Tag: photos

From time to time I transform into a camera-toting tourist and take pictures. Then I post them using this tag.

Hangzhou City Balcony

I arrived in Hangzhou in winter with a pair of breathable sneakers suited to the summery weather in Singapore, a pair of somewhat worn but comfortable heeled leather office shoes, and two other pairs of office shoes, one of which broke and the other of which didn’t fit as well as I thought. Since arriving, I’d acquired a pair of casual leather boots, but they didn’t fit me as well as I thought either. So Siqi took me shoe shopping.

There’s a fantastic underground outlet mall at a place called City Balcony, near the spherical Intercontinental Hotel and Hangzhou Grand Theater in Qianjiang New Town in Hangzhou. After thoroughly exploring the mall, we were blessed by the shoe gods with no fewer than four well-fitting pairs of shoes, one from Hush Puppies and three from Columbia; two for me and two for him. (Also, I took down the product number of another pair I wanted to buy from Hush Puppies, and bought those later, when the weather got warmer.)

By the time we finished our subterranean shopping, it was night. We emerged and enjoyed the lights across the river:

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West Lake Boat Trip

My boyfriend Siqi and I took his parents to Xi Hu (Hangzhou’s famous West Lake) to see the scenery. We walked around and also took a boat ride across. We saw the famous “three pools mirroring the moon”. Kinda.

I like mountains better than lakes, but the sky over the lake was gorgeous when the sun started going down! I’ve selected the best few photos out of the many many many I took.

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Tea at Xixi Wetlands

I joined Zhejiang Lab just before Chinese New Year. I went with my department to Xixi National Wetland Park to drink tea (outside in the cold!) to celebrate.

The park is a huge green historical area with canals, ponds, old buildings, cobblestone pathways, and stone bridges. Its name means “west creek”. It has museums and shops and restaurants. We didn’t do a lot of exploring, but we bought some persimmons and nian gao (sticky starchy “year cake”) on our way to have tea and snacks, and we visited a longquan porcelain shop and climbed up a pagoda on our way back.

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Lin Feng Mountain

On New Year’s Eve, my boyfriend Siqi drove us up one of the tea mountains just outside of Hangzhou. We visited a lookout tower, marveled at patches of melting snow, and watched a magical sunset.

Having relocated from Singapore where it never gets cold, I have mixed feelings about winter, but I love living in a place surrounded by beautiful mountains!

See below for the best of the photos I took with my smartphone.

Continue reading Lin Feng Mountain

Photographically Speaking by David duChemin

I thought I knew nothing about photography. I was wrong.

True, I have little experience making photographs the way professionals do, and I know very little about cameras, my own cheap point-and-shoot included.

Still, photography is art, and creating photographs is much like creating other kinds of art. Much to my delight, the author of Photographically Speaking often draws explicit parallels with the art of writing, with which I’m somewhat familiar.

Once he establishes the thrust of the book (the importance of making conscious choices to create art), the author goes on to highlight the kinds of choices photographers can and should consciously make. Though he has a lot of specialized equipment and knows a lot about it, he focuses more on principles and concepts that you can observe in the finished image, not on which lens or filter you attach or which buttons you press.

See more below about what made Photographically Speaking such an approachable and informative text.

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Blog of the month!

Okay, so technically it’s one of five blogs of the month, but they gave me this badge that says “blog of the month”, so here we are.

It would be foolishly optimistic for me to assume my blog is about to “go viral” or start making me big affiliate bucks or whatever, and in the search for content to feature, I don’t assume I was terribly close to the top of the list.

Nevertheless, I’m pleased to have been selected, I’m seeing an (undoubtedly temporary) traffic bump since the listicle was published, and I even went so far as to create a Facebook page for this blog, in case any of you temporary visitors are thinking you might want to hear about future blog posts that way.

The plane to Sydney and Sydney

Below are 58 photos, mostly of Sydney Harbour and the Sydney Opera House.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Opera House tour. Exploring the structure was more interesting than I had been expecting. The shapes are regular and yet unusual at the same time. Historic, groundbreaking, stunning.

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My Christmas South of the Equator

Since moving to Singapore, I’ve spent many Christmases in places that don’t have winter. This year I celebrated the holidays in a place that does have winter, but has it at a totally different time of year.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea that winter can happen at different times of year. It’s almost easier to believe that winter is hot and summer is cold than that winter takes place during the, uh, summer months (June, July, and August) and that Christmas takes place during summer.

While in Australia and New Zealand, I took photos of Christmas trees and other holiday items that looked festive yet incongruous—none more so than this sign:

I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

Below are 30 more holiday photos.

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