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Fushimi Inari Temple, Kyoto, Japan

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Tori gates at Fushimi Inari Taisha, Kyoto, Japan
On a trip to Japan last October I visited the Fushimi Inari temple in Kyoto. A big banner at the entrance proudly proclaimed that it was the most-popular site with foreign visitors for 2 or 3 years running according to Trip Advisor. The number of visitors on that weekday was testament to this claim, however, the site is very extensive, and probably a majority of tourists don't actually make it all the way to the top of the mountain, so don't be put off. It is very accessible from the Kyoto train station (Kyoto-Eki in Japanese), just 2 or three quick stops by a local JR train. Then it's a quick walk across the street to the entrance.

Fushimi Inari is probably most well-known for its vermillion-colored "tori" (Shinto gates) which line the pathway to the summit of the mountain. Each tori actually represents a donation to the shrine, mostly from businesses; a key principle of the shrine is to implore the good favor of the gods for the success of one's business. Early on this was particularly the business of growing rice, and a feature of the place is the many statues and images of foxes which hold a key to the rice granary in their mouths. It is believed that the fox intercedes between the businessman or woman and the gods.

Anyhow, please visit it you get a chance, and be sure to climb the entire way to the top. I saw many "obaachan" (grandmothers)  making their way all the way to the top, so if they can do it, you can do it! Allow yourself a couple of hours for your visit.

I posted a few of the photos I took at Fushimi Inari Taisha to my Facebook page, which you can visit here:

Photos of Fushimi Inari Taisha, Kyoto, Japan


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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

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I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
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