The Ancient Villages

As usual, this is about the pictures, so click on any of the images to see them larger.

During our stay in China, we stopped in several old, actually ancient villages. Not necessarily extremely ancient by Chinese standards, but very old by mine.

NOTE: I am terrible with ancient villages, ancient temples, ancient just-about-anything. Don't get me wrong, I really love being surrounded by - and shooting - really well-worn places. And every time I know that I will be in such places, I dutifully bring a pen and notebook to record the name of the place, a bit of the history, etc. Then I get there and find that I only care about the image possibilities. Within these pictures are images from multiple locations. I do not know their names (I could find out, but I actually don't care). I know this makes me a terrible traveloguer (probably not a word). My wife knows all of the names and the details. She was not consulted in the creation of this entry.

The Chinese ancient villages we visited were very different from the "ancient" villages you might visit in the US. At a historic village in the US there are smiling people dressed in period costumes with their hands out to sell you $5 bottles of water and tricorn hats. The villages we visited are actually still villages and many of the really, really old buildings of the village are still lived in and worked in. There was surprisingly little effort made to separate me from my money. In fact,the prevailing attitude seemed to be one of wishing we had never come in the first place. While I took a couple of pictures of people, they generally made it plain that picture taking was unwelcome. Don't get me wrong, we did meet some great people throughout the trip. But some of these folks seemed tired of tourists.

Time really does seem to have stopped in many ways in the villages. The difference between the rural areas we visited and the urban areas is hard to measure. Life in the big cities is very cosmopolitan with nice cars, contemporary bicycles and many of the trappings of my modern life. In these rural tourist areas, you expect to find the occasional closet full of push brooms from Wal-Mart and Rubbermaid buckets. That is simply not the case. It is very easy to think that the way life is lived there now is pretty much the same as it has been for a very long time. The rusty bikes and carts are the way people get around and move stuff. The hand-made brooms are their brooms. That is the local barber shop.

In the villages, there are buildings open to the tourists. Many of these are beautiful, stark spaces with little ornamentation. We were travelling in very wet areas, yet several of these buildings were architected to connect the building with the outside. They contained large, interior courtyards open to the sky and very few walls. Many surfaces are of stone and frequently covered in moss as they are constantly wet.

They have cats there. Go figure.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures.

4th of July Photo Magic (Shooting Fireworks)

Remember to click on the pictures to see them full-sized.

I started shooting fireworks on July 4th several years ago and the results have been surprisingly satisfying and have found their way into numerous presentations over the years. I have a somewhat different technique and several people have asked me to share it. Here goes.

As soon as you see my fireworks photos, you notice that they are not the typical "fireworks over the city" or "fireworks over the bridge" shots where the fireworks fill the sky over some landscape. While those shots are beautiful, they capture what you already see if you have a great spot to watch the show. They do not capture the incredible subtleties of the fireworks.

Like photography, excellent fireworks design is a balance of science and art. The fireworks crafters use a seemingly infinite number of techniques and materials to generate the patterns and color dynamics of their short-lived art works. I really enjoy zooming in close to the point of the explosion to catch all of the detail and color that you cannot possibly see from the ground.

Here are the technical basics:

What you are shooting is an explosion followed by a lot of trails of burning materials against an almost black sky. The trails of light are really like colored pencils drawing a line on your picture. They are points that, like a pencil, form a line when they move. This idea that the trails are moving points is important as it explains why the exposure can be consistent along the entire trail, even though the part of the light trail nearest the initial explosion happens so much sooner in time than the end of the trail. The reality is that the beginning of the trail is completely dark long before your shutter closes from what you will see is a very long exposure.

I setup about a block from where the fireworks are being launched. At a minimum, I must be able to hear the sound of the launch, as that tells me when to open the shutter. You must use a tripod. Keep it low to the ground with the legs spread wide for stability. This will help make a clearer picture and will keep your camera out of the view of the other people that are certain to be all around you. Please be very careful using a tripod in a crowd. They can be very dangerous, especially as they are usually black, you will be shooting in the dark and people will all be looking up. Kids wandering around in the dark are very likely to trip over the tripod if you are not careful. Bring a friend who is willing to spot your tripod for you while you shoot.

