| "Hey, dude, nice
you could drop by".
This photo of the
statue doesn't begin to convey its size, but it's nice to have a shot of
the entire thing all at once. You can't really see much of
the 10 foot tall lotus leaves he's sitting on, but this is the best I could
do from this angle.
You can see that
his head looks a lot newer than the rest of his body. That's because
the head was made in the nineteenth century to replace one which fell off.
His hands were made sometime in the 16th century. The original
statue dates from 752.
Getting a photo here
is not as easy as it looks. The Daibutsu-den, or Hall of the
Great Buddha, is dark except for the natural light which filters in through
its sides and through the large doors at its front - you can pretty much
ignore the light from the two flaming torches visible in front of the Buddha!
You can't use a tripod, so hand-held photos are the only way to go.
You're going to need a pretty powerful flash or a lens that sucks in an
awful lot of light. I did use a flash for some of the photos inside
the hall, but mostly I shot using a special 50mm fixed focus lens with
its aperture opened all the way to f1.2.
My apologies to the
99% of readers who have no idea what that last sentence means. |
