Blog Marco

eBay in China

A photo of McDonalds, Nanjing Road Branch, Shanghai China.

Lens 50mm f1.4 Nikon D70 Body.

A typical scene in Shanghai, China. A scene with plenty of bicycles!

Kit Lens, Nikon D70 Body.

Fish from Shanghai Aquarium

This photo was taken at the TV tower in Shanghai. The view is of Huangpo river in Shanghai.

I feel as if I fluked the feeling of this photo. It really was not intended to look as if it were a glum photo.

Before processing this photo in Photoshop, the photo looks like any other tourist landscape of some city taken from a tower.

I think it was the smog and the fact that it was a cloudy day that contributed to the whole look of the photo.

You may want to visit this page for more information on Shanghai.

What kind of fish is this? who knows... Wish I knew... That's what you get when you're with a tour group rushing through the whole experience.

Picture me, trying to take a great picture - setting up the camera settings, waiting for the fish to be in the right spot, making sure the photo is in focus, making sure the flash reflection isn't eveident in the photo... it was great that a few photos actually turned out decent after that rushed experience.

I used an off camera flash - SB-800 with the on-camera flash on the D70 working as the commander. I angled the off camera flash in one hand - while taking the shot with the other. Obviously the angle of the flash was trying to prevent the flash reflection. I also used the 50mm f1.4, as it was the fastest lens I had with me. I tried to balance the speed of the lens (consequence is that the faster you set it the less depth of field you get), the speed of the exposure/film (ISO 200-1000? - consequence is that the faster you set that, the more grainier your pictures will look).

I think I also played with the effect with setting the camera to shutter priority but it didn't really give me the results I wanted as it always wanted f1.4 which meant a really shallow depth of field.

So what I decided was to get a good enough exposure, with enough depth of field to cover the subject, with the least grain I can get away with, so that I can play with it in photoshop to overexpose it slightly.

This photos is the result of a little cropping and curves in Photoshop.

A photo with a part of our tour group.

This was taken with a digital SLR on AUTO mode. I then crudely photoshopped it to slightly overexpose the foreground. The foreground was severely underexposed due to the cloudy weather and the weak on-camera flash which wasn't powerful enough to fill-in the foreground.

If I had an off-camera flash, it may give better results - but since it was cloudy - the photos would look a little dull nonetheless.

I found this scroll scribe at the back of a tourist shop just busy copying a scroll - BY HAND!

I wonder how many people in the world still make copies of a text totally by hand?