Sun setting over Lantau Island
Now that was a quick 7 months and a bit in Hong Kong. Whenever I go over Stone Cutter island bridge, I can never help staring at the hill with colonial houses on it overlooking Hong Kong Island. For me at least, that would be the best location with a view of Hong Kong Island. I’ve always wanted to go there in the evening and set up my tripod to take a panorama at location (22.31530, 114.14248). On my last weekend there, I found that that place is a Naval base, hence off limits to casual passerbys. Its amazing what a little check on Googlemaps and streetview can tell you. So its time to search for an alternative. I’ve shot quite a number of pictures of Hong Kong, and I have not had a good panorama of the place yet, so this is an obvious last project before leaving.
The new ICC tower in Kowloon, next to the waterfront
Finally settled on West Kowloon Waterfront as the second best alternative just above Western Harbour tunnel. Again, best time for me to shoot was between 6:30pm to about 8:00pm. At this time of the year, the sun will start to set at 7pm and there will be two light show. One when the orange glow of the setting sun showers the subject with soft warm light and the second (which I think I like better) when the sun has set below the horizon and the skies in the background are in a dark shade of blue and foreground lighted by orange neon lights. I’m pretty happy with the resulting panorama made up of up to 15 frames of 12 megapix pictures stitched in Photoshop. Heres a sample:
Hong Kong Island at sunset: glowing in the evening sunlight
Hong Kong Island at early night: Moon on the left, remains of daylight on the right.
Good way to end my short stay in Hong Kong. Now signing off, soon I will report back in a new location.
Construction ahead...
I’m in the progress of moving from a website that is blocked in China, to a new webhost. The move will be painful as there’s no way for me to retrieve most of my current data from the previous FTP server. Let’s see after a few weeks!
Update: Migration completed! We are now live off the new server. Hope you will be able to see a little performance increase. For me, as I’m able to access this when I’m in China, I should have a lot more flexibility to post more in the future.
Coming back from those two provinces, I ended up with 12 rolls of film, 1200 pictures from the DSLR and 1500 pictures from the point and shoot. As you can imagine it takes a long long long time to sort and categorize them and delete the junk shots. I have spent a week developing the rolls of film, and I can only go thru 200 pictures a night maximum for the DSLR as they are all shot in RAW NEF format and needs some kind of adjustments in Lightroom.
So bear with me for a moment. I will put up the pictures on the postings and will announce on Twitter or Jaiku once I get them ready. Post processing sucks. But there are some nice pictures there!!!
This will also mark the start of me putting watermarks with copyright logo on the pictures, even though they are all small. Read about how pictures are reused without permission and just wanted to be sure I’m protected as much as possible.
Planning to label the posts with the following:
- *Incomplete* means I have not started on it yet
- *Partial* means that I have loaded pictures from some but not all my cameras yet. Soon to have more pictures coming up.
General
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d300, dslr, film, GR, guangxi, jaiku, jiuzhaiguo, mountain, NEF, nikon, point, postprocessing, ricoh, shoot, sichuan, siguniang, twitter
The newspaper here says that it is the strongest typhoon to hit Taiwan this year. On the map it looks like its big enough to engulf the whole country, and the time this will happen will be tomorrow, Monday. It has been raining the whole day today and occasionally there are strong gusts of wind, where umbrellas get entangled. If it gets any worse, that means I will get a holiday on Monday!
All doors are braced for the strong winds expected on Sunday
This is interesting. I hold a standard Y class economy ticket which I bought last minute at Taipei Taoyuan aiport (TPE) but in Taipei they put me in the lounge as well. So when I checked in today at Narita, I asked them what made me so special (of course I didn’t mind the lounge, beats sitting in the common area next to someone taking a nap across 4 seats) and she told me that’s because I bought the most expensive economy ticket (i.e. at full fare!). Yeah, so I think I might have paid something like 2000USD to fly one way from Taipei to Tokyo to Shanghai. 2 legs, 1 direction. So I’m going to drink all the wine I can get my hands on. Where is the caviar!!!
