So, unlike yesterday's gloom and rain, today was clear and sunny. The cherry blossoms are not yet near full, and they don't seem to be particularly good this year anyway (we had an extended cold snap just as they were starting to blossom, which seems to have messed them up in varying ways), but nevertheless, I took the tripod and headed out for the last evening of the local cherry-blossom lightup.

Last year I took shots from closer to my place, but this year I wanted to try the long view, from where the canal bends, so I made the [...]

This year's cherry blossom season in Kyoto is turning out quite odd, or, at least it seem so to my limited experience. Last week, matching up how the blossoms were shaping up compared to how they were in the month-long cherry-blossom timelapse I posted last year, it seemed that this year was a couple of days ahead, and indeed, one of the trees outside my window is getting full of blossoms.

But I was out and about quite a bit today, and from what I could tell, most trees were nowhere near as far along. Some trees had no blossoms [...]

So, I've still got my cold, although it's finally starting to get better. Hence, fairly light posts lately, and this one is no exception. It's a collection of photos from the same April 5th stroll last year that produced Cherry-Blossom Full Bloom Hits Kyoto and Cherry-Blossom Joie de Vivre in Kyoto, as well as the "darker-side" post, The Hanami was Nice, But.... It was a fruitful day, so here are a few more pictures that will serve as a Cherry-Blossom Preview.

The area near my place is glorious during cherry-blossom season, but the ugly cinderblock wall often spoiled photos, so [...]

I love playing with the isolation that a thin depth of field offers, and a 340mm lens wide open offers a pretty darn thin depth of field.

I was at the Kamo River for an Anthony school event, and snapped a few pictures of a hedge of long thin branches. The next two shots are of pretty much the same scene from the same location, but the first is focused further away, while in the second the focus point is closer to the lens...

Both are at f/14 which should generally give a fairly deep focus area, but with this [...]

A couple of weeks ago I posted Lightroom Plugin Development: What To Do When a Hobby Becomes Work, a long missive about the weight that Lightroom plugin development has taken on me.... how something that I intrinsically enjoy has become, in part, a chore. I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and encouragement, both online and off.

I've decided to take the route that I speculated I would take, and that many encouraged me to take: Tim Armes' "donationware" model.

(The stack of unanswered email and comments has only grown while I've concentrated on implementing this system, so I've [...]