Cherry blossoms are all the rage on my Facebook feed lately.  From Tokyo to DC to Seattle and everywhere in between people are posting up scenes of lush cherry trees with people milling around enjoying them.  While there are a lot of trees blooming up here, I’ve found that the majority of them just aren’t there yet.  I think I’ll have to try back in a week or two for maximum flower-shooting fun! The one in my front yard doesn’t even have leaves yet…

Since I seem to be using my old Minolta 50mm lens so often, I decided to switch it up a little bit and grab the Minolta 135mm F2.8 lens that I got in the same shady craigslist deal.  I haven’t used it much, and I’m really not sure how much I like it overall.

Overall I think it has a really nice background blur, but can look really “busy”.  The verdict is still out on this one. It’s also possible that the lighting was crap all around. 😉  To make the test more scientific, I swapped back over to the 50mm that I seem to like for blurry flower photos.

I feel like these are two very different sets of picutres… The photos aren’t distinctly unpleasant, but they’re really not what I had in mind.  I’m definitely going to go back out with a better plan and my actual macro lens and see what I can get!