Monthly Photos　February 2019

Photos taken by ILCAA staff and associates are posted here once a month; most of them are taken during their field research in Asia and Africa.

(The copyright belongs to the photographers.)

Hardest task

In photographing inscriptions, we often encounter difficult cases where it is impossible to keep the distance enough between the object and the camera. When an inscription is located or relocated in a temple, it tends to be placed close to the wall. In many cases, a large inscription is enshrined in its own inscription shed, which generally have minimal size to install it.

In the last field trip we faced one of the hardest tasks we have ever experienced at the Old Palace of Shwebo, the hometown of Konbaung dynasty. Unusually, the inscription is installed diagonally to the walls of the shed. The innovation by the designer of the shed to save building materials—I could not find any other reasons because there is ample space around the shed—has created a tremendously difficult situation for photography. If the camera is set at the gateway of the shed, we can take photos only from an oblique direction. Because the inscription is about 3m height and about 2.5m width, we cannot flame the whole inscription from the position of the tripod as in the picture, even with a superwide-angle lens. We hardly accomplished the task by tilting the pole of tripod back so as to set the camera close to the very corner of the shed, and turning the monitor so as to operate the camera from the side.

24 DEC 2018
Bonsantuhlut Inscription Shed, Old Palace, Shwebo, Sagaing Region, Myanmar
Photograph by Hideo SAWADA