This past weekend, my wife and I took some friends to Kamakura for a bit of walking around and for me, some much needed photo time. Our friends had never been there before and Toni had really only seen the Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu Shrine and some of the coastal towns between Kamakura and Enoshima. I’ve done a little more exploring there, but the one temple I’d been trying to get to recently, Hokokuji, closes early-ish and for any number of reasons, I hadn’t made it before closing.
So that was stop one and the most notable feature at Hokokuji is the bamboo forest. The weather was overcast and a bit drizzly, so lovely blue skies and brilliant green bamboo were more or less out of the question, so black and white it was. There were a couple of scenes involving other objects that benefited from the use of color, but in regards to the bamboo, the mood really felt monochromatic. I loved the way the stems arc overhead and by using a superwide focal length of 16mm, I could accentuate the perspective and lead the eye from the base (or near enough) to where the tops get lost in the brightness of the sky, cloudy as it was. It was that very cloudiness that made the capture of details along the whole stem possible due to the dispersal of the light. It’s like moving from a room where the light source is a single, bare bulb to one where the entire ceiling is lit, causing shadows to mellow or disappear entirely.
So, we had stems of bamboo, lit wonderfully by a cloudy sky, and the remnants of the leaves that had fallen covering the ground with a light tan carpet. Add in that the dirt was exceptionally dark due to the light rain and the lack of harsh shadows and you get a wonderful scene for an afternoon stroll. It was all about texture for me. All in all, a very pleasant stop on the day.
We made a few more stops along the way, but it’s really the bamboo (and the company, of course) that made my day. Here are a couple of shots and please visit the rest of them in my zenfolio gallery.
6 comments
sandi ross says:
May 9, 2011
great shots.
mikerossphoto says:
May 10, 2011
Thanks so much!
Mari says:
Jun 9, 2011
the raven—whoa! nice shot!
Looooooooooove your hokokuji photos! especially the really tall-looking one…that is a scientific term: “tall-looking one.”
mikerossphoto says:
Jun 14, 2011
Thanks Mari!
Terri Bigsby says:
Jul 9, 2011
Love these shots Mike! Special favorites are the “bamboo shoots and stems” going all the way to heaven and the late blooming sakura. Are those a cherry blossom?
Mike says:
Jul 9, 2011
Yes, they’re a variety of cherry blossom, I’d be hard pressed to tell you what they are, but to the best of my knowledge, they are cherry blossoms! The bamboo is very cool to shoot in and among, one of my favorite forest subjects!