KOE HTAT KYI BUDDHA IMAGE

BACKGROUND

Koe Htat Kyi (translated as “the nine-tiered pagoda” in English) is located on Bargayar Road, Sanchaung Township of Yangon (formerly known as Rangoon). It is the home of an enormous sitting Buddha Image. The Buddha Image at Koe Htat Kyi pagoda is also recignized as Atula Dipatti Maha Muni Thetkya Image. Chronologically, the image was built in August, 1905. The pagoda was erected on the 14-acres compound of the Bargayar monastery. The Buddha image is a 72 feet in height.

The pavilion has a nine-tiered roof and hence it is generally referred to as the nine-tiered pagoda. In the past it was a wooded hermit for monks, quiet and peaceful. There are many monasteries, devotional halls and an ordination hall in the compound. The Buddha Image was donated by U Kyin and Daw Nge San. There is a statue of donor U Kyin was put up by his son, U Hla Swe, to recognize the religious dedications his Dad had accomplished throughout his life.

SHOOTING AGAINST DRIZZLING RAIN

It was a Sunday. I asked my best friend, Wynn Thein, to wake me up early in the morning because I wanted to shoot Koe Htat Kyi pagoda before I left Rangoon. Wynn Thein had given me a call at 5:00 sharp. Actually, I was awake for the whole night reading photography articles online. Myanmar internet is notorious. Yes, the connection is workable only after the midnight. Of course everyone sleeps, so the bandwidth becomes more promising. Undoubtedly, late night is the best time for me to perform data mining.

There was drizzly rain on our way to pagoda. I thought it would not have been a setback for our shooting since Koe Htat Kyi is an indoor Buddha image. But when we arrived, the area was totally gloomy. And my honorable friend forgot to bring the tripod. Yeap, we could not shoot well due to insufficient light. Making hand held shots in low-light occasions is like buying a lottery ticket. The chances to achieve sharply focused pictures is very slight. Luckily the rain stopped at 7:00 so we made our move. It’s such a silent and peaceful place. I really love shooting there.

The archway on the entrance of Koe Htat Kyi Pagoda…

The hallway to the Buddha image…

The 72-feet enormous sitting Buddha at Koe Htat Kyi Pagoda…

The Buddha image was also known as Atula Dipatti Maha Muni Thetkya image…

The throne prepared for the preaching monks at ordination hall of the pagoda. There are weekly religious events during the Buddhist lent…

When the donor, U Kyin, passed away… his son erected the statue of U Kyin…

The guardians of the Buddha image… Burmese people believe that paying homage to these guardians protect them from harms and dangers…

The pagoda is constructed on the 14-acres compound of the Bargayar monastery…

Archboy

Nice job… cheers bro
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Archboy >> Thanks bro… I will try harder…
Hnin Wai

I really appreciate Ko Ye Lwin Oo for sharing those beautiful pictures! Please share with us if you have more photos which portray places and real people (no models) in Burma. I know you are very good at taking natural scenes.
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Hnin Wai >> Thanks for your kind words. I still have many photos to share. They will come batch by batch. Just that I couldn’t have enough time to write the descriptions…
http://www.wltstudio.com Wai Lin

Great photos, dude!
really proud of you…
keep working…
http://burmesemtv.com Linn

been a while I have been there… fabulous photos…
Su Hnin

all photos are great! i like the last one more…
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Wai Lin >> Thanks for the visit and comment…

@ Linn >> Long time no see, Ko Linn. How have you been? You really are a regular visitor of my blog. Thanks for spending your time, bro…

@ Su Hnin >> Thanks for your comment and visit, sis… I should have included the lion statue in the last one… I feel like going back Ygn and shoot again… :)
Nwe Ni

ေမာင္ေလး…
ပံုေလးေတြက စိတ္၀င္စားဖို႔ ေကာင္းတယ္… သူမ်ားနဲ႔ မတူတဲ႔ အေတြးနဲ႔ တစ္မ်ိဳးဆန္းေအာင္ ရုိက္ထားတာေလးက စိတ္၀င္စားဖို႔ ေကာင္းတယ္… ေနာက္လဲ အားေပးေနမယ္ေနာ္… ေက်းဇူးလဲ တင္ပါတယ္… ပံုေကာင္းေလးေတြ ၾကည့္ရလို႔ေလ။
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Nwe Ni >> မႏြယ္။ ေက်းဇူးဗ်ာ။ ခု ဘယ္မွာလဲ ဗ်။ မန္းေလး မွာလား။ ဘယ္ေတာ႔ မဂၤလာ ေဆာင္မွာလဲ။ ဓါတ္ပံု လာရိုက္ေပးမယ္ ေလဗ်ာ…။ ႀကိဳေျပာဦး။
Aung Pyae Soe

