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Games, Games, Games
Although I seem to write disproportionately about photography, I’ve still spent more of my life playing videogames than taking pictures. It’s easier! I just don’t post anything on this topic because I don’t think I have any insight of value. Not that I have insight about photography, but at least on that topic, I think I come at it from a different angle than most of what I see out there.
But since I’m already on the verge of forgetting some memorable gaming experiences that I’d rather not lose with my memory, I started writing down all the games I’d played that were particularly memorable to me. I’m not actually finished with that process yet – I’ve added about 39 games to the list, and have at least 14 to go that I can currently think of – but after a month of occasionally adding one or two more titles to the list, I’m just posting the page with the TODO list at the bottom.
If you’re one of those people I spent lots of time playing games with, and I left something off the list that deserves to be there, do let me know!
It’s on the top header menu, or you can find the page here.
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Places I went in Beijing
A main purpose of this blog is to externalize my memory before it fades, and while I intended to do that for my trip to China in the previous post on the hotel I stayed it, it just got too long. In any case, these are the places I went around Beijing, and what I thought of them!
The Forbidden City
One of the first places I went was, of course, the Forbidden City (now called the Palace Museum):
This helped enormously in understanding the scores of Chinese Kung Fu movies set in the time when this was the palace of the emperor and his consorts, in which one or more Kung Fu masters go charging through a succession of palaces and staircases, en route to the emperor (or empress) themselves. Now I fully grasp the setting, and boy, if you’re going to fight a Kung Fu master, there’s no better time to do it than after they’ve spent all their energy sprinting from the south gates to the northern end! If those sequences were shot in a single unedited cut (like the O-Ren Ishi entrance sequence near the end of Kill Bill 1), the palace entrance scenes would eat up a good chunk of the entire movie!
The scale and scope of the Forbidden City is truly quite incredible; there are apparently thousands of rooms, and while after a while they do all start to look the same, there’s intricate work on almost anything you look carefully at. Since I just went in and walked and walked without a guide or a map, I never got that clear a sense of how big the place was until I was looking at it afterwards from the hillside:
I’m sure I missed much of what the palace has to offer, but it was still quite an amazing thing to see. Each small area or even object within the palace seems to have its own story, and while some of these are printed on plaques outside the bigger buildings, the tour guides would often be going through a much longer explanation – usually in Chinese, because domestic tours vastly outnumbered any foreign ones. The plaques themselves were often quite interesting, because many of the fairly large halls would have names like “Hall of Ultimate Wisdom”, then have a story of sorts, and then conclude by saying “this palace was used as the residence for the emperors concubines”. Somehow, the assigned names didn’t always seem to match the actual usage!
I’m sure it would be quite interesting to hear all the full explanations, because some explanations had all the tour members trying to touch the object, whereas others, like this picture below, had elaborate explanations of how it was not good for the emperor to sit on his throne and face a wall (even at great distance), so they put a block of jade there – but decided that it was necessary for him to still see through the jade, hence a hole in the middle:
For some strange reason, I actually like the above photo (though you’d have to click it for a larger version to see any detail).
Jingshan Park
This is a small park on a hillside just north of the Forbidden City, which is where I took the picture above from a higher vantage point. There’s a series of 5 pavilions on the top of the hill, which provide a really nice view of Beijing – except for the fact that even on a good day, it’s smoggy enough that visibility is somewhat limited.
The defining thing about Jingshan Park, however, seems to be highlighted in this sign:
A pavillion, a garden, a restaurant… and The Spot Where Emperor Chongzhen Hanged Himself. Not to be missed! (It’s just a tree, if you’re wondering).
Beihai Park
Continuing on my walk, the next thing that looked interesting – since I wasn’t following a map or trying to go anywhere in particular – was Beihai Park, which is just beside Jingshan Park on the northwest side of the Forbidden City. It’s basically a big loop around a lake/river, with a temple atop a small island in the middle of the river, and a fairly peaceful trail to walk around. Lots of people were out in pedal boats, just enjoying the nice weather we had that day. Perhaps the most memorable thing for me was the Wall of Nine Dragons. I originally mis-captioned the picture as the Wall of Seven Dragons; Wen later mentioned that there’s actually supposed to be a Wall of Nine Dragons in Beihai Park that perhaps I missed, so I went back and actually counted the number of dragons in the picture… and yup, it’s nine:
I’m still not any good at B&W conversions, but hey, keep trying right? After Beihai Park, I’d been walking for about 6.5 hours and figured I should walk back to the hotel – which is when this happened. Still, a nice day with lots of sights!
