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 [...]

As part of the process of renewing my visa to stay in Japan, I had to make an unplanned trip to Hirakata City Hall (about an hour's drive south) to pick up a copy of Fumie's koseki (family registry). On the way back, I came across the Yodogawa Kasen Koen, the Yodogawa River "Rivers Park" in Yawata City (Kyoto Prefecture), a mile-long raised berm in the middle of where three rivers join to create the Yodogawa River (which empties into Osaka Bay twenty miles later, a good mile in width by that point).

The park -- the mile-long raised berm [...]

The dinner party I went to yesterday was right in the middle of Gion, Kyoto's traditional area for maiko and geisha.

We ate at a simple okonomiyaki restaurant on the Shirakawa river (the river that runs next to my place, but a kilometer downstream), just off a street whose name translates, literally, to "Cherry-Blossom-Viewing Lane". The immediate area has a lot of traditional architecture, cobblestone streets, and the river overhung with cherry trees just starting to blossom, so you can imagine the photographic potential.

So can everyone else, which is why I was surprised that it wasn't super [...]

Continuing with my cherry-blossom pics from last year, here are more from my trip to Daigo Temple last April.

Last year's cherry-blossom season was pretty bad in the sense that the trees didn't all bloom in unison, but each at their own straggly pace. In the picture below, you can see that many of the trees on the right side have yet to bloom.

The area around Daigo Temple was very crowded, yet oddly nice nevertheless. This is in contrast to the ugliness some areas become during cherry-blossom season (the subject of one of my very first blog posts). At [...]

I mentioned two weeks ago that I'd post some cherry-blossom pictures from last year, as we await this year's season, and so today I begin. To help get me in the mood, I'll start with a picture from my balcony of the trees across the river, and then two from ground level. These were taken on April 7th last year.

I'm not very confident of their color balance -- they seem to have a redish tint to me -- but the sun was heading down, so perhaps it's deserved.

I like these because they show the fluffy, cloud-like nature of [...]