Cherry Road

There is hardly a better time or place to start a new photography blog than March in Memphis, Tennessee.   The city comes alive with blooming trees and plants everywhere you look.  One of the first signs of spring can be found on Cherry Road.  There is no Washington Monument here, and no Potomac River, but a narrow street lined with cherry trees, tucked between the Botanic Gardens and a golf course.   The blossoms hit the trees about a week earlier than they do in Washington DC, and, in checking my photos from last year, the blossoms are about a week earlier this year than last. 

The tree blossoms are white with a pinkish tinge to them.  At some times of day, they look more pink than others.  I tried to capture the whole line of trees, and then some individual blossoms.  Because the wind was fairly strong, and the branches moving, I wasn’t able to frame these photos as I was shooting them. .  I was grateful for my camera with the continuous shutter bursts, and  software that crops photos.   

  
I took care to get photos of blossoms with both the golf course in the background, and also the cherry trees from across the street. Notice the bokeh in the individual blossom photos.  Bokeh is actually my favorite thing to incorporate into a photo.  Focusing on one thing through the lens causes objects at different distances to be blurry, which creates depth in the photo.  Below is my favorite example of bokeh in my cherry blossom photos, with the blurry tree trunk in the background.  

This will never be a technical blog, but there are settings that you can use on your camera to create either more or less bokeh.  This is covered well in other more technically oriented blogs.   

As you can see, the trees are still budding.  Even so, many of the blossoms have been damaged by some wind and rain, leaving this year's cherry blossom season more lackluster than last. Most, but not all of the photos posted today are taken facing the sun.  Can you tell which ones?

For fun, below is one of the many M shaped (Memphis, March, Music?)  beds of impatiens spread out all over town.  It happens to be upside down here for a better view of “The Parkway.” 

  
It's a great time to begin to notice the changing vegetation around you and start capturing it.  I had fun comparing these to my photos last year of the same trees.   Next I need to start looking for wisteria.  I won’t totally bore everyone with spring flower photos, so I promise there will be at the most one more blog post devoted to flowers this year.  And that will probably be after I actually go inside the Botanic Gardens.