Temple of Heaven
I already mentioned the Temple of Heaven, where I (and a dozen other people) took pictures of people doing their wedding shots, but there was lots more to see there. The main attraction was a series of three actual temples laid out from North to South; the northmost one is where the bridal couples were hanging out, and looked like this:
Amazingly, it looks deserted from this angle, but the bridal groups were on the left side of things, and there is actually a huge crowd of people in the area to the right. As with the Forbidden City, the tourists were overwhelmingly domestic (or at least Chinese). I was quite fortunate to have purchased the right ticket, since you can apparently purchase a grounds pass that doesn’t grant access to the three temples, or a package ticket that does. So if you’re there, buy the more expensive one!
There were quite a few people who just got grounds passes, to enjoy the gardens that surround the temple area. It’s actually quite a serene place in the middle of Beijing, perfect if you need some space for martial arts practice:
Other people were flying kites, hanging out, and even gathering to sing some songs using an archway to provide natural acoustics.
Walking Around
The streets around the hotel were full of contrasts as well; one moment, you’d be in what felt like a true Asian market:
But literally 1-2 minutes later, you can be standing in front of a Hermes store if you feel like blowing $1,000+ on a wallet. It’s a fairly amazing juxtaposition, like the motorbike conversion vs. Rolls Royce dealership I mentioned earlier. I guess that whatever you’re looking for, you’re likely to find it!
That was basically the sightseeing I was able to do on this trip (it was a business trip, after all), but I’m glad I had the opportunity. I used larger images than I usually include, but that’s because there was so much detail in almost everything I saw there that using any smaller size obscures it completely (as always, you can click on the pictures for larger versions). Sorry if you’re on a slower connection or a small screen!
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Do we really still need HDR?
Some video Wen sent me – high-speed HDR by NASA using multiple cameras – prompted me to think about this topic again.
The power of the human eye (and the brain behind it) really never ceases to amaze when you consider what it’s capable of. We can see perfectly well on a bright day, but well enough with the same eyes to walk around a dark room at night without bumping into things. At least not too many things. In challenging scenes, like a dim room with a window out to an exceptionally bright day, cameras often fall apart and display a pitch black interior and an over-exposed outdoor scene; but our eyes seem to render this perfectly, at least as far as our brain is concerned – we can see interior details and still see a normal, sunny day out the window. It’s all quite remarkable.
The fundamental problem above is one of dynamic range – when there’s a huge variation between the brightest and darkest parts of a scene, it can be a real challenge for the camera to deal with. The camera has a limited dynamic range, so it basically has to pick whether to capture shadow detail and blow out the highlights (turning everything white), or to capture the highlights and turn everything in shadows to pitch black. One approach for dealing with this which is becoming increasingly easy – and popular – is High Dynamic Range (or HDR) imaging – in which the camera takes multiple shots at different exposures to increase the total range of light values that can be captured. So it takes one shot that preserves the highlights, another that captures the shadow detail, and then combines these later (usually in software, but sometimes in camera).
In reality, the problem is only in part what the camera is capable of capturing; monitors have less dynamic range than cameras, and print has less dynamic range than a monitor. Wikipedia cites 10-14 stops for the human eye, 11 for DSLRs (less for compact cameras), 9.5 for computer LCDs, and 7 for prints. So a lot of HDR is actually about how to map what the camera captured (whether in a single exposure or with multiple) into what can be displayed or printed. How that mapping is done determines whether the end result is a natural looking recreation of how our eye perceives an image – or a more artistic/dramatic interpretation of things. I’m personally not a big fan of the over-the-top HDR style – it’s just not what a non-photographer like me would use to capture their kids! But I must admit that some images produced this way are pretty interesting.
