms Off to a Cold, Wet Start" I lamented that it was still cold and wet and windy, even though the cherry trees had started to blossom early, and speculated that it might even snow the next day. It didn't, but it's snowing right now, fully doubling the number of days I've seen snow in this part of Kyoto this year.

[Update] A few hours later and the snow has really picked up, falling in big fluffy clumps. It's nothing on the order of magnitude of the snow we saw in Shirakawago in [...]

The weather has been miserable lately -- cold and rainy, with possible snow tomorrow -- but the cherry blossoms have started blooming already, a week earlier than normal. You can see the normal season for the trees near my place in the month-long cherry-blossom time-lapse from a few years ago. It stopped drizzling for a bit late this afternoon, so I went out for a picture.

My main intent this afternoon was to try to get something that highlighted that one tree had absolutely no blossoms yet, while the trees next to it were well on their way. (You can [...]

My fall-foliage photos always seem out of season compared with the rest of the world, Kyoto not getting its color until mid November after much of the Northern Hemisphere's autumn has passed. In line with that, this post features an out-of-season element in an out-of-season photo: cherry blossoms in late November.

Five minutes away from my place, buried back in the mountains of eastern Kyoto, is the small Himukai Shrine, featured in "Thatched Roofs and Colored Canopies" and "Changing Seasons, Changing Lenses" earlier this month. Among the spectacular colors I didn't even notice the lone blooming cherry tree off to [...]

This post continues from my previous post, "Cherry Blossoms in the Rain at the Heian Shrine". Even more so than in that post, a lot of the pictures this time have a sort of distinct (distinctly annoying?) feel, with multiple planes of focus (or the lack there of).

Also, as with some of the photos in last month's "Kyoto 2009 Cherry-Blossom Preview", some this time have had a touch of Lightroom's "negative clarity", which I apparently am enamored with. The shot above, of course, has had a lot of negative clarity applied, to give it a glowing pastel feel. I [...]

Last Tuesday, after Anthony went to school on the bus all by himself, I thought I'd take advantage of the rainy weekday morning (no crowds!) to check out the cherry blossoms in the garden of the Heian Shrine. The most common variety of cherry blossom around here (the pure white yoshino) are almost completely gone, but the Heian Shrine's justly famous garden is full of other varieties that were still pretty much at full bloom.

By the time I started over (the shrine didn't open for an hour and a half after Anthony had gone), the rain had started up [...]