Huangshan photos on ISSUU

A compilation of Huangshan photos taken during my recent trip to China...

Winter 2012 - Photography Trip

This winter has been very fruitful for my photography. After so many years staying here, I finally rented a car in winter and driven around on icy roads, with occasional snowstorm and white-out (with Ankit, an Indian friend who is on his way picking up photography, and Hannes, a German friend who called for the trip). 

Visibility in snowstorm  

Almost white-out

Entering tunnel

Exiting tunnel

In windy condition, if the road is level with an open field,
there will be continues sheets of snow hurtling across the road

At night, when snowing, driving with high light is impossible.
I put on the high light for few sec just for the sake of photography.
As I am driving, so Ankit took the shot. 

For the trip, the final destination is Sounkyo, a small town  at the middle-north of Hokkaido with average temperature 5C colder than Sapporo. 
The first stop was at a hot-spring resorts area (Shirogane town) for taking pictures of this waterfall. The waterfall remained unfrozen because it's a hot spring waterfall. 

You can see the steam rising from the water

Next, we went to a natural hot spring at middle of a mountain. It's really in the wilderness! The surrounding temperature was -5C while the water was 46C... a very extreme hot-spring experience.   

When we left the hot spring, it's already dark. From Shirogane to Sounkyo took us about three hours on icy road. 
Sounkyo is located in mountainous area with many elevated cliffs. When in autumn, the cliffs turn colorful and this is why Sounkyo is listed as one of the popular red-leaves viewing spot of Hokkaido. 

The white-vertical area at the left is frozen waterfall

Taken from Mt. Kurodake. When doing time lapse, the battery  of my timer control  went dead  because of the cold temperature - first time experiencing this.

I have also visited a ski resort for the very first time not doing any snowboarding, but just photography. 

The panorama photo was taken from Mt. East of Rusutsu ski resort. I chosen this resort because of the Mt. Yotei view.

My Canon 16-35 mm lens safe my day.
Without the 16 mm wide angle,
I will not achieve a shot with this perspective
 which gives emphasis on the snow accumulated on the trunk,
and it will make a less impact then.  

The following shots seem like the desert, but with snow instead of sand?
Maybe I have not travel to other places and therefore I have yet find other places with this kind of scenery except on top of the ski mountain.  

Mushroom & Statue - Mt. Maruyama

Yesterday went to the reserved forest of Mt. Maruyama, Sapporo. The main purpose is to photography one of my favorite photography subject - mushroom. 

The first time I photography mushroom after owning a macro lens was during my trip at Oirase.
To shoot mushroom, tripod is a must because it usually grow in shaded places which required very low shutter speed - mostly shot at 0.8 second in this series, thus handheld is impossible.
Also, I usually overexposed it by +1 or +1.5 so that the mushroom looks growing.
To make it interesting, approach from law angle so that you are showing its under side of the cap, which should looks growing glowing with back-lighting and a little of overexposed. How I wish my camera has a swivel LCD to make the task easier.
I didn't shoot any top-down picture because it looks dull to me.

Since there weren't much mushroom to shoot, I then started to find these (below) statues to be interesting. 

When you started to pay attention, you'll notice that they have very different kinds of expression.
This one looks jolly to me.

This one looks calm and a little serious.

This looks calm and joyful.

 So as this one.

Calm and humble.

A typical cunning, evil, foxy smiling.

This too, calm and joyful.

Calm and innocent.

Calm and joyful.

There are scattering along the way up to the hilltop of Mt. Maruyama. 

Perhaps counting them will make the way up less tiring when you have something to keep you from thinking about how tire you are. But what if you become tire of counting? Because there are literary more than hundred of them!  

 

My bicycle, parked near the entrance to the walkway up the hill.

A natural lighting setup

Just tried up a natural lighting setup for still life photography, corn in this case.

The setting is simple, one diffuser to diffuse the natural light coming into the room (make the light source larger), and a white reflector opposite to the diffuser to bounce back some light.

Although the setting can provide very soft lighting, still some Photoshop work is needed to create a pure white background shown below:

Water droplet photography

Just tried out water droplet photography today after obtaining some tips from youtube. Here is the result.

The blueish look is obtained by changing the white balance to tungsten mode.

My light source come from two table lamps behind a white sheet.

The vacuum cleaner tube is to hang a punctured plastic bag filled with water. The water droplets from the plastic bag fall into the black bucket below, which is filled to the brim with water.

I used canon 5D markII with a 100mm macro lens. Because the light source isn't that strong, I need to push the ISO up to 5000, so that I can shoot at 1/1000 s and F8.0.

It seems that I should have used an even faster shutter speed because the falling droplet still have some motion blur at 1/1000 s!

Photos of Horses (Shadai Stallion Station)

Recently, I have photographed some horses in a breeding facility, known as Shadai Stallion Station (社台スタリオンステーション Shadai Sutarion Sutēshon), that I found when searching for a cow farm.
Initially, this is the kind of picture (or probably video or timelapse) that I intend to capture:
A bunch of Holstein cattle walks on a hill of meadow, with green grass and yellow flowers (the dandelion flower), against a blue sky with white clouds; To me, these are the elements that make a perfect picture. Sadly though this one is cropped from a snapshot I made while in a car drove by a friend (on the way back from this trip). So the resolution is very small.

Well, back to the horse story, there were more different postures from the horses this time compared to the one at Urakawa. At least they are not so busy eating, but to run around probably because of to the present of the small horses that are very energetic.
You may not believe it but all photos were actually taken through the fence like the one below. Well this is a kind of magic in photography - when you shoot with a telephoto lens any objects that are really close to the lens become invisible.