Sly and I have been meaning to take cherry blossom photos since last year, it just never seemed to happen. Last year, it was freezing, then we had guests in town, then we just forgot about it. This year, due to all the warm weather, the cherry blossoms bloomed early.
We were a little worried that there wouldn’t be any blossoms, and the weather was looking kind of iffy, but finally by late afternoon, we dragged ourselves to the Tidal Basin. At first we were beginning to wonder if we made the right decision – we didn’t see hardly any cherry blossoms, and what ones we did were located in random bits of grass on concrete islands in between busy roads or beside the highway. At every cropping of blossom trees we saw just hoards of tourists taking photos. After circling the area about a million times, we started to wonder if we made the right decision.
A couple months ago, we came to this same are to check out the Solar Decathalon and had a similar experience in dealing w/the crowds and finding parking (typical weekend in that part of town). The upside of that experience was that we knew a few ‘secret’ spots to find parking. So after our millionth loop, we headed in that direction, found parking immediately, and then wandered around for a little bit before we discovered a beautiful grove of blossoms with not a single tourist or photographer. It was such a magical and beautiful place that we named our “secret grove.”
Just because we like (and take tons of) photographs, doesn’t mean that shoots like this come easy for us. For one, I’ve never liked Spring, pastels (especially pink), or pollen, and yet I found myself in the middle of all three. There was a reasonable amount of motivating one another and plenty of dragging feet before we finally made it out of the house. But, like all the photos we take, we are always thankful and happy that we took them when we had the chance. It’s sort of my #1 rule of taking photos: don’t wait to take a photo because you think you’ll have another chance. Most likely, you won’t.
Anyway, it turned out to be a lovely Sunday afternoon in our secret grove, and ‘formal” photos aside, it will always be one of my favorite memories of this Spring.
Photos: Canon dSLR w/Tokina 35mm lens (portraits) and Canon 10-22mm lens (landscapes) mounted on a Manfrotto tripod. All photos shot in RAW format and edited in Adobe Lightroom.