2009
About once a year, I try and generally fail to produce an image using HDR. In part, this is because I’m a non-photographer – I never carry a tripod (which is important if you want multiple exposures of exactly the same thing), and HDR is so rarely useful in pictures of the family that I’m not willing to spend money on HDR tools. I’m sure my lack of knowledge is a bigger factor, of course. My first not-so-successful attempt was in Yosemite, taking a picture of Half Dome:
I consider the attempt not so successful because the end result is just kind of boring. I hadn’t started doing any post processing on any photo back then, but even so, the above image was sort of flat. It wasn’t a total failure, mind you; the original default exposure for the above scene looked like this:
As you can see, Half Dome itself is blown out beyond recognition, yet the trees are still very dark, and only the reflection looks about right. So I guess the HDR version is preferable for remembering what it looked like being there, even if it’s not a particularly compelling photo. Of interest might be that I used a free tool that you can find and download online, called Qtpfsgui, to create the above. It was pretty straightforward to use, and offered a lot of different tone mapping options. I’m sure that it’s possible to produce better results than the above by using the tool more effectively than I did. It’s a good cheap way to give things a try!
2010
My 2010 attempt came as I was boarding a flight from Tokyo back to Toronto, as the sun was setting. As with the above example, I only even thought to try HDR because without it, everything was a silhouette against the setting sun:
Besides still being boring, the above fails for another reason – once you bring up the detail in the shadow areas, all the reflections off the glass I shot through become painfully obvious. Since this was literally after showing my boarding pass and on the way to the plane (not the one pictured, mind you), I didn’t really have a chance to get a better picture, go flush up against the glass, etc. And as usual I had no tripod so I was just balancing the camera away from the window itself. For this 2010 attempt, I had gotten suckered into buying Photoshop CS5, which has HDR capabilities – this was my first attempt to use it for that purpose. It was easy to import things; however, I found that the options for tone mapping the HDR were very limited, and I couldn’t produce any sort of interesting results with it. Oh well!
2011
On to 2011! A couple of weeks ago, I was in Naperville, IL – my company has a big office there – and went for a walk since I had to fly in the day before to make an early morning meeting. Another too-much-dynamic range scenario came up but this time, without something to prop my camera up on, I tried doing some hand-held HDR in spite of my past failures. The original, default exposure image was as follows:
The processed image looks a good bit different – and overall, I like it much better:
However, as you probably guessed from the title, this isn’t the story of how I fell in love with doing HDR. Indeed, while I took 3 handheld exposure bracketed shots of the above, trying to using Photoshop to do HDR with the image failed miserably. First, without any sort of support, the alignment between shots was off by enough that Photoshop’s “auto-align” feature didn’t do a great job at putting things back together. Second,it was windy, so the leaves and especially the flag was notably different between shots. And finally, I couldn’t tone map things in an any reasonable way using CS5 (my lack of knowledge again, I’m sure).
So what’s the above then? I took the middle exposure in what had been intended for HDR use – and applied a large dose of local adjustments. Essentially, I darkened the sky and increased its clarity, brightened the foreground, especially brightened the middle column of stairs, added a little vignetting, and a few other things. It was actually quite time-consuming to do this; the sky needed about -1.5 stops of adjustment relative to the foreground, but when you make adjustments that big, if you cross even slightly into the building, you see a big black splotch; if you don’t come right up to its edge, you get a noticeable halo. The above isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough for me!
The above is possible for one simple reason; the dynamic range of modern DSLRs is simply awesome. The D7000 has 13.9 stops of dynamic range at ISO 100; if you compare that to the 10.3 stops at ISO 200 of the D70 (the great-grandparent of the D7000, released 7 years earlier), it’s like having +/- 2 stops of exposure bracketing on every single shot. If there’s enough light to shoot at base ISO, there is just so much to work with that doing HDR just seems like an unnecessary nuisance. As long as you shot in RAW, that is; with JPEG you’re stuck with the first image!
