I always look forward to the arrival of the cherry blossoms at High Park. I don’t make it ever year, but each time go I try to think of a different way to capture their fleeting beauty. In 2011, I arrived with a photographer’s meetup at sunrise, in 2012, I focused on the people, and in 2015 I tried out daytime time-lapsed photography.

This time, I wasn’t sure what I was going to try, but after a few photos I decided it might be interesting to only shoot the blossoms on their shadow sides. Perhaps it was because the barrage of people shooting with their backs to the setting sun made it crowded to shoot from the sunny side—who knows?

In any case, I did find myself wanting to step around and turn direction to get the blossoms with direct sunlight many times. It’s easy to argue direct light makes for better photos. Each time, I managed to keep myself in the shadows.

There’s something about the translucency of the blossom petals that make shooting from this side interesting. Of course, this works best when the sun is low; I was shooting during the hour before sunset.

Every photo in this gallery except the first one was shot from the shadow side.