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The Main Wihan and Friends

After climbing the 306 stairs to get to the main entrance of Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, you pay a small fee to get in (a dollar, maybe two) and if you're anything like me, you pay another small fee for some ice cream from the store that's conveniently placed at the top of the stairs next to the ticket booth. It was delicious, but more importantly, it was cold!

 

In Thai temples a Wihan is the shrine hall that contains the principal Buddha images, usually one large statue, and many smaller statues. It is the assembly hall where monks and laypeople congregate.

 

It's the structure with the highest roof in this photo. I'm not exactly sure what all the other smaller structures are. I think one of them is a shrine for the hermit that lived in this place before the temple was built. (it has a crazy story, which I'll explain in the photos to come)

 

This area was very busy, with a constant flow of people, occasionally stopping to take photos, or pose for a photo. I thought it would make for an interesting timelapse, making the flow of people look even more like a river, and I also knew that if I took enough photos from the same position, I could "erase" all the people using the mean stacking mode in photoshop, which is how I made this image.

 

I managed to get 126 photos before someone bumped into my tripod (and even prevented a few collisions before that) which wasn't bad considering how crowded it was at the time.

 

Here's a quick and easy Photoshop tutorial of the process I use to make time stacks. youtu.be/oTfp47jTzWc

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Uploaded on September 23, 2018
Taken on November 3, 2017