Now, if Lightroom could import multiple RAW images into a single HDR image and then let you do all the usual adjustments, that would still be a real win; sometimes, you don’t have enough light to shoot at ISO 100, or you have more dynamic range than the scene above. But for the most part, I just can’t see myself using any dedicated HDR tools or the built-in HDR functionality in CS5, when the natural dynamic range of the D7000 combined with some local adjustments seems to do all I need!
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My Hotel in Beijing
Since the business meetings I was traveling for were mainly held at the hotel we were staying in – The Regent Beijing – I spent quite a bit of time here. Fortunately, it was a really nice hotel – one of the nicest I’ve probably ever stayed at, despite the relatively reasonable rate which worked out to around $180/night or so including taxes and fees. The hotel was conveniently located downtown, about a 15-20 minute walk east of the Forbidden City.
A few random notes about the hotel and area:
- For just a little more than the price of taking a taxi from Toronto Pearson airport back to my home in North York (500 RMB), the hotel arranges limo pickup service for guests. Not only did a young lady stand at the exit from the airport for over an hour holding up a sign with my name on it (my flight was a little late), she said this really wasn’t too bad compared to how long it sometimes takes. I have to say, the good thing about smartphones and the like is that hopefully it will give people stuck with these kinds of jobs the ability to keep their minds occupied instead of just standing there – though prices still need to fall a lot to reach this demographic. Separately, the driver waited with the car – a very nice Audi A6 (or perhaps it was an A8, I don’t really remember) – for that entire duration. It does highlight what for me felt like a pitfall of capitalism; the amount of human capital expended (two people for several hours) for a marginal increase in my convenience doesn’t seem particularly worthwhile. Don’t get me wrong – I’m happy that the fee I paid can support their income and likely their families (a topic I discussed with colleagues later in the trip), but with an education it’s possible that either could be smarter and more accomplished than I am.
- While I didn’t check out the supposedly amazing health spa, the room itself was top notch, and unlike most hotels that try and ding you $5 if you dare to drink the water they put in the room, that wasn’t the approach here – free water, free apples, and even free shoe shining. You just leave your shoes in a bag, let reception know, and within hours (even on a Sunday evening), someone came to your room, picked up your shoes, shined them nicely, and returned them. The included breakfast buffet was also amazing and would have easily cost $25-30 in a North American or European hotel (making the $180 inclusive price that much better).
- The level of service provided around our meeting facilities was similarly excellent. Not only were there ample power bars, but the electrical outlets (including in the room) were all universal outlets that required no adapters regardless of what country we were coming from. Staff monitored the room at all times, set up various snacks/beverages outside the room in a non-intrusive way (and we likely missed some, because every time we’d take a break, something different was there – most of which we did not completely eat), and they aligned all servicing of the room with our natural breaks – so things were always in great shape but it didn’t disrupt even a minute of our meeting. Such was the attention to detail that you pretty much couldn’t open the door back to the meeting room after taking a break – someone was always a step ahead of you with their hand on the door to open it for you.
- Despite the very high level of service, in stark contrast to somewhere like India there was no expectation of tipping – much less a system designed around extracting tips. Indeed, the experience seemed design to even remove any ambiguity about whether a tip would be appropriate (e.g. they pick up and return the shoes while you’re out, and they know you are out due to some kind of sensor in the room – rather than presenting them to you in person so you can wonder whether to tip or not).
- I was quite surprised, given that prostitution is illegal in China and that I’ve always though of breaking the law as being a particular bad idea in a country like China, with the propensity with which I was approach in the immediate neighborhood of the hotel. I suppose that my obviously non-Chinese appearance greatly facilitates their targeting, and to be fair, some of the people approaching me seemed like more mild attempts to separate me from cash – like having a drink together that I’m sure would result in the bartender presenting a bill for hundreds of dollars (I’ve heard this is a common practice/scam in Hong Kong). Others were more definitively working girls, even though from their outward appearance you couldn’t tell them apart from anyone else on the street. This was a little disconcerting, but I eventually found that if you don’t acknowledge their presence in any way, they ignore you back very quickly.
