My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
During my second visit to Yu Yuan Gardens, the light was much more conducive to photography than during my first visit two days ago: diffused sunlight through slightly close cover instead of harsh mid-afternoon sun.
Since I have already seen the gardens themselves, I ended up taking many more photos of tourists taking selfies with their smartphone. This seems to be a universal preoccupation and could probably make an interesting focal topic for travel photography.
I find Shanghai most photogenic at nighttime, when cooler temperature removes some of the haze from the air and multicoloured lights illuminate everything from the skyscrapers of Pudong to the souvenir shops of Nanjing Road. While I generally prefer converting the street scenes to monochrome, the nighttime shots sometimes benefit from the crazy palette.
Pudong, the “new city” side of the Shanghai is incredibly picturesque at night, when viewed from the opposite side of the Huangpu river, the Bund. In the morning, the sun illuminates the city from the Pudong side, so I wanted to explore how the Bund would look like in this light, and also take some photos of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower up close. It turned out that the smog caused by humidity and pollution is so heavy that even when the sun was directly behind me, the contrast was incredibly low.
I boosted both the contrast and saturation in post-processing as much as I reasonably dared, without sacrificing realism of the scene. Another thing that required quite a bit of processing was cloning out sensor dust, which always becomes visible, usually in the areas of flat colour (e.g. the sky), when the lens is stopped down to f/11 or higher f-numbers.
The flower and insect market is the most exotic shopping place that I have visited in Shanghai. Crickets that are kept in small plastic containers with mesh tops make the indoor marketplace incredibly noisy. The crickets themselves are not easy to photograph because of the containers, but the customers make fascinating subjects.
Generally, the insect market and the neighbouring “antiques” market on Dongtai Road are overwhelmingly chaotic. The shop owners mostly do not object to having their pictures taken. They almost never speak English, and I do not speak Chinese, but smiling and pointing to the camera works very well and usually results in them nodding in approval.
The backstreet scenes in Shanghai are so multicoloured (not in a good way) that I find it useful to convert the photos to black-and-white (or other monochrome palette).
For taking the iconic night shot of Shanghai skyline, my plan was to place the camera with a 70-200 mm lens on a tripod and take a long exposure shot. However, during my first evening in the city, I carried only the 35 mm lens and no tripod.
It quickly became apparent that the ship traffic on the Huangpu rive in front of the colourful skyline was so heavy, with huge barges and bright tour boats constantly crossing the field of view, that a long exposure shot would render them as trails of light. Moreover, the panorama of the Pudong district is so wide, that even a 35 mm lens could not capture it all.
I will definitely return with a tripod to take a long exposure shot, as well as a video of the constantly changing light show, but I will also try a wider lens (16-35 mm) as well as some vertical shots of individual buildings.
Photos taken from airport terminal windows out of sheer boredom are often boring, which is not surprising. Sometimes making a window reflection a prominent element of the picture can add some interest.
I took this shot with my iPhone, going for a”double exposure ” effect. The problem with this type of image is that the dynamic range between the brightly lit scene outside and the dark interior scene in the reflection is too high for the camera sensor. In this case, instead of pulling the shadows in post-processing, I focussed on the pattern of the reflection.
E-books have obvious advantages for travelers, as one can carry many of them on a single device such as a tablet or a smartphone. However, conventional, paper-based travel guides, still have their place. In particular, I like to be able to read as my airplane is taxying to the takeoff position and before the “you can use your electronic devices” announcement is made. Having said this, for my new destinations, I prefer electronic versions of travel books.
For my current trip to Shanghai, I am bringing a hard copy that already travelled with me to China three years ago.
I do not have a specific photography agenda for my upcoming trip to Shanghai. I will have only a couple of days available for photography, but the destination is so exotic that I want to take enough gear to not be limited in the types of shots I can take. At the same time, I plan to carry most gear with me as I wonder around the city, so excessive weight can easily become a limiting factor itself.
. It is bulkier and heavier that my 5D Mark II, but fast autofocus and much better low-light performance of the 1D X really tip the metaphorical scale. If I had a 5D Mark III
, it would have been a perfect compromise for travel.
.This is the heaviest lens that I plan to take. Leaving it at home would save a lot of weight and space, but this lens is incredibly versatile. In fact, most of my best photos are taken with it. Besides, one type of shot that I do plan to take is a night-time cityscape, similar to the one from Yokohama (above), and this lens is the perfect one for this job.
. This is currently my favourite walk-around lens. I was debating wheteher to take a 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM lens
instead, but I am willing to sacrifice its zoom and image stabilization for incredible low-light performance, shallow depth of field as well as physical size and weight of the 35mm f/1.4L.
for close-up shots of architectural details, like the shot from the Forbidden City below.
. I have a slightly different tripod from the one in the link, but carbon is the key for saving weight.
. Mine is an older model from the one in the link.
The term “entitlement” has gained some negative connotations in recent years, as many people, at least in North America, where I live, are abusing the opportunity to customize their circumstances to suit their particular needs, as Malcolm Gladwell describes this phenomenon in “Outliers: The Story of Success
I agree with Jon Acuff, the author of “Do Over
I am planning to take headshots of colleagues from the Mathematics department for their website. My wife, who works there, and I met for lunch and explored possible locations and settings for the photo shoot.
The math building has huge windows that spans the entire wall facing the courtyard. Since the shoot will happen during daytime, I want to use this window as the main light source for the photos. Since the window is very large compared to the subject (a statistically-average math professor), the lighting that the window casts on the subject is very “soft”, i.e. the transitions between the light and the shadows are very gradual, which is typically flattering to the above-mentioned math prof (or any typical human being, for that matter.) I will use a white plastic card sticking out from an on-camera flash to create a catchlight in the subject’s eyes. This also has an added benefit of slightly filling in the shadows on the side of the face opposite from the window. Combining flash with window light is not an issue from colour-matching standpoint, since the flash is daylight-balanced.
I plan to shoot wide open, at f/2.8, or maybe slightly stopped down in order to blur the background, which will be just the interior of the mathematics building. I do not want to set up a paper or fabric background, since there are several alternatives offered by the interior itself: an abstract, brightly-colored mural (the window would provide a frontal light in this case – the easiest setup), a grey-coloured staircase receding into the distance (subject facing sideways from the window – the best background colour and most artistic lighting) or the exterior courtyard (subject facing mostly away from the window – nice edge light in this case, but a lot of fill-in flash required, which is not ideal.) I am curious to find out which background/lighting combination would be most popular among the math professors.
