Koi Ponds

In which I trawl my photo library for koi and post them here.  

The play of light on a koi pond is a requirement for a good koi photo. Orange koi seem to be the most common and I've only seen orange and yellow, some with white patches. The rarest koi are blue, black or white, apparently. I mostly value the play of light on water without which the koi are completely invisible.

I recently saw a documentary about specialist koi collectors who spend untold thousands of dollars on a single fish. The record price for a koi named "S Legend" was $1.8 million USD. S Legend was raised in Japan and the buyer may have been Chinese. Koi are sensitive to the cleanliness of water unlike their catfish cousins who abide in murky pondbeds.

In Chinese mythology there is a story that a koi kept trying to leap to the top of a 100-foot waterfall. After many, many attempts, it finally managed the enormous leap. The gods witnessed this feat and rewarded the koi by turning him into a dragon. A Confucian lesson in rewards for perseverence. But I really have no idea where the story comes from. Perhaps not Confucius.