Torii gates at Fushimi Inari near Kyoto
From my first visit to Fushimi Inari, a 10 minute train ride from Kyoto. The Shinto shrine was founded in 711 AD and has thousands of torii gates dedicated to Inari, the deity of fertility and material success.
Getting a view unobstructed by other visitors took some patience, especially because we arrived at the end of the annual procession where priests carry the statue of the deity around the complex. Even with the crowds, the ambience had an underlying peacefulness and unassailable sacredness that took me by surprise. Someday I will return and make it all the way to the top of the mountain.
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3 Comments
Beautiful. I keep thinking we need an international photowalk… perhaps Kyoto is the place to do it?
I love this image. It almost invites me along the path and shows a world I know nothing about. Great you get a chance to travel to places that offer such different scenes than anything we see here in the U.S. I would love to know how you decided on this photograph. Did you see it right away or come back to it and say, “Hey, wait a minute…look at this…”?
Thanks guys. It is a magical place.
David: this is actually the first “serious” composition I made that day. First there’s the excitement (and adrenaline) of seeing something that could be an image, those images are just vacation photos. Then I settle down, start organizing the frame. I was looking for a place where the hot spots from the sky above would be blocked.
When I went back the next day, I worked this same area again, was lucky to find that the lantern was illuminated. I tried some different camera heights, pushing around the location of the “endpoint” of the path.
More on the blog today