This is a photograph of the garden courtyard of a Shikubu (guesthouse) in a monastery in Mt Koya Japan in autumn. There’s no place like Japan, and when I am away from it too long I get nostalgic. If you are interested in coming with me on a new Japanese photographic adventure this autumn (October 2020) please note that the early-bird savings end January 31!
Japanese Monastery Garden © Harold Davis
I’m organizing a photography week in Tokyo for next year. As part of my research and planning for this destination photo workshop I pulled some photos from my files that I haven’t posted before.
Masks on a Tokyo Street © Harold Davis
Temple Grounds, Tokyo © Harold Davis
Tokyo Harbor © Harold Davis
Tokyo Street © Harold Davis
I’ve been writing this blog since 2005, which is to say over twelve years. Sometimes there’s more, and sometimes I have less to say, but the average is about ten stories a month. That’s quite a bit of material; back-of-the-envelope it comes to more than 1,400 stories.
Of course, some are more weighty than others. But it will probably come as no surprise that some stories are serial and sequential, and build on each other through an adventure or fraught life event.
Kumano Sanzen Roppyaku Po © Harold Davis
The purpose of this meta-blog story is to point out a few of these embedded series, and to show you where you might start reading if you are interested.
The Birth of Katie Rose—My daughter was born very prematurely, and we didn’t know if she would survive. I photographed her in the NICU, and wrote about what was happening in real-time. You can start with First Look or The Birth of Katie Rose Davis (written after she came home and was out of danger).
Hands © Harold Davis
Hiking the Kumano Kodo—In 2013 I hiked the famous Kumano kodo pilgrimage trail in Japan. You can read about some of my adventures in Japan starting with Noriko Tries to Poison Me, and read about my hike starting with On the Kumano kodo.
Tree and Reflection, Nara © Harold Davis
Camino de Santiago—More recently, in the spring of 2018, I hiked a portion of this famous pilgrimage trail in Spain. My pilgrimage story starts with Beginning My Compostela.
Romanesque Bridge along the Camino © Harold Davis
Does the Wilderness Care About Me?—Back in 2005, I launched myself on an ill-prepared early season venture into the Ansel Adams Wilderness. I survived to tell the tale that starts in A Walk on the Wild Side.
Alone I Stand © Harold Davis
Vietnam—In 2017 I visited Vietnam with my longtime friend Eric. Our ostensible goal was to visit the largest cave in the world, Son Doong. Along the way, we saw many strange and wondrous things, starting with the Long Bien Bridge that was important during the American-Vietnamese war because it connects Hanoi by rail with the port of Haiphong.
Son Doong Cave © Harold Davis
Cuba—In 2009 I visited Cuba with a photography group. You can read some of my observations starting with Fifty Years after the Cuban Revolution.
On the Cover © Harold Davis
Nanzenji is one of the Five Great Zen Temples of Kyoto, Japan. Wandering through the grounds at Nanzenji, I came across a huge red brick aqueduct, built in the 19th century, and designed to carry water to Kyoto from Lake Biwa (it is still in use today). The mammoth nature of this structure seemed incredibly interesting to me, so I moved underneath the aqueduct with my camera and tripod to capture its supports, which seemed oddly out of place, almost like an ancient Roman engineering project in the heart of Japanese Zen.
This image is brought to mind because it is one of the illustrations in my new book The Photographer’s Black & White Handbook, which will be published by Monacelli Press.
Under the Aqueduct at Nanzenji © Harold Davis
28mm, 4/5 of a second at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted; processed in Photoshop, and converted to black and white in Photoshop and Nik Silver Efex Pro.
Click here for more blog stories about Japan.
Related image: Under the Yaquina Bay Bridge.
Poet William Blake wrote about building a Hell in Heaven’s despite, and the cognitive dissonance of traveling in Japan often put me in mind of this poem of Blake’s (which also describes building a Heaven in Hell’s despair). In Japan, there’s an aesthetic that embraces remarkable beauty, and at the same time is able to create landscapes that bear a passing resemblance to Hell itself, from the vast human ant piles of the urban Japan to the industry on the shores of the Inland Sea.
Fern Forest © Harold Davis
Less the thirty miles apart as the crane flies, the peaceful, serene, and fern-filled landscape along the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail (above) somehow manages to reside in the same consciousness as the heavy industry in the port of Wakayama (below).
Shores of the Inland Sea © Harold Davis
I photographed the image of the Fern Forest on a wet and dripping day, with the sun starting to come through the overcast skies. Everything I needed was in my backpack, and I waited for the wind to still as I used my umbrella to protect the camera on its tripod from raindrops. Exposure data: 36mm, 1/13 of a second at f/8 and ISO 400, tripod mounted.
The photograph of industry on the shores of Japan’s Inland Sea is from the “Big Tuna” ferry heading from the port of Wakayama on Honshu to Tokushima on Shikoku Island. In processing this image, I regarded the industrial landscape as a kind of abstraction, almost mirroring the kind of calligraphy sometimes used in Japan. Exposure data: 300mm, 1/800 of a second at f/8 and ISO 200, hand held.
Related: Japan category on my blog.