I’m in Taipei today, and seems that Typhoon Kalmaegi has been pummeling Taiwan for the last 2 days. I do see some light to medium rain, and occasional strong winds, but compared to what I have seen in the past trips to Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines, this didn’t look too much like a TYphoon from where I am in Taipei. News says that there has been some casualties, but I’m already planning to wake up early tomorrow and if there’s a little respite from the rain I might go out for a morning jog. Staying over near the office at NeiHu across the river from Taipei city. Morning jog consists of running 1km to the river and then running along the park across from the city airport. Nice run. Too bad I can’t cover more than 5km now.
Continue reading 'Taipei & Typhoon Kalmaegi'»
Based on recommendations from colleagues, went to check out a shopping centre near Shanghai’s main railway station that has only mobile phone shops. Its located at the junction of Meiyuan rd and tianmu rd. Just across the road from Pacific Dept Store and Xinmei East Hotel. The place has a name but too bad its in Chinese so it is as good as ‘the building’ to me.
Prices here are cheaper than elsewhere in Shanghai where I have compared, using Nokia N82 as my control phone. Its May 2008 and cheapest for the new Black version is 3050 rmb and I’m fairly confident to hit 3000 rmb cash price. This place is an insane 5-6 floors of identical phone shops. And I think 10% of all prepaid cards are here too, judging from the stock each shop holds.
I didn’t feel anything, but colleagues mentioned that the office building was swaying. Thought it was nothing big compared to what I feel in Taipei and Tokyo, but now I’ve heard there’s a 7.5 earthquake in Szechuan Province, which is far far away from here. Will have to listen to the news to see how devastating it was…
| Magnitude |
7.5 |
| Date-Time |
|
| Location |
31.084°N, 103.267°E |
| Depth |
10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program |
| Region |
EASTERN SICHUAN, CHINA |
| Distances |
90 km (55 miles) WNW of Chengdu, Sichuan, China
150 km (95 miles) WSW of Mianyang, Sichuan, China
360 km (220 miles) WNW of Chongqing, Chongqing, China
1545 km (960 miles) SW of BEIJING, Beijing, China |
| Location Uncertainty |
horizontal +/- 6.5 km (4.0 miles); depth fixed by location program |
| Parameters |
NST=206, Nph=206, Dmin=>999 km, Rmss=1.61 sec, Gp= 29°,
M-type=moment magnitude (Mw), Version=7 |
| Source |
|
| Event ID |
us2008ryan |
Was wondering… since tri-x in rodinal looks so good and imparts that atmosphere of the photojournalists in the 60s, why would anyone be so lazy to use a DSLR in a wedding. Of course, most couples probably can’t tell the difference between digital and film, as long as you crank up the saturation a couple of notches and scale down the 12mpix image into a 640×480 web JPEG. And in terms of convenience, an auto everything DSLR with whatever lens and flash on bounce and diffusing dome would do the trick.
But what the hell, all talk and no action, so for my own sister’s wedding, I thought since she already has a professional photographer, why not go back in time. Brought a Nikon S2 paired with a Voigtlander 21mm Skopar lens, Leica M6 with 50mm summicron, and a third rangefinder, an Leica M2 with 35mm summicron ASPH to the wedding. The rule was, Tri-X for all shots, except for dinner when its my favourite Neopan 1600. All black and white. For safety measures, I brought a Voigtlander 35mm f1.2 Nokton ASPH. And for portraits, why not Fuji’s GA645i. 4 cameras with me. Swapping from one to another…
I have with me right now 6 rolls of 135 film and 2 rolls of 120. Will be processing them in my darkroom in Shanghai and the labs recommended by a fellow photographer. Here are some of the results…
This terminal has been opened for a month already, and since all my flights were to Japan using ANA (they move to the new terminal end of April 2008), this is the first time I’m using the new terminal. The layout is fresher, but probably not as thought out as other airports. Anyway, not the purpose of my current post. Wifi points with the SSID “spia-guests” are available everywhere in the terminal (at least the check in and waiting lounge). Wifi using that point is free and all you have to do is to bring up the browser and click on the button in
the centre. Don’t worry if the page is all in Chinese, there’s only one button to click.
