As I earlier posted from our trip to Miyajima an island near Hiroshima, Japan, one of the main photographic attractions is the large main gate of the Itsukushima Shrine (厳島神社、宮島). It's off the coast in the intertidal zone, so when the tide is in, it's in the water and really pretty. There's a nice daytime shot of it at high tide at the end of this post, and on another post, some night shots.

Perhaps it's just the geek in me, but I think there's a certain interest to it even at low tide. I like to see how things work, and how they're built, and, of course, it's easier to get close to it when it's not surrounded by eight feet of water.

I got up early the morning after the Kousuke Atari concert, and was delighted to find that it was a very low tide, with up to a quarter mile of extra land exposed. It was occasionally muddy, but mostly just damp sand and rocks, so I could freely walk out and wander around. The guy walking his dog in the shot above was likely just using the opportunity of a low tide to take a shortcut.

There were large areas of light-green seaweed that looked like grass from a distance, but up close, it looked more like small squares of slimy paper. It's quite tasty.

The intertidal zone also had a lot of large sandbanks, which are entirely under water at high tide, but at low tide create little lakes.

The gate itself is quite large, although you don't get a sense for really how large until you get right up to it.

This shrine (and the whole island, for that matter) are one of the most famous tourist spots in Japan, but it was miraculously uncrowded the whole time we were there, as if it was our own private resort. During my stroll this morning, I saw less than a dozen others, including some guy at the edge of the water who, I presume, was looking for clams.

There was a steady stream of water still flowing outward, which I thought at the time meant that the tide was still going out. Had I thought about it even a little, I would have realized that it wasn't the tide going out (the tide was already out), but an actual stream that likely originated in the mountains. It wasn't very deep or wide, but sufficiently both that it was difficult to cross wearing only street shoes.

The shine itself is almost entirely over the intertidal zone.

I like the clouds in this last picture. Despite the morning's overcast, the clouds were thin so things were quite bright, making exposures a challenge (for me, at least).

Continued here...