The weather has been a bit odd lately, but by the laws of the seasons spring should be here any day now. Since I post things in order, this one was originally scheduled to go up about a week from now, but I’m putting it up early as a special little bit of spring news.
It can’t compare with the cherry blossoms of Kyoto, but even my own neighborhood has a temple called Senju-in with a cherry tree several hundred years old. It’s a shidare-zakura, a weeping cherry: unlike ordinary cherry trees its branches droop down, and it blooms about a week earlier. When I went, it looked about half open, so I’d guess that from around next weekend the whole of Japan will be caught up in cherry blossom festival madness.
I went at night, and they had it lit up.
Night shots are really hard to take, and they don’t come close to how moving it is in person. I want a camera made for night photography~
The colors aren’t great either..
I have plenty of complaints about my old camera’s AWB, but even so, editing photos is a real pain. I’m also an out-of-camera purist, so until I change cameras I don’t expect the quality of my photos to suddenly get much better.
Even at half bloom, it really feels like spring.
That said, maybe because it was cold, it felt a bit like looking at plum blossoms.
This is what it looks like as a whole
In the photo it looks like something out of Legend of the Hometown, the old Korean ghost-story TV show, but in person it was quite charming. With just this one cherry tree it felt a little lacking, but the view nearby is nice too, so it’d be lovely to drop by when you have a moment. Though you should probably hold back on drinking from a can of beer inside the temple grounds.
The cherry blossoms I like best are the ones just past full bloom, when they slowly start to fall, but actually timing it right isn’t easy. I’m getting ready to go to Kyoto again this year, but how beautiful it will be is something I’ll only know on the day. All I can do is hope for good luck.