Cherry Blossoms

The Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. is world famous and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors.  Matter of fact, I have never (and I mean never) seen as many people in downtown D.C. as I have during this past week.

The trees blossom only once a year and the blossoms stay open for just about a week.  While I knew they'd be pretty, I didn't know how I was going to photograph them with so many thousands of people gathered around.  So, I picked an unusually cold evening that was windy and quite unpleasant, and went when the sun was setting.  The cold weather combined with the after-hours time made for zero crowds and a beautiful sky that made an amazing backdrop.

I know that many of the pictures are similar, but the Cherry Blossoms are located in a part of D.C. known as the Tidal Basin which is, well, a basin.  It's a big, round circle so there isn't a lot of variance.  However, even if some of the pictures look similar, there are differences in position, angle of the camera, the timing of the sunset, etc.  Interestingly enough, most of the pictures in this sampling have literally zero editing done to them.  The conditions were just that beautiful.

I'm also including a couple of pictures in this sampling of some other trees in blossom that I found quite stunning.  These pictures will be the last two in the sampling and were taken in Old Town Alexandria.

Here are my favorites.