The Yoshino River is one of the three great rivers of Japan. Located on Shikoku Island, it is nicknamed “Shikoku Saburo,” Sabaro being a popular first name for a third son. The photo shows the wide sweep of the Yoshino near its outlet in the ocean near Tokushima. The landscape is actually much more built up than it seems in this image—typical of Japan, most flat areas such as the lower Yoshino Valley are heavily populated.
Yoshina River © Harold Davis
Exposure data: 28mm, circular polarizer, 1/500 of a second at f/8 and ISO 200; hand held, processed in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop, and converted to black and white using the “Ansel in the Valley” preset in Perfect B&W.
Hokusai, the famous Japanese woodblock print artist of the Edo period, created many views of Japan that included Mt Fuji, but the one shown here was probably not in his contemplation as they didn’t have air travel back then. I made the photo on an internal Japanese flight from Tokushima on Shikkoku Island to Haneda Airport near Tokyo.
View of Mt Fuji © Harold Davis
For my own homage to Hokusai in the context of San Francisco, check out my book 100 Views of the Golden Gate.
As part of a chapter in the new book I am working on, related to black and white photography, I’ve been looking through my photography of Japan. These are some of the iPhone photos I’ve found, mostly of subject matter that I also photographed with conventional, high resolution cameras.
Misty Mountains © Harold Davis
For example, the view of misty mountains long the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage on the Kii peninsula shown above can be seen more extensively in Distant Japanese Landscape.
The somewhat bleak courtyard shown next is in Koya-san, where I stayed for a couple of rainy autumn days as a guest in a monastery.
Autumn in Japan © Harold Davis
If you’ve ever visited Japan’s ancient imperial capital of Nara, you’ll know that the deer of Nara are a big touristic deal—which is why they are portrayed in the attractive design on the manhole cover that I found on a Nara side street.
Manhole Cover, Nara, Japan © Harold Davis
I liked wandering around Nara. There was a great deal to look at, such as Kofuku-ji, a Buddhist pagoda temple with origins dating to the 669 AD, once one of the powerful Seven Great Temples. Today, even monuments as important as Kofuku-ji radiate a palpable sense of time having moved on, and despite all the hustle and bustle in Japan Nara seems like a delightful backwater.
Pagoda in Nara © Harold Davis
In the eighteenth century, Tokyo—then known as Edo—was the world’s largest city, with a population of over one million. Today, Tokyo is still one of the world’s great metropoli, sprawling over an almost unimaginable population and area with numerous “cities within the city,” districts that are important in-and-of themselves.
The Rainbow Bridge crosses northern Tokyo Bay between two of these districts, Shibaura and the Odaiba waterfront development in the Minato district.
Rainbow Bridge, Tokyo © Harold Davis
Walking across this graceful suspension bridge is an uplifting experience in several sense of the word. The graceful curves of the bridge take you high above the bustle of the city, at the same time making the lines of modern Tokyo apparent.
As I crossed the Rainbow Bridge with my camera in the dusk of a foggy November day, I tried to align the curves of the bridge with the lines of an apartment complex in Odaiba in image that uses selective focus to contrast the curves in the Rainbow Bridge with the linear spaces of the buildings beyond.
300mm, 1/200 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 400, hand held; processed in Adobe Camera RAW and Photoshop, and converted to black and white using Perfect B&W.
Japan, as someone put it to me, is the most exotic place one can go that is absolutely safe. Nachi-san, shown in this image, is one of the ends of the Kumano kodo pilgrimage trail. It is a religious Shangri-la above the ocean with an impressive waterfall behind the temple complex.
Nachi-san © Harold Davis
In my initial story on this image, I noted that “while some pilgrims do it the hard way and walk the ancient stones of the Kumano kodo up to mountain passes and down through valleys to arrive in Nachi-san, most visitors arrive by scheduled bus, or by tour bus. Like Lourdes in France, or Mt Koya in Japan, Nachi-san is a destination for religious tourists, almost all of whom are Japanese.” There’s more about the location in the story about my long exposure photo of the Pagoda at Nachi San.
When I first processed the image I straightened the lines of perspective, but my mistake left a little of the amrgin in the finished image. The version shown here fixes my earlier mistake.
Please consider joining me in the spring for a photographic trip to Japan, which includes a visit to Nachi-san.
Umbrellas, Tokyo © Harold Davis
When it comes to photographic technique, sometimes simple is good. I photographed these umbrellas on the street in Tokyo in a light rain on a overcast but bright autumn day, handheld at 1/160 of a second, f/4.5 and ISO 400. There was no post-production involved other than a little adjustment in the RAW conversion.
Getting to Kyoto late in the afternoon, I checked into my hotel. Next, I proceeded to wander with my camera. In November, the sun set early and found me along the banks of the Shirakawa River. Somewhere between a canal and a river, and bounded in a stone channel, one-way streets ran along either bank. I set up my tripod on one of the stone foot bridges that crossed the Shirakawa, and shot the peaceful urban landscape as ducks played in the water.
Shirakawa River, Kyoto © Harold Davis
Gardens in Japan are almost never just about nature. The key point in a Japanese garden is how the natural elements interact with structural and human elements.
Isuien Garden, Nara, Japan © Harold Davis
The style of Isuien Garden in Nara is specifically to use extrinsic elements—landscapes and structures that are outside the domain of the garden—to enhance the garden itself. My image echoes this stylistic idea by including only the reflection of the temple in the pond, in addition to the stone footbridge and natural reflections.
