This post was originally made in early September of 2017, but I never got around to editing it and adding in pictures. Mainly because my picture backlog for my Asia trip is way to large, and my incredibly slow work pace through them has made it that I’ve taken more pictures than I have gone through. Yikes! It’s May of 2018 now, and now with the downtime I have, I thought I should at least wrap up this blog.

Anyways, the rest of the post is coming from the context of September 1st and 2nd, during my Asia trip. At that time, I was visiting family in Beijing, China, after coming on a week trip to Japan.

I originally wished to have this post out before the 31st, but the laptop I brought with me on my family visit/vacation wasn’t the best choice for Photoshop .RAW file batch processing. I’ve really considered purchasing a powerful, but portable machine like a MacBook (I’ve never used MacOS), or the Surface Laptop, and this is simply another reason for it.

Anyways…

My parents and I woke up at 4am on a Tuesday in order to get to the Beijing South Train Station before 6:20 am. My aunt drove us there, and I was able to experience more of China’s trademark driving.

I would describe the train station as a miniature airport inside a single floor mall food court.

It was insane to see the number of restaurants and fast-food chains that surrounded the 20 or so gateways. It included well known places like Burger King and KFC, Chinese food chains, and lesser known places (in Canada at least) like Dunkin’ Donuts. There was also an incredible amount of people, which shouldn’t surprise me because it is China. They had automated machines for ticket dispensing, but if you didn’t have a Chinese ID you needed to line up at the office. There was a surprising amount of people in that line, and it was surprisingly slow considering how there were over 10 people working.

Eventually we got on the train, and I got to experience the smooth movement of 302 km/h. I also got to experience TRAIN FOOD (spoilers: not much different from airplane food). I basically tried to sleep the entire way, but ended up playing Layton’s Mystery Journal for a good third of it (thanks to Nessa).

We get off at HanZhou west (or was it east?) train station and try to find a taxi to get us to our hotel. Turns out, there’s a good 150 people line for a taxi that turns at least 3 times. The line surprisingly goes by pretty quickly, and within 20 minutes we are on a taxi heading to our hotel.

The taxi driver mentioned that the current actors for Enduring Memories of HangZhou show (notable for being presented at the 2016 G20 meeting in China) that we were going to see are no longer the professionals that originally did it. It didn’t mean much me, because it made sense that after doing the show daily beginning October of last year, they would like to take a break. More on this later.

 

Our hotel turned out to be pretty great. My aunt/cousin (long-story!) booked the rooms for us so we didn’t know what they were like. It was very modern, different from the homey, air bnb style I was expecting, nice!

On our journey to find where we need to go (without data and Google maps [because it is blocked in China]), we ended up talking to a few locals who recommended us a trip into the mountain and something else. My dad was against it, but my mother was all for it, so we went on the trip.

This is where I take a moment to say how I wasn’t sure if the locals were actually this friendly or this was some kind of elaborate scheme to get us to buy something in the end.

Long-story short, we ended up in the middle of nowhere with people recommending that we purchase some local tea. So to relation to my previous thought, probably the later.

 

We eventually do get back to the place we are supposed to be and spend some time exploring the beautiful nature park and lake (which I’m not sure I have displayed in my photos). It was very refreshing feeling, and the large scale of the place made it feel a lot more adventurous than just walking around a small park. Supposedly the lake is over 15 km in circumference, so it would be quite the walk.

At 7:45 pm, the Enduring Memories show started.

If you watched the video I linked, the show was amazing. There were moments where I believe it could’ve been improved on, but I’m chalking it up to the change in actors/staff for the show, since they have to do it daily.

Some quick math for how much the show brings in for the city.

There are 5 sections. Each sections has 16 rows. Each row has about 18 seats. Each ticket is 360 yuan (about 5:1 CAD). Even at 80% capacity (it was more like 95% capacity for that Tuesday), that is over $80,000 CAD per show! That is also without accounting for VIP seating costing a lot more. They even perform it twice on weekends. The city will continue to conduct this show until it loses all it’s glamour because it brings in so much money for them. It also supports the local shops and tourism-related places. It is incredible how much this show effects this city.

Now some thoughts on photography.

I decided to switch to full manual at the beginning of my vacation. I wanted to learn how to control everything at once. Whether that has improved my photography in the recent times has yet to be seen, but it at least feels like I’m learning. I didn’t realize pairing a low shutter speed with a high aperture would give me a similar light-reducing effect for when there is way too much light outside. Well, I probably did know this in theory (higher f-stop requires more light), but to know it in practice is different.

I’m also not sure about my night photography. It’s harder to have much choice in subject/focus when it is dark out. I really only have the choice of choosing a bright object and trying to compose a shot around that. In Japan, it usually resulted in a lot of shots revolving around storefront signs and building lights. In Hangzhou, it ended up being very focused on streetlamps and vendor stalls.

I am also at a loss for how to shot a show. The Enduring Memories of Hangzhou show was beautiful, but at my fixed angle and length, there wasn’t much flexibility in the composition of shots. There was not much distance I could move because there were other audience members, and I think my photos came out very boring. I am not saying the subject matter was boring, because the show was incredible, but my composition of the subjects were boring.

It also doesn’t help that I am unfamiliar with low-light photography in general.

Another thing of note is that I am starting to feel and understand the problems of my 18-200mm lens. Notably the lack in sharpness of my photos. Even compared to my 50mm prime lens, photos are noticably more dull, and that bothers me since my 18-200mm is my daily usage one. I plan to someday move to a 12-70mm lens, since I seem to mainly shoot street photography and scenery, of which a 12-70mm covers.

During the review of my photos, and where I pick the ones I like to change from RAW to a usable format, I couldn’t help but notice that the compositions of my shots felt off. A lot of the time, I wasn’t sure what I was trying to capture. What scene was I aiming for with this picture? It was hard to tell from just the photo, and I was the one that captured it! When it comes to nature shots, I just don’t know what I want to capture. There’s too much information in terms of the trees, shadows, sky, etc. To try and frame something out of there is tough, and it doesn’t help that I don’t have an image or idea of what I want to capture in the first place. I often resort to just taking a bunch of photos in a horizontal line, and using Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor to stitch them into a panorama shot.

I also have trouble trying to compose a shot when the environment is very busy. If there is so much going on, I find it incredibly hard to separate the instances I want (if I even found instances I wanted) from the instances I don’t want. I understand that zooming in, focus, and angling the camera different can hide/distort the things I don’t want to focus on, but it’s hard to strike that balance. It’s also hard to strike that balance, AND get the timing for the shot, because busy environments tend to be shots about people, and people don’t hold their positions for very long. It is kind of a serendipitous event if I can capture a single action within a busy environment. The lack of control I feel during those situations really bother me. How can I start to get some control back? I am not asking for full control (which is impossible when shooting candid strangers), but I just want to be able to better position myself so I  can get more serendipitous shots, rather than just pray that today is a good day.

I felt a bit lost when it came to trying to post-process a photo. I didn’t know what I wanted to aim for, and the stuff I kind of wanted to do, it was too complex to even begin to imagine how to work. I need to work on trying to visualize what I want the end result to be like, before trying to post process anything.