Our friend Rob came to visit Okinawa and we went up to Kyoto and Osaka to see the fall colors. Kyoto in the fall is really pretty and it was a great time to go! During the trip I decided to try shooting with the black and white filter on my new camera as I haven’t had much experience with b/w since College (two decades ago…). I brought two primes – a 40/1.2 and a 28/2.8. They both are great lenses, and with the 40mm being manual focus only, took some work setting up shots.
I was shooting on my Nikon Zf which has a 24 MP sensor, so cropping in (even significantly) is possible, though I tried to frame shots as best I could. The b/w shots are straight from the camera with very minimal editing (I mostly just hit the level horizon button), and the color shots are either SOC or edited from the RAW image. Generally if it’s daytime and the sky is visible, I used the RAW. Otherwise, it’s the jpeg straight from the camera. Nikon added “styles” to the Zf and one of them applies artificial grain, which I quite like. You’ll see that throughout the series.
Since there are so many photos (I shot 1500+ in Kyoto and selected 332 to share here), this will be different from the normal story-style post, and will just be blocks of photos. If I see something interesting or worth commenting on then I will. Kyoto is a beautiful city full of rich history, and because of that is jam packed with temples, shrines, castles, courtyards, and other attractions at pretty much every corner. If you ever get a chance to come visit, I VERY HIGHLY recommend working in a fall trip, ideally the last two weeks of November.
We spent quite a bit of time walking the streets at night. I am working on improving my “street photography” – capturing candids of people in particular. It’s very hard! But shooting black and white and night is actually pretty fun since there’s already quite a bit of contrast. I did shoot some color photos as well.
I have probably taken this photo of the red lantern with a car behind it like 15 times, haha. It’s in Gion, down a street famous for Geisha (Geiko in the local dialect) sight-seeing. Sadly, the word is out, and the streets were far too packed to see much of anything.
That was the first night! Lots to see and a lot of walking for sure. On to the next day!
Next up is maybe the most famous temple – Kiyomizudera!
Next we went walking to the next temple, which was going to be a night illumination. But first, we did have a couple stops on the way, including to an aqueduct!
The next stop was the night illumination. This is something that is very popular during the winter. Normally the temple grounds are only open during the day, but for special occasions they open them at night where they are specially lit for evening viewing.
Next up was a nightcap in a fun little establishment we found.
The next day we went up to the northwest portion of the city, and then went for a walk through the woods. We started along the river, and then went to a bamboo forest!
Next we kept along the path and found another temple that had the most fantastic colors of leaves. There was a big forest area behind it that we ended up wandering through for most of the afternoon.
I really like the lamp picture above. This is the end of this post – stay tuned for three more photo posts of Kyoto!
