March is a time of hope in Japan... hope for a good cherry-blossom season, hope for a nice spring, hope for the coming new school/fiscal year (the school year and most companies' fiscal year start in April). Maybe this week has more worry than hope, but hope will return.

I mentioned the other day in "Surprising Early Cherry-Blossom Preview Hits Kyoto" (about a snowfall that made the cherry trees look as if they are in bloom), it's about time for a "Cherry-Blossom Preview" type post, and I linked to some preview posts from earlier years. I'd still like to do [...]

Another one from the outing last week that also produced the previous post about the carving on the wooden gate. This shot is part of the wall of the little relaxation hut in the stone-lantern gardens behind Nishimura Stone Lanterns in Kyoto Japan. The hut can be seen in previous posts, here and here.

I thought I'd give it a try as a desktop background, but since I'm still really digging the "stark tree" desktop background that I posted the other day, today I'll try it on my portrait-oriented second monitor (as mentioned in "Going Vertical"), using this next version....

As I mentioned the other day in the post about an outing with Vaughn Hart to the mountains of north-western Kyoto, we stopped by a simple, unassuming rural shrine. The entrance to the immediate shrine area was through a small little wooden gate, seen here at the top of the steps Vaughn is standing on...

You can't see them in the photo above, but the gate actually has doors, propped open at the moment...

Something about the carving at the top of the gate caught my eye. The light was just wonderful for it... strong shadows, yet somehow soft....

The [...]

At the end of my previous post, I showed an odd tree... very tall without branches, except at the top a rat's nest of tightly bunched twigs and cones. Futzing around in Lightroom with a shot of the top of the tree, I came across a fairly stark monochrome version that struck me as interesting enough to give it a try as a desktop background.

Prior to happening upon that, I had a "stylized" version that I sort of liked...

I don't often venture into these non-realistic versions unless I'm doing something specific (such as this, this, this and this), [...]

On the family outing to some nearby still-snowy mountains the other day, we noticed that the maple trees are starting to bud, with an odd rust-colored fringe...

Up close, it was easy to see what was happening...

Elsewhere along the drive we found a tree with big, pink buds.... likely plum.

I don't know for sure whether they're plum, but it's likely because we're well into plum-blossom season. Even two weeks ago another Kyoto blogger posted about plum blossoms in Gion, and in prior years I've posted about them as early as late January.

The plum-blossom season winds down early, [...]