I made a quick weekend jaunt to Kyoto. It has been almost a year since I went last time. My wife wanted to run the Nara Marathon, so while she was busy pounding the streets of Nara, I decided to get the Sigma Merrills out for a day. The first place I went was the Fushimi Inari shrine. This is probably th emost famous of sights in Kyoto with over 100,000 orange Tori snaking over the mountain. Inari shrines are for a fox, and the orange gates a specific for these. The shrine I earlier posted on at Nezu is a much, much smaller version of this. All of the photos on this page were taken using a Sigma DP2 or DP3 camera. It does show that these sensors are a little probelmatic on the red channel - and there is a very technical reason for this involving the red channel being on the “bottom” of the pixel stack. Anway - I had the desaturate the red channel a lot in Aperture to gett hese looking less cartoonish. Next time I will use a different camera for this place. Let me know what you think….
The classic shot - the first section of gates. I screwed up a lot ofthe photos I took here by rushing and not paying attention to the shutter speed - lots of blurred shots. This just means I need to go again.
It gets quite dark as the sun rises behing the mountain and the sjeer number of Tori creates a dark mood inside.
The names of the donor families or companies are all on one side of the Tori.
A sense of scale.
You can even buy mini-Tori and thesea re all over the place. Damn good business this shrine.
Meet the fox - the local diety.
Of course being Japan everyone needs to make “the sign”.
Some really beautiful autumn colours - a little late, but still some around.