In China

Well now I’m deep in China. I think it is my fourth or fifth time here. This time I’m going to visit many of the old haunts as well as try some new ones. As usual, if there are suggestions, let me know! 🙂

Daily Photo – Boy and Grandfather at Tiananmen Square

I was walking through Tiananmen on a white-out cloud day taking photos of people. I had on my earphones and was kind of drifting in and among the crowd. It’s a bit like being in a movie when you do this… anyway, I’m sure you’ve heard me mention it before, so I won’t go into details. It’s often a very nice way to make things timeless… to separate people and objects from their place and time.

These two were on the ground wrestling and having fun. I squatted about 15 feet away to take a photo, and they were most delighted!

Tea or Coffee?

Are you a tea person or a coffee person?

Daily Photo – Tiny Tea House

Once it got to be quite dark outside, I was dog-tired, so I retreated back into this little tea house to relax. There were so many ornate details and nic-nacs everywhere… It was very nice to zen-out, eat tea and snacks, and just sort of look around at all the little nooks and crannies.

After about half an hour, I had regained my wits and decided to set up for this quick shot to share it with you.

Thomas Hawk on Google Winning the War

Thomas Hawk put up a good article the other day… he points to an experiment I did and gives some other thoughts…

Clouds

Hey here’s a little note about Photoshop and stuff. I get this question from time to time… I do not take clouds from one photo and paste them into another photo. That’s a little over-the-top photoshop to me! I guess people ask why my clouds are always kind of crazy. I guess the best answer is that I am just patient. I just sit there and listen to my music and wait…wait…wait…

Daily Photo – Approaching the Forbidden City

These are the kinds of clouds I love… these high icy clouds that are pulled apart by fast winds like long, sinuous strands of silk. When the sun starts to go down, it makes them even more silky…

The Trouble With Tripods

Are you still having trouble with tripods in places… I sure do… but, here’s the question — does it discourage you from trying the next time? It doesn’t discourage me at all. I’m at about a 20% rejection rate, which isn’t so bad… it means I get to use a tripod in 80 out of 100 places I want to. But, if those 20 rejections were too discouraging and I stopped, then I never would have hit those 80 successes.

Daily Photo – The Beautiful Beijing Airport

This is a place where I never had trouble with a tripod. I didn’t need any special permission… everyone just left me alone. I think that in China everyone is basically scared to death of the authorities, so this means the authorities don’t really need to do much in the way of diligent “enforcement.” And, there seemed to be no rules against photography, so it was easy to go hog-wild in this beautiful airport.

This is another good reason to take your tripod with you on the plane… If it is checked down below, then there’s nothing to do but eat Chili’s Express or, the Chinese equivalent, KFC Express. (Yes, KFC is ALL OVER Asia for some reason…but some of you probably know this already!)

The Beautiful Beijing Airport

Photo Information

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• Date Taken2010-10-04 03:14:32
• CameraNIKON D3X
• Camera MakeNikon
• Exposure Time1
• Aperture6.7
• ISO100
• Focal Length19.0 mm
• FlashNo Flash
• Exposure ProgramAperture-priority AE
• Exposure Bias+2

People and Places

So I do love to take photos of people. I got a question on Google+, asking why I don’t take photos of people in Iceland. I guess the biggest reason is there is hardly anyone around! Sometimes I go days without seeing people… As opposed to China, for example, where there are people around everywhere!

Daily Photo – Colors in Beijing

It was pretty late in the evening and I was tired after shooting all day long. My assistant and I stopped at a tea house along the banks of a little lake to relax. We had a very nice serving girl that kept bringing us more and more food and drinks. I think she expected us to eat in a dainty way, but we most certainly did not.

She had a pleasant disposition about her, so I asked if I could take a quick photo.

Random Encounter!

I took this on my first evening in Beijing, and, of all things, I met Gernot here on the corner by chance! Gernot is a very interesting photographer that came to my workshop in Tokyo earlier in the year… and here he was just randomly! I’m jealous of him because he just took a motorcycle from Shanghai to Tibet on a photo-adventure… can you imagine? He’s been sharing some photos in the Clubhouse and it looks like a great time.

