Just posted a series of photos of cormorant fishing, known in Japanese as ukai, from Uji near Kyoto.  They were taken on a visit there several years ago.  Ukai is a traditional - reportedly going back 1300 years - method in which cormorants or u (pronounced like, "ooh") are used at night to catch river fish such as ayu.  The fisherman, or usho, controls about a dozen cormorant birds on leashes from a long, wooden boat.  A basket of wood is set afire and dangled over the river; the light is said to attract fish.  The cormorants instinctively catch fish in their mouths, but the rings around their necks are sized so that only small fish can be swallowed.  The larger ones become stuck in the bird's throat, and are removed by the usho after the cormorant is pulled into the boat.

You can buy a ticket to watch this spectacle from a yakatabune covered boat.  A beer at one of the rustic establishments that line the river provides a refreshing prelude on a sultry summer evening.  Because it was so dark and flash was forbidden, I only pulled out my camera as something of a, "what the heck" afterthought.  They were just about the least photo friendly conditions I could imagine - night, no flash, no light but that basket of fire, a moving subject, and shooting from a boat that's also moving.  Oh, and the birds are black.  I just set the camera to high ISO and ended up taking quite a few shots.  Our usho, a woman, was clearly very skilled at controlling her team.  It was thrilling to watch, and the atmosphere on the water around that basket of fire on a hot night was in some way magical.  My expectations for the photos were low, however, and I had many other photos to process from that Kyoto trip, so the ukai shots sat for ages with me just occasionally wondering if perhaps I could do something with them one day.  Now I've finally taken some time to go through them.  They are obviously flawed, yet there was a certain mystery I remember from that evening on the river, and I wonder if some of these photographs perhaps capture at least a hint of that.