Kyoto is having its annual festival of flowers and lights (a loose translation of 京都・花灯路). The path from Chionji Temple to Kiyomizu Temple is lined with lanterns and large flower arrangements. This festival extends from March 11th to the 21st. All of the shrines and temples are open until 9:30pm and are lit up splendidly.
Kiyomizu Temple (above) is one of Kyoto's most beautiful temples and certainly the best place to see the city at night. Unfortunately, it's only open in the evening a few times a year. If you wear a kimono, all of the buses and subways as well as all of the temples and shrines will give you free admission during the festival period. Alas, my kimono is in St. Paul. The irony.
I have about 200 photos from this evening. I'll be posting them slowly to this blog and then later uploading them to my gallery. Oops, it looks like I have to fix my Photoshop copyright stamp script, it's now 2 years out of date. Just noticed that...
Equipment: Canon 10D; EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L; Velbon Charmagne tripod; Acratech Ultimate head. Settings: f/3.5 1/2 sec @ ISO 800.
On the old blog, ckapublishing said...
Thats an awesome picture. I only visited that place during the day but that makes me wish I would have gone at night.
Just to add a little flav, here is one of my favourite night shots:
http://www.photokyo.com/showpicture.asp?number=1314
2:05 AM