Taken with a 61MP resolution specialist camera, this dark and moody vision of a Japanese temple transforms a postcard favorite into fine art​

Buddhist temples in Japan are major tourist attractions, and the most popular have been photographed literally millions of times. So if you're entering an image of a temple into a competition, it's going to be an uphill struggle to get noticed, especially within Japan itself.

Nonetheless, awards judges were drawn towards this shot by Rintaro Ukon, who's somehow managed to portray one of the country’s most familiar architectural wonders in a way that's more visual poetry than tourist snap.

Originally a country palace for the Fujiwara clan, Byodo-in’s Phoenix Hall was converted to a temple by Yorimichi Fujiwara to enshrine the Buddha Amida. Featured on Japan’s 10‑yen coin, it's one of the most photographed places in Japan today, and visitors queue daily to shoot it straight across the pond, to capture the full reflection in their lens.

Here, Ukon leans into that convention but innovates in terms of technical settings and composition, to create something quite different from the norm. This highly original shot won him Silver in the Architectural/Historic category of this year's Tokyo Foto Awards.

Technical execution

Silent Elegance was taken with a 61MP Sony Alpha 7R V paired with a 16mm lens, shot at 1/200 sec and f/7.1. It's a great combination for high‑resolution architectural work. The A7R V’s back‑illuminated full-frame sensor offers extremely fine detail and wide dynamic range, allowing Ukon to hold both the deep shadows in the eaves and the specular highlights in the gilded ornaments without obvious clipping.

At 16mm on full frame, the field of view is a dramatic ultra‑wide, yet the building remains free of obvious converging verticals, suggesting careful camera height, precise levelling and perhaps some perspective correction in post.

The medium aperture of f/7.1, meanwhile, hits a practical sweet spot: enough depth of field to keep foreground, temple and distant treeline all crisp, while avoiding the softening that can creep in from diffraction at smaller f‑stops on a 61MP sensor.

In terms of composition, Ukon anchors the frame on the central hall, using the bridge on the left and the extended wing on the right as vectors to guide the eye inward. His lens is positioned just high enough for the base of the hall to sit above its own reflection, avoiding the overlapping lines that often muddle pond shots at temples.

The calm mirror surface is then punctured by a single koi drifting into the lower left, its wake forming a subtle S‑curve that breaks the symmetry at exactly one point.

Small though it may be, it's precisely this storytelling accent that – to my eyes – lifts the image from a sterile exercise into a magical scene. The living subject “stirs the silence”, in Ukon's words, giving the frame a temporal moment, rather than a purely static study.

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