Here I am listening to a tune on the iPod touch, typing out an entry to this site to be sent when I land, while my flight circles over the pacific ocean just outside the bay of Tokyo. We have made two loops so far and slowly descending, definitely the sign of being put on hold, whatever the terminology for that is. Funnel?
Flew over some nice geographical features over west japan, including a potshot of kansai airport island, some volcanic looking features, but Tokyo is very cloudy today. Mount fuji cannot be seen although I know it should be roughly there. Watched An Inconvenient Truth last night and the view from the skies takes ok a different meaning sometimes. Is that town going to be under the water in 50 years? How are all these urban features affecting the weather in ever little ways? Ok no time to think about this. Time to land, and the stewardess is already wondering why I’m typing out an email during the landing procedures.
Travelling along a highway right now en route to Xian and just some observations and some do’s and dont’s.
- Don’t reverse your car on the highway once you missed your exit. Pretty common sense but any trip along the chinese highway and you’re bound to meet with one guy doing just that. Ok, the emergency lane will do but its plain bad habit.
- Don’t spit out of the windows. When in the bus don’t spit in the bus either. If you need to regurgitate your phlegm, swallow it. Else wait till you get to a rest stop.
- Do car car pool. This has to be the funniest thing on the road. A small truck stacked on the bed of a medium truck and in turn on a larger truck. I have seen two so far today, 3 trucks in one. If it saves petrol or diesel, why not?
- Don’t sleep while driving. Ok this one is quite serious, saw a car flipped over a couple of times. Not really sure what happened, but I guess sleeping at the wheel brings something similar.
Brought back from Tokyo an Epson X970, basically a Japanese rebadged V700 film and document scanners. Firstly kudos to ANA airlines for handling it properly. I know that they put duties on scanners and many other items in China but there’s nothing on the web that specifies how much except I know its 20%.
Declared it and was charged 20% or a maximum value of 1000 rmb. Basically whatever your stuff costs its 200 rmb. Of course the maximum value for every type of item is different. So go on, buy your high end stuff and bring them into China.
Yup. Something like the official day of spring today. So there’s no work here in Tokyo, and spent the whole day out in Nakano having tako balls, charcoal fired unagi and the occasional Fujiya here and there (and checking office mails at the same time). Bought a lens case at the junk corner. Raining the whole day, and made the whole day feel miserable. After that its time for Shinjuku just to walk around a little here and there. Was looking for small hard cases for 120 films since they seem quite fragile after exposure.
Flying back to Shanghai this Saturday after spending 3 weeks out here in Tokyo.
My first earthquake in Tokyo. Woke up at about 2am on Saturday morning by a little shake. Nothing compared to the one I experienced in Taipei a couple of years back, but this one was still a first. Nothing like a first! Here’s a copy and paste of the details from the USGS website.
Earthquake Details
Magnitude 5.2
Date-Time
* Friday, March 07, 2008 at 16:54:56 UTC
* Saturday, March 08, 2008 at 01:54:56 AM at epicenter
* Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 36.474°N, 140.420°E
Depth 35 km (21.7 miles) set by location program
Region NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
Distances 15 km (10 miles) NNW of Mito, Honshu, Japan
80 km (50 miles) SSW of Iwaki, Honshu, Japan
110 km (65 miles) NE of TOKYO, Japan
120 km (75 miles) E of Maebashi, Honshu, Japan
Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 8.9 km (5.5 miles); depth fixed by location program
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