- Nothing quite accentuated the juxtaposition between rich and poor like the car dealership and the vehicles that pass by it:
That dealership is literally in the hotel. Why buy an expensive watch or a diamond ring as a gift for the family – when you could bring home a Rolls Royce! By contrast, directly in front of the dealership, these sort of vehicles pass by:
There was a whole class of vehicles like the above – essentially, motorbike conversions in which a light frame is constructed and sits on top of a small scooter or motorbike as the underlying platform. It’s quite funny – sometimes you see what looks like a small car, only to realize it’s a shell around a scooter. I’m surprised this hasn’t caught on in other Asian countries like Taiwan and Malaysia that are heavy on scooter use!
Although I have no idea how my hotel compares to others in Beijing, as it’s the only one I’ve stayed, it was definitely an excellent experience; if you’re staying in Beijing and OK with a hotel in the $180 price range, I’d certainly recommend considering it!
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Wedding Photos in China
Taking professional engagement/wedding shots seems to be a big thing in Asia; indeed, when Valerie and I got married, we were whisked off to a photo studio to take some wedding pictures (which I will not share here :)) only hours after we had landed in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. China seems to be no exception to this, as the street directly in front of the hotel we stayed at featured at least three studios right at that location. Every evening starting at around 7pm, you’d see couples just standing in the street, using the nice hotel across from us (featuring a more classical European design) as a backdrop for their photos.
Two couples (and probably many more), however, were braver, and took their photos during the day at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. This is a public attraction, featuring many buildings from imperial times surrounded by a nice set of gardens. I walked there during the day, and it was sort of hard to miss a couple taking pictures behind the first of the main buildings. The photo crew was throwing the tails of the girls costume in the air, taking shots as it fell slowly to the ground. A small group of tourists had already gathered to capture this, so I didn’t feel too bad snapping a picture too:
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D7000 Settings
Directly or indirectly, I’ve mentioned my friend Herman a couple of times. First in discussing the D90 vs. D7000 (and recommending the D90 for most people + extra accessories), and then again in the whole discussion on lenses in which I said most people should really not buy full frame lenses on crop cameras. Well, the advice clearly didn’t work since Herman ultimately decided to go with a D7000 + 24-70 + the 80-200 that I upgraded from. Well, I tried!
Since Herman has bugging me incrementally for my settings, as if there’s some magical way that I set the camera to prevent my pictures from being blurry, I thought I’d just document them once and for all to avoid future questions.
In the M/A/S/P post from a while ago, plus the first in the series of pages I wrote on Shooting for non-photographers, I actually covered the rationale behind the “main” decisions I made, namely:
- Shooting RAW (NEF), so that I can fix mistakes later;
- Using Aperture Priority mode most of the time, since in most cases aperture has the most direct impact on what your pictures look like;
- Enabling Auto ISO (except when using flash), with a maximum ISO of 3200 for the D7000, and a minimum shutter speed that is the higher of:
- What’s needed to avoid blurriness due to camera shake, typically around 1/focal-length (less with VR lenses)
- What’s needed to avoid unwanted motion blur, typically around 1/80 or 1/100 for still subjects and 1/200 – 1/500 for moving subjects
I guess there are a bunch of other settings, here’s what I change from the default values:
- Main settings (not in menus)
- Single point AF (AF-S), with manually selected focus point; I just find it easier to focus and recompose, but this is situational
- Exposure compensation -0.3 or -0.7 for outdoors/high contrast; 0.0 for indoors. The D7000 doesn’t have as much headroom to recover from over-exposure as the D700, but it has really low noise at ISO 100 – so I prefer to bump up exposure as necessary when processing vs. finding that I blew highlights irreparably.
- CL (continuous, low speed) shooting mode by default
- Shooting Menu
- File naming -> Custom name (MS7 for my D7000), to easily tell my pictures vs. stuff E-mailed to me named DSC_0001.jpg
- Role played by card in Slot 2 -> Backup
- ISO sensitivity set to Auto-ISO, max 3200, shutter speed as needed
- Movie settings -> manual movie settings -> On (I don’t like ISO changes mid-video)
- Custom Setting Menu
- a7 Built-in AF assist illuminator -> Off
- d1 Beep -> Voume Off
- d2 Viewfinder grid display -> On
- d3 ISO display and adjustment -> ISO
- e1 Flash sync speed -> 1/320 s (Auto FP). This allows you to go above the default 1/250 sync with a flash like the SB-600/800; you get reduced output but for fill flash on a bright day, often quite sufficient.