Daily Photo – Forbidden Corner

Two of the corners around the moat around the Forbidden City are exactly the same. The only difference is the direction they face. And, with bad luck, I started on the wrong corner, so that meant a not-so-short-runwalk to the other corner, and that is no small feat with something this huge. But, in terms of a long walk, at least there is something beautiful to look at along the way.

The Student Interview

Remember these? I never ran all three parts, so I will start that now.

See the rest of part 1 on Vimeo… At the time I uploaded that YouTube video, I was not yet a YouTube partner so I had to make it short… so you may want to fast-forward a bit through that Vimeo one there…

Daily Photo – Entering the Neo-Opera

This is a truly beautiful building. I sometimes feel like I am cheating… when the colors and textures and lines are already there, it just makes for such a pleasant shooting experience. But, when times are easy like this, it reminds me of when the situation is a non-stop struggle to get a good shot. I guess, like everything, it comes in waves…

Category Reminder

I’m usually pretty good about tagging the daily entries with categories.  If you see one that interests you, just click on the tag at the bottom.  For example, this one is in China, so clicking that will take you to all the China photos.  I only put up about 15 per page, so if you click “Previous” at the bottom, you’ll get another set of 15, and so on.

Daily Photo – Shopkeeper in Beijing on Steps

I carry around two cameras so I can get things like this.  I keep my main body affixed to my tripod with whatever lens fits the bill.  This is either a the 14-24 or the 28-300.  I keep my second camera with a prime — either the 50 or 85 prime.

I was taking photos of the festive street at dusk, and I noticed this shopkeeper out taking a rest.  I’ve always admired how people can rest in this position.  I can only sit in that position for about 15 seconds before I scream in agony and my patellas pop off at a hyperspeed tangent.

http://stuckincustoms.smugmug.com/Portfolio-The-Best/your-favorites/10668747_AuyBk#1329655537_bnBH

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.

Austin Airport Not Supporting Artists

This one angers me… especially since I am supposed to live in a city that respects and supports artists. Anyway, you won’t believe this story…

So, I was coming through the Austin airport many weeks ago, and in the PRIME spot at the bottom of the escalators is a huge light-up photo display. Inside, I saw a photo that looked HDRish and so I went over to investigate. Down in the corner, it said simply “photo by mapaolini.” So, I recognized that “name” because Mike had taken one of my workshops back in a 2010.

About a month later I saw Mike at the Austin photowalk during SXSW and congratulated him on getting his art up in the airport. He said, “What?”

And so then I got very very interested. After my most recent trip to Florida, I took this photo with my iPad while waiting for my baggage and sent it to Mike so he could see! We then got into a big email conversation while I was trying to figure out what happened… it was pretty much immediately obvious to me, but I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct.

So, get this:

1. Mike was never informed that his photo was in the airport
2. Mike was never paid a dime (placement like this should be worth several thousand dollars to the artist, especially if they are going to use it for many months)
3. Mike’s name is not even correct in the corner of the photo.  His name is not “mapaolini” – that is his Flickr codename!
4. They made the WORST CROP EVER.  See his original Flickr photo!

Any one of those things is annoying — but all of them together are just embarrassing for the airport and the city of Austin.

Mike did some detective work and called the airport, who said they got it from the Austin Tourism Bureau.  They said this is considered Non Commercial.  HORSE MANURE.  Is all art in the airport non-commercial?  Does no one get paid?  How much did they pay for that huge bronze of Barbara Jordan (who looks like she is waiting on her baggage)? How much did they pay for those gut-wrenchingly awful paintings above the checkin counter for American Airlines?

It’s an insult to Mike, and, by extension, to all photographers and artists in Austin. They know what they did, and I think it’s pretty lousy…

Daily Photo – High-Tech Dining in Beijing

Beijing has some of the funkiest restaurants in the world! I think that some of the interior designers and architects really take some risks to do all sorts of things with lighting, textures, and styles. It doesn’t always work, but I  think it works pretty well here.

This restaurant was right next to the opera (see my blog post on “Amazing Opera Discovery in Beijing“). This was also built inside one of the old imperial bans in this old sector of Beijing.

And, below is the photo that was taken next door at the opera just after the amazing dinner.