Continuing on with this set, we spent a lot of time wandering through the various temples and grounds that Kyoto has to offer, and there was so much to see!
I took a lot of shots here with a wide open aperture (using the f1.2 lens), so there are quite a few pictures with very thing depth of field. I’m not sure it’s very good for capturing what we saw, but I think (I hope) it does a good job of capturing how it felt to be there.
There was a whole statue garden that was pretty exciting. Each figurine had its own pose and plenty of props. It was someplace I’d never been before, so I’m glad we got to see it.
The moss covered ground is very pretty. Sometimes there are people very carefully picking leaves off both the ground and the water. The moss is tricky because if you walk on it, it gets destroyed, so there are generally signs and little fences designed to keep people off of it. As you can see, we got very lucky with some of the colors happening in the trees.
You can see the little wicker stands around the lights that are used for the night illumination. Very creatively hidden! I was able to work around the moss and get some close ups of the leaves that were brightest below.
We got a 2-for-1 deal on some of these temples, as they were moderately “out of the way” of the busy tourist areas. We did go to those as well…so, a well spent couple of days! The green moss shot above was on a little wall, I was able to get very close and I like the way it turned out. Apologies if these are more “arthouse” than your traditional travel landscapes, but like I said in the first part, I took well over 1,000 photos, so hopefully there’s a little bit of everything.
It was basically very difficult to take a bad photo.
Just a light evening walk. We did not end up getting in to the Bar Rocking Chair you can see the sign for above. Erika and I had went on a previous visit, and we think it just got too popular since we last have been here (especially this time of year because it is so popular to visit), but it did make for a nice walk through the cool evening streets. The next day was one of the most iconic temple grounds in Kyoto – Kinkaku-jin – The Golden Pavilion
There it is! The above image is one I made from the RAW file (the raw sensor data from the camera), and the below image is from the JPEG produced by the camera (which has a filter applied as well as grain). Similar, but you can hopefully see the differences if you look at them side by side.
Stunning from every angle. I really liked the “extra golden” filter applied to this scene. Looks like a postcard to me! You can see some of the crowds that were waiting in line for a chance to take a photo together. Erika and I were no different haha!
Following this, we kept on walking towards another temple area, this one had a large lake and some persimmon trees around it.
I really enjoyed all the Japanese Maples trees in this garden. The leaves were making really cool patterns and the light was very good for taking pictures. Surprisingly, we left this garden and went to yet another temple. We got somewhere around 20K steps in each day — wow!
There were more gardens to walk through, each a little bit different than the last.
Here’s some of those persimmons I promised earlier. It’s crazy how there are so many of them that grow, but all of the leaves seem to fall off the tree. In fact, it almost looks like the tree is dead / dying, except for the dozens of persimmons hanging from the branches. There were many of them all along the ground. We did not pick or eat any of them from the trees, but we did get some from the shops around the area. It is a local delicacy in the fall!
That concludes this round of photos. Stay tuned for parts 3 and 4!