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 ended in me getting absolutely soaked during a 20-minute ride home on my scooter without rain gear. This time my preparation was simply knowing it was coming and leaving the moment it started. (At least that was the plan.)

So knowing I didn't have much time, I just pushed my scooter in the park sort of aimlessly, stopping now and again for pictures.

I'm going to guess these are Cherry...

The varieties never cease to amaze me.

These buds, of whatever kind of tree, were huge...

I eventually came to a nice area that will be teeming with thick crowds in a couple of weeks, but rain aside, it was absolutely delightful today.

This orchard is where I got the most delightful shots in last year's “Cliché Incarnate: Lame Formulaic Pictures of Plum Blossoms and Those Enjoying Them”. The title is a joke about a conversation I had that led me there (explained on that page), though I had apparently not noticed the “Peach Orchard” sign last time.

I had the place mostly to myself, but a few folks wandered in and out...

I went in and did the same myself...

In one sense it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but I put a lot of thought into blossom selection and composition... what's the background like, the lighting, the overall balance. That last one above fails on some basic composition levels, but of the millions of blossoms around, it was the only one I noticed with the subtle pink in the petals. It was at a really odd angle, with lots of branches in the way, so it was a challenge to get even this shot, which is perhaps why I like it more than it deserves.

Not everything had a bright future... these blossoms, whatever they were, were well past their prime....

I normally put the not-weather-sealed Voigtländer away at the first sign of rain, but every time I did I felt the need to pull it out for “just one last shot” almost right away. Pushing along a path toward the exit, I came across yet another kind of blossom that was, at the risk of overusing the word today, just delightful....

Some areas had more than just a smattering of blossoms...

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 shrine, a week ago...

I was using my weather-sealed Nikkor 70-200/2.8 most of the time due to the spritzy rain...

... but I longed to use the Voigtländer 125mm for its macro capabilities. The rain finally seemed to stop completely, so I got what turned out to be a short chance...

It looks like the same bird I saw last time, but this time he was hopping all over, seemingly drinking nectar from the blossoms. He didn't seem to mind all the paparazzi surrounding the tree, but it was quite the challenge to get him exactly in focus as he jumped around, especially with the manual-focus thin-depth-of-field Voigtländer. The best I could do before I switched back to the Nikkor 70-200 and its autofocus was this one, where his eye is indeed in focus, but he's bashfully hiding behind a branch...

I haven't looked yet, but hopefully I got something better with the other lens in the few minutes I had before the skies opened up and drenched everything.

To be continued...

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 Colors, Devoid of People”. So today I'll finally share a few more.

The path from the street winds up and into the mountain for a short while, landing at an entrance area.

I neglected to get a wide shot of the entry area when we arrived, but here's one from later in the day when we left. It was a blustery day, alternating light drizzle and harsh sun, and this parting shot was immediately after a rain, when the late-afternoon sun came blinding through...

After entering the temple area you're greeted by the main garden flanked by buildings with (among presumably much else) garden-viewing rooms, but if you walk past all that and hit the path up the mountain behind the temple, you're greeted with a wonderful view of the temple with the northern Kyoto as a backdrop. This is back earlier in the day not long after we arrived:

As I said, the weather was dynamic, and so therefore was the light. When the sun came out the colorful leaves of the main garden were plunged into a decidedly unphotogenic harsh light, but the wider view offered some opportunity....

Enkouji's garden is not huge, but it's got quite a personality, with each area having its own vibe...

This last shot is very similar to “Quiet Contemplation” from the long-photogenic-November post, though with its own vibe. They garden-viewing room the girls are sitting in is the same one from the “impossible shot” post.

I've much more to share from that trip, but that's the gist of it for now.

To be continued...

I heard from a friend today that the plum blossoms at the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine (北野天満宮) in northern Kyoto are at their best, so I thought I'd revisit my went-too-early visit from two weeks ago, last written about here, with more of the same.... blossoms blossoms blossoms.

I prefer the white ones over the pink, so let's start out with some of those...

I'm always amazed at how a tiny change in perspective or composition can make an otherwise similar photo feel completely different. Maybe it's just me, but this next shot, almost identical to the one that leads this article, feels quite different....

Plum are better known for their pinks, so here are some of those. One plum tree was next to what appeared to be an orange tree, and for some reason I tried to get the oranges in the background...

The blossom was pure pink... no white fringe... but it was backlit by the sun, so the color you see so richly in real life gets washed out to white in the camera. 🙁   It took all manner of post-processing contortions just to keep this much detail:

Somehow (for some reason) I wanted the oranges, so when this wide-aperture shot didn't work...

... I tried stopping down a bit...

Oh well. There's always the ever-pleasing super closeup.

Walking elsewhere on the large grounds, they have a storm-runoff stream with a so-so path that probably looks a lot nicer today (two weeks after these photos) with the trees in bloom....

One corner of the property is on a hill overlooking much of the rest, and on the way there you get a nice view of some of the complex roofs of the nearby buildings...

I wanted to try to get as much detail of as many roofs filling the frame as I could... this was the best I could do...

Pointing elsewhere, you could see the photographers scurrying around like ants...

The closest roof to this vantage point was quite complex... I just wondered what it must have been like to design it and the underlying structure...

Exiting the fee-required orchard area, you return to the open area of the shrine where you can see people waiting to say a little prayer at the main shrine building (that of the roofer's nightmare)...

Continued here...