You will need a camera that can be set for manual shutter speed, manual aperture and manual ISO. Select a long telephoto lens. Even fairly inexpensive lenses will work well as you will be working at smaller aperture sizes (around f8). I shoot fireworks at around 200mm on a camera with a full-sized sensor (Nikon calls this an FX size sensor). That would be around 120mm if you have the smaller sensor size (DX). Experiment with focal lengths until you get the results that you like.

Set the camera for full manual. Set ISO to the lowest natural value. This is usually 100 or 200. Start with a shutter speed of 3 seconds (yes, seconds) and an aperture of f8. Set to MANUAL FOCUS. Shutter speed adjustment when shooting fireworks closeup in the sky (no background other than sky) can be compared to pure flash photography. It really has no impact on the overall exposure of the final image. Shutter speed in this case determines most of the photo composition. It does two things. 1. It aids in your chance of catching the initial burst of the shell as you really have no idea where or when the shell will burst. 2. After the shell has burst, you will record all of the action until the shutter closes. If you miss the initial burst, the trails will simply start in space with an empty circle of some size in the middle (along with some smoke, etc.). If you set the shutter speed too low, you will either consistently miss the initial burst or you will not catch enough of the trails. At higher shutter speeds, you will catch more of the effects of wind on the trails. This can be great or make things look blurry. Below is an example of what happens when you miss the burst.

Exposure is set by ISO and aperture. Keeping the aperture fairly high (f8, f11, etc.) is really important to focus as it is not easy to focus on fireworks. Higher numbers will ensure that a wider range of distance will be in focus. Remember that lenses can be focused "beyond infinity", meaning that an object very far away will be out of focus. You can't just turn the focus ring all the way to infinity and expect anything to be in focus. You will need to use the first few fireworks launched to get an accurate MANUAL focus. Focus on a firework, focusing quickly on the trails as they disappear. Look at the shot on the screen and zoom way in. Very small misses in focus will ruin the shoot. You will not re-focus more than once or twice during the few minutes of the show, so the initial focus is critical. I do recommend re-focusing every few minutes in case the original focus is a little out and because you can hit the focus ring or it can slip. Remember that you will need to re-focus if you zoom in or out. While looking at the focus, look the exposure as well. This, as usual, has some trade-offs. The initial burst is much brighter than the trails. You will likely need to sacrifice the burst (just let it be blown out) in order to get the more important trails right. In short, set exposure for the trails, not the burst. If your sample shots are overexposed, set the aperture to a higher value (ex. Move to f11 from f8). If they are underexposed, adjust the ISO higher. Try to keep the aperture at f8 or higher.

If you have the same luck I usually do, you will end up in a parking lot where they decide to leave some lights on or there will be street lights. Be certain to use your lens hood to prevent lens flare and keep as much of that ambient light out of your shot as possible.

I highly recommend using every tool at your disposal to ensure the images are sharp. This means at a minimum that you should use a shutter release cable or remote control rather than pressing the button with your finger. To take a shot, point the lens at the point in the sky where other fireworks have burst. Listen for the sound of a firework being launched, wait a second or two, then open the shutter. This part is pretty much all luck. You catch it or you don't. Keep guessing the location and pushing the button. You will be surprised at the enormous range of unique shapes that make up a firework.

I personally prefer images that contain only a single firework (I needed to look up the singular of "fireworks"). The examples above contain single, multiple and Grand Finale multiple fireworks. With more fireworks comes more smoke and general picture busy-ness. You can eliminate much of the smoke by setting the black point correctly in post-processing, with contrast adjustment, etc. Sometimes, the smoke is really cool. Remember that they only send up one firework at a time early in the show, so make the best of that time.

