Impenetrable

You can’t walk into it. The grove is fenced along the path, which means the wall of stems on the other side is unreachable and nobody is ever standing in it — the one place in Arashiyama where a photograph is guaranteed to be free of people.

We’d left the hotel at quarter past five to catch one of the first trains out, and then lost time on the far end because the signs pointing to the grove are easy to miss. We’d have been first if we hadn’t got lost. As it was a few people were already setting up at the main viewpoint when we arrived.

I shot that view too. But I was interested in shooting something more textural with the bamboo as well. I envisioned the stems as texture rather than as a tunnel — the subtle shifts of green and grey down the culms, the wear on them, the way the pattern repeats without ever quite repeating. This is deep in the densest part, where the bamboo runs fifty feet and more overhead, which is why it’s dim enough to need ISO 5000 at first light.

I tried it as a panorama, with the idea of a 3:1 wall of thicket. The stitch never lined up properly and I gave it up.