Wow… mite del…
http://lundgrenstudios.com Ted Calbazana

Hey Bro – wonderful shots of the big bhudda. I like images 2 and 3 very much. It’s very kind of you to share these with us. Beautiful construction.
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Aung Pyae Soe >> Thanks for the visit bro. I wish I could shoot professionally like you. :)

@ Ted Calbazana >> Thanks a lot for your kind comment and visit. As long as I hold my camera, there will be a lot more similar on my blog, bro. I promise. There are tens of thousands of interesting places in our land which I plan to share bit by bit…
Joe

Nice photos Ko Ye Lwin Oo. I detect a bit of shadow recovery processing (HDR?) in some of the photos. Yes?

A bit of a trivia for you. If you come across very good fortunes in life (the likes of Bill Gates) and you are given a choice to either build a very grand Buddha statue and a pagoda (called grand Ye Lwin Oo pagoda) or a state of the art Hospital/vocational training center (called Ye Lwin Oo hospital and skill training center for the poor) dedicated for the poor/underprivileged citizens to leave your legacy, which would you choose? Supposing you can choose only one for the sake of argument. :D
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Joe >> In response to your question, none of my photos here are HDR. I do HDR for fun. But not here. I have just condensed the saturation and richness of some colors in Adobe Lightroom. And the compound was newly painted when I was visiting there.

To be honest, I will choose the second option, bro. Why? I am just following my grandpa’s way. Do you know that TAVOY HOME FOR AGED is donated by my grandpa? It’s been many many years that my grandpa donate a certain percentage of his annual income to hospitals, home for aged and school of blind. So, I will continue doing these when it comes to my time.
thein s soe

လာေရာက္ အားေပးသြားပါတယ္…။ ပံုေတြ အကုန္လံုး ေကာင္းပါတယ္…။
Joe

About the HDR, I asked because recessed header ceiling of the Buddha statue was bright and colorful (usually they are dark and poorly lit) and thought some form of HDR processing may have squeezed out more dynamic range and shadow details out of the RAW files. I guess it was adequately lit to begin with then all the better. :D

I like your thinking on pagoda vs school. I feel Burma spend way too much $$ on pagodas for the sake of ego boosting (I am being a cynic here) than building the infrastructure. I feel there should be a balance (between spiritual good deed and present time physical well being).

I understand about following your grandpa’s legend. My dad was just a little soldier in Aung San’s BIA army that fought to free Burma from Colonialism (was recruited in Tavoy along with his good friend Sein Win who later became Prime Minister under Ne Win). Today, I am ashamed that I am not brave enough to fill his shoes to do what must be done to free present day Burma. :(
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Thein S Soe >> လာလည္တာ ေက်းဇူးဗ်ာ။ ေနာက္လဲ လမ္းႀကံဳႀကံဳ ၊ မႀကံဳႀကံဳ လာလည္ ပါဦးဗ်ာ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လဲ ပံုေကာင္းေတြ တင္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ ႀကိဳးစားေနမွာပါ…

@ Joe >> You are right, bro. Burma should have better health care scheme for the citizens. According to the teachings of Buddha, we should do good deeds for our next life. At the same time, we should also pay a great attention to the present situation and fill up those gaps of necessity. Oh, your Dad is soldier. My grandpa is a miner, bro…
စုလတ္

