As a Washingtonian, I normally avoid the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin area at Cherry Blossom time like it was ground zero for the Zombie Apocalypse. The cherry blossoms may be beautiful, but the groves are so overrun with tourists with necks snapped back in positions normally reserved for car wreck victims as they stagger mindlessly about, blocking traffic, walking into your camera’s frame of view and not moving while THEY compose a shot, and pointing with arms at full length like the walking dead in the general direction of everything and nothing at the same time. Most of my photographer friends who want to shoot the blossoms do so at the crack of dawn when most tourists can’t be arsed to get out of bed to go see them. At which time I, too, can’t be arsed to get out of bed to go photograph them because I have a day job.

That said, there are other places to see cherry blossoms around DC that aren’t completely overrun. There happens to be this tree, for example, on the George Washington University campus in the front yard of a fraternity house no less. I caught this one on one of my lunchtime walkabouts. This was also with the Tele-Rolleiflex, shot basically straight up into the tree from a standing position (the tree is in a yard several feet above the sidewalk, so it was easy to stand beneath it and shoot up into the blossoms).