On The Streets: Kyoto, Japan

This is my visual guide to street photography in Kyoto, once the ancient capital of Japan. Kyoto is where you’ll find a much more traditional Japan with historic wards, thousands of bright red Torii gates, golden temples and towering bamboo forests.

Following our 15 day trip across Japan, this post picks up where we left off; leaving Osaka on an abnormally late train north to Kyoto. I was very excited to visit Kyoto especially to see the more ‘traditional’ side of Japan. We spent four nights here mostly checking out the most well-known sites such as Arashiyama Bamboo Forest, Fushimi Inari Taisha and the Gion district but we also found plenty of time to explore quieter streets.

My ‘On The Streets’ series takes us across the world with short posts focusing solely on my unique style of travel and street photography. The series will never be complete but here’s a look at where I’ve covered so far:

Newcastle, United Kingdom
Bangkok, Thailand
Faro, Portugal
Palermo, Sicily
London, United Kingdom
Osaka, Japan
Kyoto, Japan
Tokyo, Japan

Trapani, Sicily
Mazara del Vallo, Sicily
Vilnius, Lithuania
Herceg Novi, Montenegro
Singapore
Budapest
Malta

Ok, now it’s time for a virtual wander around the streets of Kyoto. This is my take on street photography in Kyoto with the Fujifilm X-T5.

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY IN KYOTO

THE DETAILS

We spent four nights in total in Kyoto; three nights at the Hotel Forza Kyoto Shijo Kawaramachi which was pretty well situated before spending just one night at Hotel The M’s before taking the shinkansen to Tokyo.

Kyoto was probably my favourite place to photograph out of the three cities we visited in Japan. I have barely scratched the surface with Japan but Kyoto had that uniquely historic Japanese feel within its architecture, its Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples as well as its proximity to nature. I’ve never seen so many Japanese maples in one place. In contrast however Kyoto was far more modern in places than I anticipated; Kyoto Station may well be one of my favourite train stations in the world.

A word of warning, I haven’t managed to get anywhere near finishing off my Japan photos so think of this as perhaps a not quite complete collection of photos from our time in Kyoto. Also, I was away with the family so the images are really just snapshots of our day to day explorations rather than having time to specifically focus on photography. I’ll add more photos as and when I get chance!

On The Streets: Osaka
On The Streets: Tokyo

As I stated in my Osaka post, my top two lenses used to capture Kyoto were the Fujifilm 18-55mm f/2.8-4 and the Fujifilm 35mm f/1.4.

You can find a detailed post on everything I took to Japan right here!

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All of the colour shots are JPEGs, pretty much straight from the Fujifilm X-T5, with my Classic Negative recipe. I used RAW + JPEG which meant I could convert every single image to my Acros recipe and see Japan in glorious black and white.