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Friday Slide Show: Neighborhood Cherry Blossoms
11 April 2025
Last week when we marched around the neighborhood looking for cherry blossoms, we were disappointed. The rains, apparently, had delayed things.
But this week, the blossoms have come to the party around here. The trick was how to photograph them.
We find it increasingly important to be inconspicuous in public these days.
And since the cherry trees we wanted to photograph were all private property themselves, that ruled out taking a long lens on a big camera out on the street. Someone would surely call the cops, afraid they were being surveilled.
But a little smartphone is not intimidating. It's flattering, we suspect, to catch some geezer lining up a shot of your flowering beauty at arm's length.
So we shot these with the iPhone 15 Pro, mainly with the 2x and 5x lenses so we could stay on the sidewalk without trespassing.
The first day we did this, it was sunny. The second was cloudy with a bit of blue peeking through.
But on both occasions the problem we confronted was how to inject some variety in the images.
Usually we revert to our abstract impressionist bias, looking for configurations of blossoms or branches or both. But that wasn't enough in this case. It was just a starting point for our compositions.
Although we didn't find it particularly interesting, we did take an establishing shot of each tree. Only a few made it into the show to demonstrate the spot of bright beauty the tree brings to the scene.
We did find macro shots more dramatic. Especially when played against the medium shots, all of which (however) clearly delineated the petals.
It turns out there are quite a few varieties of cherry trees, mainly with white or pink blossoms. The blossoms in this neighborhood all seemed similar, although the color did vary.
We ran all the HEICs through Lightroom, kicking up the Dehaze slider a bit and adjusting exposure, then tweaking the shadows and recovering the highlights. The editing made significant improvements to the camera images. So, uh, this is a bit beyond a social media post.
The blossoms won't be here long. A stiff wind will blow them away. But we've got a few photos to remind us how beautiful they were and what fun it was to chase them around the neighborhood.