- e3 Flash control for built-in flash -> TTL in some cases, but usually Commander mode even if I’m holding the SB-600/800 in my left hand. Getting the flash off camera helps a lot!
- f1 Light switch -> Info
- f3 Assign Fn button -> Access top item in my menu
- f5 Assign AE-L/AF-L button -> AE lock (hold); I find this better than holding the button down, especially across multiple shots, but watch out in case you have AE-L hold on and don’t realize it!
- f8 Slot empty release lock -> Lock, just to prevent my own errors!
- My Menu
- #1 = ISO sensitivity settings. In conjunction with f3, I can press the Fn button and change minimum auto-ISO shutter speed quickly. Not as quickly as I’d like, if you recall my M/A/S/P post.
- #2 = Flash control, for switching between TTL and CMD. I press Fn, back, down, OK, and I can adjust this easily. Though I’d rather assign the preview button to My Menu # 2 instead.
I have been trying a more radical setting using the ‘U2’ mode, in which the AE-L button maps to AF-ON and the shutter releases immediate, and in which 9-point AF-C mode is used, but I’m still getting used to it.
I don’t think my settings are anything special, just personal preferences, but Herman has this odd belief that the camera comes configured to make fuzzy pictures till you find the magic settings. Sadly, even if he uses exactly what I do, he’ll discover there are no magic settings :).
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31 Days Later
I’m back from China, and just in time for the Victoria Day weekend! I’ll post some thoughts and pictures from China later – but first, I just found the contrast in weather that we experience here in Toronto in a 31-day timespan to be pretty interesting. We went to the zoo just over 4 weeks ago, and suffice to say it was cold:
They may look nice and warm, but the reality is, we were a little under-prepared and didn’t bring gloves. Luckily, ingenious kids are more than capable of deriving a makeshift solution to the problem – Linxi figured out how to help Olivia with the no-gloves issue:
Just 31 days later, and our trip to the zoo was looking noticeably different:
In fairness, there was a downpour of rain while we were at the water playground inside the Toronto Zoo that almost sent us home; fortunately we stuck it out and things were quite nice after that.
I talked before about having wide angle lenses, and I’m sure glad I did in China – more on that later – but the one place in the world where having the 2.0x teleconverter attached to the 70-200/2.8 (making it effectively into a 140-400 f/5.6) is useful is the zoo. I used this combination on the D3, but Wen also tried it out on his D90 (the crop factor of which gives it effectively 600mm of reach!). It was quite effective for getting up-close shots of animals while still being far enough away to avoid any danger of being eaten, or stomped (both are at the maximum reach of 400mm):
The tiger, of course, was behind a cage – but with that kind of zoom, you just don’t even see the out-of-focus cage grill that’s in front of the camera. With an elephant, 400mm is so much reach you don’t even get the full elephant anymore – but you do an get an interestingly detailed cropping of one (as always, click for a bigger image):
I’m not sure I’ll use the TC all that often, since it’s at odds with my non-photographer goals of really just taking pictures of the people around me, but it’s certainly a better way to get to 400mm than the $10,000 Nikon 400mm f/2.8!
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How to confuse an illiterate pedestrian
I’m currently in Beijing, China on a business trip; one of the nice things about my job is that it’s allowed me to see places that I’d likely never otherwise have had the chance to see. The travel has a downside, of course; usually I just go to the same places over and over again, and often those places have little of interest other than the office that I happen to be visiting. Also, while in the past if I was coming some place that was new, I’d seriously think about buying a 2nd ticket for my wife and extending the stay a little, that’s no longer really practical now that we have kids. Still, Beijing is new and I’m thankful not just for that, but also that a last-minute agenda change provided enough free time to take a vacation days while I’m here.