ဓါတ္ပံုေတြကိုၾကၫ္႔ၿပီး ခံစားမိတာ ျမန္မာျပည္ ကိုယ္စားျပဳ ဓါတ္ပံုေတြကို ရိုက္ေပး ေနသလိုလား လို႔ း)
ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေစ်းမွာဆို ပို႔စ္စကဒ္လို ၊ ဓါတ္ပံုလို ဟာေတြ ေရာင္းတယ္ေလ။ အဲ႔လိုမ်ိဳးနဲ႔ တူတယ္။ ဦးၾကင္ပါတဲ႔ ပံုရယ္ ၊ ဘုရားႀကီးကို ေရွ႕တၫ္႔တၫ္႔က ရိုက္ထားတဲ႔ ပံုရယ္ ၊ ေနာက္ဆံုး ပံုရယ္ ကိုအႀကိဳက္ဆံုးပဲ။ စုလတ္လဲ ဓါတ္ပံုေတြကို ႀကိဳက္တတ္သမားမို႔ ဒီကို မၾကာမၾကာ လာျဖစ္ေတာ႔မယ္ ထင္တယ္။
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ စုလတ္ >> လာလည္ၿပီး ခုလို အားေပးတာ ေက်းဇူးပါ ညီမ။ ျမန္မာျပည္ကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳႏိုင္တဲ႔ ဓါတ္ပံုမ်ိဳးေတာ႔ အကို႔ Blog မွာ မ႐ိွဘူး ထင္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ္႔ ျမန္မာ႔ဓေလ႔ ၊ ျမန္မာ႔ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ ကို အတတ္ႏိုင္ဆံုး ေဖာ္က်ဴးထားတဲ႔ အေရးအသားေတြကို ေတာ႔ ျမင္ေတြ႕ရမယ္ ထင္ပါတယ္။ ထပ္ၿပီး ပို၍ ေကာင္းသထက္ ေကာင္းတဲ႔ ပံုေတြ ႐ိုက္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ ႀကိဳစားသြားမွာပါ။ လမ္းႀကံဳရင္လဲ လာလည္ ဖို႔ ဖိတ္ေခၚပါတယ္။ အေပါင္းအသင္းေတြ ထဲက ျမန္မာျပည္ကို စိတ္၀င္စားတဲ႔ သူေတြကိုလဲ link ေလးေတြ မွ်ေ၀ေပးပါဦးဗ်ာ။
http://http:eaststone7.blogspot.com/ ၿဖိဳးေမာင္ေမာင္

အကို လာလည္သြားတယ္ ေနာ္။ အကို႔ blog ကိုစေတြ႕ေတြ႕ခ်င္းပဲ စိတ္ဝင္စားလို႔ တခါတည္း facebook မွာ add လိုက္တာ။ ဓါတ္ပံု ပညာကို ဝါသနာ ပါတာလဲ ပါတယ္။ ခဏခဏ ေတာ႔ လာၾကၫ့္ ျဖစ္တယ္။ ခုမွပဲ comment ေပးျဖစ္တာ။ ဆက္လက္ အားေပး ေနမယ္။ မသိတာ ေလးေတြ လဲ ေမးခြင့္ျပဳပါ။ အလုပ္လုပ္ရင္း ေလ့လာ သင္ယူေနသူ တစ္ေယာက္ အေနနဲ႔ ေပါ႔။
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ ၿဖိဳးေမာင္ေမာင္ >> ခုလို လာလည္တာ ေက်းဇူး ဗ်ာ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဒီထက္ မက ေကာင္းတဲ႔ ပံုေတြ တင္ႏိုင္ေအာင္ ႀကိဳးစားသြားမွာပါ။ မသိတာ ေမးလို႔ ရပါတယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ နားလည္ တတ္ကၽြမ္း တဲ႔ အပိုင္းဆို ေျပာျပဖို႔ ၀န္မေလး ပါဘူး ခင္ဗ်ား။
Akash Demo

Nice… very nice…!!! i want to photoshoot like u… :)
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Akash Demo >> Thks for ur visit and sincere comment. Photography is not hard. As long as you have passion, there always is space for you…
May Koe

ဒီလုိ ပံုေလးေတြ ေဖာ္ျပေပးတဲ့ အတြက္ ေက်းဇူးပါေနာ္။ ပံုေတြကုိ ၾကၫ္႔ရတာ မ်က္စိကုိ ေအးသြားေစပါတယ္။ ပံုေတြရဲ႕ အေရာင္အေသြး ကလဲ ဆဲြေဆာင္မႈ ရွိပါတယ္။ ေက်းဇူးပါရွင္။
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ May Koe >> အားေပးတာ ေက်းဇူးပါဗ်ာ…။ ထပ္႐ိုက္ ျဖစ္တာေလးေတြ ရိွရင္ စဥ္ဆက္မျပတ္ ေဖာ္ျပ ေပးသြားမွာပါ…။