I've been super crazy busy lately, working on a new plugin and visiting with an old friend in town, which explains no posts in the last week despite having such a backlog of things to write about. But I did get out today a bit with my friend to enjoy some early cherry blossoms.

This photo is all hazy because it was shot through several branches worth of blossoms much nearer to the lens than the one the focus is on. It's not a photo with much technical quality, but I like the vibe.

Continued here...

I stopped by the Imperial Household Agency office today at the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park (京都御所) to make a reservation to visit the Katsura Palace next month, and brought along my camera in case anything was blooming.

There are a lot of cherry trees in the park, but I think they're just budding so far. The blossoms are peach or, perhaps in some case, plum like those we sat the other day in "Plum Blossoms in Full Bloom at Kyoto’s Kitano Tenmangu Shrine".

I knew it was going to rain and so was better prepared than my last outing which [...]

This post is just a bunch of extra desktop-background images from the Enkouji Temple (円光寺) in Kyoto last fall, that I didn't have space to fit in "The Gorgeous Enkouji Temple of North-East Kyoto" the other day.

Next are a few "reflections of the trees in the pond" shots similar to "Pond" the other day. That one is still my favorite, but these have their own nice character...

Now a few more random garden-scene shots...

I made a short visit today to the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine (北野天満宮), famous for its plum blossoms. I'd gone three weeks ago when only a few blossoms had appeared, but now it's pretty much in full bloom.

There was the slightest of rain... you didn't need an umbrella for the most part... which kept the crowds down. It was quite pleasant.

There are many different kinds of plum, with a wide variety of pinks, creams, and whites...

Not everyone was there to take pictures. This next shot is the same scene as this one from my previous post about this [...]

In today's post we dip again into the deep archives of my very-photogenic November of last year, where on the 15th of the month Paul Barr and I visited two temples in northeast Kyoto, the Shisendo Temple (producing this post and this post), and then the nearby Enkouji Temple (圓光寺).

It was my first visit to the gorgeous Enkouji Temple in many years, and though I got many nice shots, so far I've only shared those from inside the garden-viewing room, last month in "Impossible Shot at Kyoto’s Enkouji Temple: Garden *and* Garden-Viewing Room at the Height of Fall [...]