I’m sure I may have more things to say later, but for now I wanted to pass on a tip for how to confuse an illiterate (and unprepared) pedestrian. As of late, when visiting a place, I tend to look up where I’m headed before leaving and a rough plan of how to get there, but then I just walk without really having directions, a map, or a GPS (unless it looked really confusing, or I’m on a tight timeline). I prefer this both because I tend not to walk the same route too many times, and because you also tend to walk unremarkable but very local streets, as opposed to simply popular/large ones.
Of course, if things go very wrong with this approach, there’s always a backup – ask someone, use the GPS on my phone, or even get in a taxi. Also, many major cities have maps all over the place, so you can get your bearings. But in Beijing, I saw a new trick with maps I hadn’t seen used before:
(sorry for the tall image, it was the only zoom level that showed the English names). After visiting several places of interest – Tianamen Square, the Imperial Palace (Forbidden City), Jingshan Park, and Beihai Park – I decided to head back to the hotel, having been on my feet for quite some time by that point. was directionally pretty straightforward, but I checked the map anyways, as I was walking along Dongsi West. Now, Dongsi West is itself interesting; it’s only about 500m in length despite being a “major” road; west of that, it’s called Wusi St., and east of that it’s called Chaoyangmen Inner St. One might thus understand why you might omit labeling the street on a map. Indeed, the map I was looking at had no “You Are Here” type dot, and just had a single road labelled “Dongsi” (without a direction), and which ran north/south as you see above. I knew for certain I wasn’t walking north, so I re-calibrated to the belief that I was walking south. Which of course, I wasn’t, thanks to a junction in which three of the four roads can have the same name!
To cut a long story short, I wound up walking considerably longer than the shortest path back to the hotel, finally caving in and using the GPS in my phone to get my bearings. Still, it was certainly an interesting walk along the way, as I wound up in some really run down alleyways, with poverty on display that was an unbelievable contrast to the Rolls Royce, Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Aston Martin dealerships that are all a 3 minute walk from my hotel (which wasn’t that far away). Unlike the tourist areas where people pounce on you, trying to get you to ride in a rickshaw or spare some change, the people I saw in this neighborhood seemed genuinely surprised to see a foreigner. Frankly, other areas of Beijing felt more like any other big city; these alleyways felt more authentic, more distinctive, and more like China as I had imagined it.
So I’m glad I walked a different path, and learned about a little trick that I won’t be falling for again :).
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Trying out a Lensbaby
Besides the various gear and all those backpacks I mentioned picking up in a prior post, one of the miscellaneous items we got was a Lensbaby lens (for Nikon cameras). Whereas normal lenses have a goal of keeping the entire image as sharp as possible, the design of the Lensbaby is very different – you selectively focus on only a particular part of the image. If, unlike me, you’re artistic, then you can probably achieve the cool photos that they display in their gallery. Otherwise, you’ll probably conclude that you’re not going to practically be able to use the lens, and you’ll give it away or sell it – which is indeed what we’re now trying to do. If you’re interested, let me know!
Still, it is a little interesting to play with. Besides selective focus, you can also use oddly-shaped aperture disks that control what the out-of-focus highlights look like. It’s sort of counter-intuitive, but if you put some sort of cut-out in front of your lens, it doesn’t put a frame of that shape around your picture, it actually just controls what the out-of-focus bright spots look like. Here’s a shot out my window at night, with Bahamut in the foreground, using a standard Nikon 50mm lens:
The lights in the background (mostly streetlights) look like 7-sided polygons, because the Nikon 50mm f/1.4D used above has a 7-bladed aperture diaphragm with straight blades (which is not well suited to this kind of shot; the 24-70 would have produced nicer rounded edges, for example). But throw in selective focus, and a heart-shaped aperture for the Lensbaby, and it looks like this:
You may need to click to get the larger image and zoom in on the head to see it clearly, but the head is mostly in focus whereas the rest of the figure isn’t. And the background is now nice friendly heart shapes. I think the lens could be interesting if used correctly, but it’s incredibly manual, and thus ill-suited to fast-moving kids.
