TWIT Photo – New Video

The new video from TWIT is up now. I hope you enjoy it!  Among many other things we discussed:

• My friend Lisa Bettany is not doing the show any more on a regular basis
• The future of digital photography
• Instagram integration (BTW “100 Cameras in 1” made #1 in Photography for iPad!) (iTunes link)
• Lens correction in photoshop and lightroom
• And, in general, you can get to know a bit about Mikkel Aaland

Daily Photo – Evening at the Summer Palace

I didn’t make it to the Summer Palace until my final evening in Beijing, and I was graced with a delicate sunset.

This place is also called the “Gardens of Nurtured Harmony” and it rests on top of “Longevity Hill”, a very Chinese-folk-sounding name. What is kind of interesting is that this entire area was manmade, and the huge hill was built out of dirt when they excavated the man-made lake!

It is a truly beautiful place, as you can plainly see. I could not have asked for a better place to explore on my last night in China.

The Original Photo

Now, you guys know I don’t normally do this… and don’t get used to it, but I thought you might like to see the original photo. Sometimes the colors come out so wild that people just surely assume I am “painting” in some wonderful color… but as you can see this is not the case. By the way, the reason I don’t do this very often is not be elusive — just I am incredibly, insanely busy and this all takes extra time…

Now, of course the HDR helped here a lot to bring out better color and all the detail in the palace, as well as bringing back the evening “haze” that was really there… Beijing does have a bit of a constant haze problem, to say the least… and the fast exposure there to the right (I believe it was the -1) did not pick it up… but the color of the sky is just about right.