Kyoto 1 - CineStill 400D

Morning Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto, sushi at train station, rainy arrival, 5:50 AM jetlagged banger shots at Fushimi Inari with CineStill 400D and no tourists, just photographers.

It’s time to move to another city, so we woke up early and got the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto. Since we had luggage with us, we got an Uber.

Here’s a cool fact about the Shinkansen, the seats turn 180°. When the train arrives, a staff come and rotate them all forward, because now the train would travel in the reverse direction. “Tecnolooogya, tecnolooogya”!

Aboard the train, I took this picture of this highly polite staff, who was checking if people were alright. Very Japanese, and I love it.

You can literally feel your belly lighter when the train moves around, especially on curves, I downloaded a mobile app that use the phone’s GPS (app name: Speedbox) to check speed, and it was at 279 km/h (or 173mph) when I took this shot. I think another train was passing by at the time, and when this happens, it’s kinda awesome to see how quick the trains traverse each other.

We arrived hungry in Kyoto, it was about 11 AM, so we went straight to a converyor belt sushi restaurant at the Kyoto station.

Thanks to GPS metadata (post about this soon, I promise), I can tell this restaurant is called Sushi No Musashi 寿しのむさし 京都駅八条口店, and it’s actually a very good choice if you arrive at Kyoto station.

Weather was shitty when we arrived, it was pouring a lot, we took our time to settle up in the new hotel (which was nearby the station), and wake up super early on the day next, because we were going to visit Fushimi Inari Taisha Honden (Sanctuary) 伏見稲荷大社 本殿, which is where our photo show starts. We were still jetlagged, so these photos were taken at 5:50 AM, and that was lucky because we could find the place not swarmed by tourists yet.

I’ll never pardon myself for not getting this straight and aligned. I want to crop it so bad, but I need to show it with the film border to expose how much of a mediocre photographer I am.

Pretty much rare to find it empty like that.

There were a couple of other photographers, potentially also jetlagged, who were going crazy with these empty shots, I was one of them, and I made friends with two of them, one using an analog Leica, and another one using a digital one: that must say something…

I love the colors CineStill 400D gave me. The vibrance was perfect, I made literally no color manipulation on Negative Lab Pro on these.

Alright! That’s the end of Kyoto 1, stay with me, because Kyoto 2 is even better!