Now, a reason for posting this is that while I didn’t get a picture I liked with the Lensbaby, I fared a little better getting pictures of the Lensbaby. Here’s an embedded SmugMug gallery of the shots of the kit, looking a little better than past efforts to take pictures of equipment – this still doesn’t show in an RSS reader, unfortunately; if you click on it in a browser it will take you to a SmugMug gallery that has the full-sized shots:
There’s still so much camera gear in my place – the above was taken with the D3 and the 105mm VR lens I bought recently – that I guess I don’t have much of an excuse for poor shots, though it still took some learning to get the above. I’m lucky the Lensbaby kit is actually pretty small, this made it a lot easier to photograph. The biggest difference was definitely having two flashes (previously, I only had one), and the umbrella to get more even light (you can see the reflection of the umbrella in some of the above). Still, the background is a combination of the projection screen we watch movies on (or used to, before kids), and my wife’s jacket turned inside out. Hey, whatever works, right?
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Backups and Backpacks
I finally got around to writing the last page in a series of topics related to how I handle pictures, from shooting through Backups and Sharing. Intended as always for the non-photographer like me! The short summary of the page is: SmugMug is great, go get an account!
No matter what you use, you really do need to back things up, though. Disks fail, it’s only a question of time. In an earlier post on Storage that I wrote when finishing the page on how I manage storage within my home, I made fun of Intel for pushing solid-state disks (SSDs) as a more reliable way of storing important data than standard magnetic disks. So it was interesting to see this blog post from Coding Horror describing the failure rate of SSDs:
Portman Wills, friend of the company and generally awesome guy, has a far scarier tale to tell. He got infected with the SSD religion based on my original 2009 blog post, and he went all in. He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years … and all of them failed. The tale of the tape is frankly a little terrifying:
Jeff goes on to conclude that he’ll buy SSDs anyways because they’re so darned fast – and I completely agree with this. If you plan for disk failure, it’s really not a big deal when it actually happens. My thoughts on how to do this are in the article linked in the first line, but however you do it, make sure you back up!
What does this have to do with backpacks? Absolutely nothing, except that they both begin with “back”, and I’d been meaning to write about an interesting experience from last Saturday that resulted in having six more backpacks by the end of the day than the start of the day. Though I have more photo equipment than I need (and what I really need is to learn to use it better), there’s always a few more things that it would be “nice” to have (like that macro lens), so I tend to check Craigslist once in a while to see if something pops up at a good price.
I noticed a posting of a big lot of items; they were offered individually but with an invitation to take the whole lot. I had expressed interest in one flash and one umbrella (for lighting), and forwarded it to my friend Herman who was also looking for a couple of items on the list. After making the initial offer on a small subset of the items, I started to strongly suspect the only way to get any of the items was to make an offer for all of them – and indeed this turned out to be exactly what the seller was looking for. Saturday turned into a crazy day of going to a wedding ceremony, closing a deal on the whole lot of items via E-mail in the midsts of that, rushing to bank as soon as things were over to start getting the cash, heading to badminton in a suit to get the courts & nets set up, rushing to more bank branches (due to withdrawal limits at a single branch), going back to organize the badminton club, heading from there to the wedding reception in the evening, and then finally – by 11pm – heading to inspect and pick up the equipment.
I should have taken a photo of the entire lot, but it included a D3, 14-24, 24-70, 70-200, 3 SB-800s and an SB-900, a macro flash kit, two umbrellas, and a host of other items. As advertised, it included 3 camera bags; the seller was generous and decided to just part with all the camera bags he had. And he had 7 of them, 6 of which were backpacks. It was a really good deal for the entire lot of equipment – but the total amount of stuff was insane, especially since I just wanted one flash and one umbrella. Equipment can’t make you a pro, but I doubt anyone would believe the non-photographer story were I to walk around with this:
That’s the Nikon D3, with the 24-70/2.8 lens, and the macro flash kit. My wife Valerie said she would not be willing to walk with me in public if I was carrying that thing. Sadly, I only set it up for fun, as I didn’t have any of the specialized batteries needed to power the flashes – and later in the day, the whole macro flash kit was on its way to Asia with my departing mom, for use by my professional step-father. At least it’s in much better hands than mine!
And if you need a photo backpack, let me know.
