Walk the Path

That day started in Himeji. We took the morning there, moved to Osaka for the afternoon and evening, and got back to Kyoto — where we were staying, and where the day had begun — after dark. Then we went up Fushimi Inari.

That was deliberate. There is no version of this shot in daylight that I’d have been happy with; the place is one of the busiest sites in the country. So I gave Fushimi Inari to the night and Arashiyama to first light the next morning, and worked around the crowds by not overlapping with them.

At night the gates are lit by lanterns and there’s enough light to see by and not much more. We weren’t alone — there were others on the path — but the traffic was thin enough to set up a tripod, which at these shutter speeds is the difference between a photograph and a smear. A few times I ran the exposure long to clear someone out of the frame. Mostly I didn’t need to.

It was quiet in a way that felt deliberate on everyone’s part. People kept their voices down.

I never made the summit. We climbed a good way up and I worked up a serious sweat doing it with the gear on my back — I hadn’t understood how far the gates actually run. One day I’ll do the entire stretch.