Blog Marco

Read as the author of this article is stalked by the Chinese Police. I guess if you are simply a tourist in China, with no intentions to "change or influence their culture" or are part of "Fa lun dafa" you should be fine. As for me, I was just there to experience their culture. So if you're there even with the slightest connection to the aforementioned group or if you're a known activist - WATCH OUT! You're under China's watchful eye.

A fish I managed to take a photo of while I was at the Shanghai Aquarium.

Currently my desktop photo.

Lens 50mm f1.4 Nikon D70 Body.

This view was taken on approach to Shanghai Aiport. Greenhouse crops all the way to the horizon!

I posted a picture of the external view of the maglev in a previous posting. Here, we see that the maximum speed attained in a typical trip is 431km/h - that's attained in a little over 3.5 minutes, and it only stays at that speed for a few seconds before the train needs to slow down on approach to the airport. The 30km trip takes just over 7 minutes!

This photo just demonstrates the remarkable engineering feat to build such a structure that relies on tension to stay together.

In my opinion the best features of airport are the symmetry of the structure as well as the use of natural light within the building.

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?

50mm f1.6 1/100s A view of a boat with fairy lights on the Huangpo. The building behind had somesort of glowing billboard that dynamically changed every second like a TV.

f1.6 1/100s Manual Mode. Shanghai skyline. Note the colonial style skyline.

This couple made an intersting website detailing their tour around Shanghai - includes a nice pictorial.

Don't expect anything like that here. :P

Another Photo... f1.4 1/160s... Manual Mode. Sharp. It seems that the TV tower is on a tilt though. Not sure if its an optical illusion or just my lacking Photoshop abilities (!)

Using my 50mm f1.4 lens at f1.6 , 1/125s on Manual Mode. Beautiful and Sharp photos of the night skyline on a ferry on the Huangpu River. You can even see airliners lining up to land in the top left of the picture.

This shot was taken from a tour bus driving along the highway beside the maglev line.

"The highest speed achieved on the Shanghai track has been 501 km/h (311 mph), over a track length of 30 km."

When I was on the train the fastest speed I saw on the LED sign announcing the speeds was 431 km/h.

So the world's fastest rail speed record hasn't been broken by the maglev. But in my opinion, since the TGV tracks are way longer than the 30-40km's of track for the Shanghai maglev, so the TGV has the unfair advantage of a 'runoff'.

Wikipedia article about the technology

Article about the Maglev line in 2002:

This site has great photos of the train! He definitely had time to wander around!

Take this professor's experience from riding the train.

Fastest Railroad
The highest speed recorded on any national railroad is 515.3 km/h (320.2 mph) by the French SNCF high-speed train, TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) Atlantique, between Courtalain and Tours, France, on May 18, 1990. The Train a Grande Vitesse, which means high-speed train, first entered commercial use in 1981, between Paris and Lyon in France. At the time it was the world's fastest train, with a top speed of 370 km/h (236 mph), but it has since been superseded by newer generation TGVs.