Of all the temples in Karnataka, I’ve been fascinated most by the ones built by the Hoysala Dynasty. The Keshava temple at Somnathpur (some 35 km from Srirangapatna) is one of the finest examples of the Hoysala architecture. Though smaller than its cousins at Belur and Halebidu, it is by no means a lesser spectacle. The intricacy of the stonework makes these temples worth their weight in gold; indeed they are comparable to an ornate, filigreed craft of a goldsmith.

p.s. The picture has been post processed somewhat differently from the usual contrast-saturation corrections that I subject my pictures to. It was generated by applying “tone-mapping” to the 48-bit tiff output, which was extracted from the camera’s raw.