Post-processing fireworks pictures is pretty easy. Use the black point or contrast to set the background. I like to make it really black and eliminate most smoke or clouds, but not always. The colors are very saturated to begin with, but a little saturation makes them pop. Use a bit of extra noise reduction because the long exposures usually mean more noise. Sharpen just a bit. An application of Tonal Contrast in Nik Software's Color Efex Pro adds a little extra magic.

BTW, if you want to shoot a more traditional fireworks landscape, the rules are pretty much the same. You'll need to substitute a wide-angle lens for the telephoto and you'll need to work a bit harder on exposure so the static items (buildings, bridges, etc.) are correctly exposed.

Here's wishing you great pictures on the 4th.

Huangshan (Yellow Mountain)

As usual, this is about the pictures, so click on them to see them full-sized.

Huangshan - or Yellow Mountain - was to be one of the highlights of our China trip for me. And it was. Even though I missed most of the time there.

I ended up developing a really good dose of bronchitis a day or two before we went to the mountain. By the time we got there, there wasn't much left of me. Luckily, this was about the only place we spent more than one night in a hotel, so I had a chance to just be sick in bed for a while and get better. Cyn took such good care of me. I don't think I would have eaten if not for her. She just stayed with me the whole time.

You take a cable tram to the top of the mountain - about 5000 feet up. When you get there, this is what you see. Simply spectacular. We got really lucky and arrived on a day when it was sunny. Our guide told us it rains about 250 days a year on the mountain.

The next thing you see is how you will get around the mountain. Stairs. And more stairs. All of the paths throught the mountain are stairs. The hotel is a significant distance from the tram. How far is hard to estimate as there is as much up and down stairs as there is distance to the hotel. It is about a 50 minute walk on stairs. You take a few breaks along the way to catch your breath. You carry everything in that you need.

There is a fairly nice hotel up there. Cyn and I got lucky and got a pretty good room with a beautiful view (See the first picture in this post). Our guide told us about the hotel along the way. He set the expectations fairly low, but it was better than expected. The most interesting fact he told us was how goods get up to the hotel. There are porters who carry everything up un their backs - 200 pounds at a time. He also told us that they prefer not to have their photograph taken - which proved to be true - or I would have an image here to share. They carry literally everything up. Food, drink, toilet paper - everything. They carry it up a 5000 foot mountain on their backs. This fact really made me consider every single item I consumed while we were there.

There is a tradition of leaving locks with the engraved names of special people locked to a cable on the side of the mountain. There are probably thousands of locks there. Cyn and I had our names carved on a lock and had a very romantic moment locking it onto its home with a great view of the mountain.

After the day of our arrival, it pretty much rained the rest of the time, leaving me to sleep in peace. I snuck out with the camera a couple of times, though I must admit, I remember very little of it all.

I leave you with a B&W picture taken upon our sunny arrival on the mountain. It is a unique and beautiful place.

Cruising the River Li

Remember to click on any photo to see the whole set large and in higher resolution.

We spent a few hours cruising down the River Li between Guilin and Yangshuo. It was great to just relax and let the pictures come to us.

The landscape along the river is hard to describe in terms of anything else I have seen. Some of my fellow travellers called it "otherworldly" - a term that was used a couple of times during our China trek.

There is a lot of activity at the river, though civilization's impact on the river banks (at least what you can see from the river) is light. There are access roads that run right into the river at regular intervals. Frequently, there were huge piles of red bricks on the ramp right where they meet the river. We saw people loading bricks onto trucks like in this picture. This particular style of truck is sort of the Ford F-150 of China. They are everywhere. They are all pretty much in this condition. They are all this safe (Yes, that is the engine flywheel just hanging out there in space). The women at the river bank are cleaning freshly slaughtered chickens.

You encounter plenty of tourist traffic on the river. The larger boats frequently have kitchens outside at the rear of the boat. You will also encounter stretches of the river where there are lots of smaller boats for hire with tourists shooting each other with water guns from boat to boat.

I'll wrap up for today with a traditional fisherman and his Cormorant birds somewhere along the river.