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.
With all this in mind, here is my tentative gear list for the trip, based on my prior experience:
. It is bulkier and heavier that my 5D Mark II, but fast autofocus and much better low-light performance of the 
, 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 
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 
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.
.”
I believe that a sense of entitlement is quite contagious and counter-productive in many fields. I my spheres of academic research, teaching, photography and kendo, for example, it is incredibly easy to take for granted the tremendous benefits that my work as a professor afford to my pursuit of photography, through taking me to various interesting places around the world for conferences, providing me with time and incentives to learn about the state-of-the-art imaging techniques and hardware, etc. The same can be said about, kendo, where we have a luxury of an incredible level of personalized instruction, even by Japanese standards (perhaps, especially by Japanese standards).
I plan to use the 
I am continually amazed that my three-year old daughter is enjoying some of the same cartoon characters that I grew up with, even though we came to know them in different cultural settings and in different countries. One particularly interesting character is Cheburashka, “an animal unknown to science,” who accidentally finds himself in Moscow and befriends a Crocodile, who works at the zoo as a crocodile. The animated movies about Cheburashka were originally made in Soviet Union in the 1960’s and 70’s and, after much copyright controversy, are currently produced by both South Korean and Japanese companies. 
I think one of the secrets of this character’s popularity and longevity is that the central theme of the stories about him is friendship. In Japan, the term moai refers to a small group of close friends outside of one’s work and family. Dan Buettner, in his book about world’s healthiest and happiest people called “
Rolf Potts, the author of “