Koi turning through dark water in Japan

Japan

Liquid Gold

Shunkaen is Kunio Kobayashi's Bonsai museum in Tokyo, and the reason to go is the trees. He has a shimpaku juniper that's roughly 1,200 years old, and we got to watch him work. The grounds behind the building are full of specimens, and a small artificial stream runs through the back of them with an arched red bridge over it.

The koi were the surprise. Standing on that bridge you're looking straight down into a school packed in tight at the surface, orange and yellow and black and white, mouths open, waiting on food. They knew what a person on a bridge meant. Bodies overlapping bodies, no space between them.

I shot it as an abstract. The water is black, so there's no bottom and no edge to the frame, nothing to place it. Ripples break the scales into shapes that stop reading as fish and start reading as poured color. The gaping mouths are the only thing that tells you what it is.

Nikon Z 7II · Nikkor Z 24-120mm · 91mm · f/10 · 1/100 sec · ISO 80

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Frame 18 of 37

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