Temple Of The Tooth

Alakajay, Black And White Photography, Photography

ajmonoDSC4629

Temple of the Tooth, Kandy – Sri Lanka

The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic or Sri Dalada Maligawa in my mother tongue Sinhalese, is a sacred Buddhist Shrine situated in the city of Kandy in Sri Lanka, a World Heritage Site.
The octagonal building, the main focus here and the surrounding structures have history dating back to the early 1500’s and as much as it has been a site of religious worship it was also home to the last Kings of Sri Lanka before the British finally managed to do what the Portuguese and the Dutch failed to do by overthrowing the Kingdom of Kandy and ruling the entire Island by 1817.
(For those of you who read this far I’d also state a minor fact that Kandy was also the city of my birth so it holds a special place in my heart.)

Epiphany

Black And White Photography, Emilio, Photography

Nelson Wheel

So, I imagine I will have to explain the title of this post. For those of you who do not speak English, or do not speak it well (which is, sadly, most of us), an epiphany is a sudden insight into something, My epiphany, or sudden insight, came to me as I was looking at a multitude of other photos by other photographers. And I came to realize that I usually stand back from the subjects of my photos. I am an observer, distanced from my subject. I very rarely get right up in your face. But I found that the images that most stayed with me, left an impression, were those that involved the spectator in the scene. I thought f I had something, some object, in the foreground, as if obstructing your view, you would need to lean over or around that object. So I played hooky from work last Friday and drove down to Nelson, Nevada- which is about 1 hour southeast of us- with my wife and my camera.

This was my favorite image of the day. It is an epiphany that I will work on to perfect and to use as one might use any other tool in their camera bag.

There is a color version , if you care to view and compare.

Or not!