As I hope I effectively warned, there are many photos from this trip. I’ll continue on to post the remaining bulk of them here, and then there’ll be one more to finish it out.
For as “techy” as Japan can be at times, nearly every street corner looks something like the mess of power lines above. Maybe because the water table is so high, or maybe it has to do with the frequent natural disasters, but there are heaps of lines strewn about the city in what otherwise is a very clean and put together area.
On our way to (surprise!) more temples, we found this cool tree / bush that was full of bight red little berries. Erika took a quick photo in her favorite sweater. The temple below is Gin-kaku-jin, perhaps the second-most famous temple in Kyoto (after of course the Golden Pavilion). This name means “Silver Temple” (or pavilion).
The return of some black and white shots! I don’t think I like these daytime shots as much as the nighttime ones, but they still have a very different look to the normal photos, so I’ve included them here. I think perhaps you notice different details or elements without the color (which was pretty amazing) to draw your eye.
Here’s a side by side comparison.
The grounds start with walking in to the main area by the pavilion, but then quickly whisk visitors around through a small wooded area and up a hill, until you can get a fantastic view of the whole area with some of the city in the background.
Still weaving a few black and white images in. I do think they have a totally different character. Some of these images are jpegs straight from the camera, and I was playing around with the color profiles. The Zf has many to choose from and you can also import custom filters. So many options!
Finally made it back around to the other side of the Silver Pavilion!
There was a little gift shop we stopped in, and they had these very adorable little dog statues. We passed on them, but thought about it!
Then it was back out for an evening walk after dinner.
There are little police stations throughout every city called “koban” – here is one below.
Here’s another side-by-side with the black and white version.
And more night walking photos. These shop photos with the bike are some of my favorite.
The next day we got up and went to Fushimi inari, the mountaintop shrine with thousands of tori gates marking the trail. I took quite a few pictures here so the rest of this post and part 4 will all be the remaining pictures from this portion of the trip.
Many many tori gates. There are also lots of tombs throughout the area, and they have all kinds of little statues or figures as well as decorations that people leave.
I hope you can get a sense of the area. It is a really cool spot – once you push through the initial portion with so, so many people trying to get their photos in the gates. It takes a couple hours to hike the whole thing, so most people only make it maybe 20 minutes or so. There are quite a few steps though, which I think you can see throughout. Next it’s time for more black and whites!
This shrine has some relationship to foxes that I don’t quite understand, but there are statues like this everywhere throughout. Pretty fun to keep wandering about every corner and never know what else you’ll find!
A few more black and whites…
Ok, maybe more than a “few” more…these are really fun though!
The shadows and contrast in these are all pretty amazing. I like the repeated patterns found in the gates or steps with the natural outlines from the leaves and other foliage. Pretty great place to take a camera! That ends part 3, thanks for taking a look. Stay tuned for part 4!