2008/11/30

dec. 1st: world aids day

can't read chinese?
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since 20 years december 1st is celebrated as world aids day. it's only too easy to perceive this as a problem of "the others", subconsciously letting your prejudice block the thoughtful observation. It's a task for all of us to show solidarity and support, it is this what makes us human.

dec. 1st is world aids day fighting this terrible disease deserves our attention and help, especially when when it hits the poorest among the poor. but it also deserves attention when teaching our kids, in order not to offer only oversimplified solutions, but the open, clear and concise knowledge how to avoid the risks.

the picture to the right is copyright united nations. you can download it from here. the lead picture shows a chinese condom vending machine, found in nanjing.

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2008/11/29

no words, just patterns

no words, just pattern
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everything else I do know precisely thanks to the exif data, even the place:

bildschirmphoto2 This is the result on clicking on this link and switching to satellite map. technical background? a cheap gps logger, the transystem bt 747 and (because i am a dedicated linux user and programmer) some perl code to find the correct coordinates via the exif time stamp of the picture. similar software is available for windows and the mac. nice gadget, and saves some note-taking.

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2008/11/28

late customers and nightbirds

late customers
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late night wandering through nanjing. having experienced all the noise during the day, it's astonishing that street life pretty much closes down at 8 pm. only in the biggest shopping malls you might find open shops now, and it's better to find a place in a restaurant soon.

night birds not only the people have transferred a lot of activities to the street, also the pets sometimes live out in the open. carefully taking a picture of those birds in cages, to my utter shock the dog started to bark at me. i should keep the not-on-the-viewfinder eye open...

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2008/11/27

no way out (if you can't read chinese)

no way out (if you can't read chinese)
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any questions in which direction to go? where you are?

there is one major challenge when wandering alone through a chinese city: how to come back. the namecard of the hotel is a lifesaver, so i always had two in my pocket. but not every taxidriver has good eyesight and/or knows the way. to make it more difficult, nanjing for example had 4 nanjing hotels, and it took me a while until i knew to ask for the jinjiang nanjing hotel. and even then: the hotel was in a corner of a block and had 3 entrances, looking all different. people you ask in the street don't speak english and/or don't know where they have to send you.

so once i left the shuttle bus to walk the rest of the way late at night, got the wrong direction and landed in a cul-de-sac, which fortunately turned out to be the end point of a bus line. showing the hotel name card, i was sent from one bus driver to the next and motioned into a bus, where a lady of maybe 25 year in white cotton gloves started to maneuver the bus through the nightly streets. after 20 minutes of silence she suddenly gestured to show the card again and urged me to get of the bus right there. so out on the street i was, and after several tries to get information from the rare pedestrians, i finally got a cab. this cab drove the street for 150m, turned around, went back again 150m, entered through a gate and after another 100m dropped me - in front of my hotel door.

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2008/11/26

construction site at night

construction site at night
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strolling at night, in the rain and without tripod usually is not a standard situation for good shots, but having only 8 days in china i wanted to get out the maximum of it. and this construction site offered some dramatic light effects, especially when the welding startet.

traffic in a rainy night street photography in the true sense of the word, and dangerous it was: in europe we don't see and electric bicycles, and in china when you see them it is already quite late: quiet and fast they are, and in the rain the drivers were not too willing to take care of a mad photographer...

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2008/11/25

bike sea

bike sea
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backyards in nanjing are not meant for foreigners. just 150m away from the main road i found this parking lot, chinese style. trying to work out the best way of visualising the sheer abundance of bicycles, after 5 minutes i heard somebody speaking in my back. lucky enough i did not turn around immediately but shot some more frames, this one among them. a short break on my side was used by the voice to approach me. it turned out to be a policeman, who friendly (thou shall not annoy the foreigners...) but firmly insisted by gestures that i had to leave this place. my guess was that there is nothing like a right to photograph in china...

nanjing backyard backyards are very rarely enjoyable sights (there is a reason why they are backyards anyhow) but they usually offer good insight how people are living. in the present case the officials probably regarded it as disrespectful if this normal side of life of their citizens gets photographed and published.

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2008/11/24

bamboo carving hands

bamboo carving hands
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taking a break from the roster-determined duty hours in our booth, i used my time to closely watch some artist in an exhibition hall creating their pieces. light was low and of mixed quality, so again high iso had to come to the rescue.

close inspection checking again bibblepro for linux, i found its built-in noise ninja far superior to any other solution i had tried up to now. i am still missing lightzone's ease of use and stringent workflow, but especially with high iso shots it's definitely not up to bibbles class in terms of image quality.

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2008/11/23

le dejeuner sur l'herbe, china style

dejeuner sur l'herbe
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the world urban forum of the united nations in nanjing was also used by the chinese government as a platform for showcasing achievements in tourism and real estate development. one of the booths sported this forest of tree silhouettes which was consequentially used as a picnic arena for the local visitors.

flower overflow the middle of the hall was filled with flower pots, scented osmanthus in this case, and only under close inspection it was - again - revealed that those were artificial plants. good optics, yet no substance.

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2008/11/22

expo moon

expo moon
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participating in a trade fair late in the year, the scenery above is what you usally get at the end of the day. no daylight, little photography - not only because of the light but the feet and the eyes are sore and the nee for a shower and some food is just overwhelming.

steel and glass and smog chinese representative architecture is first of all BIG. architectonically at least not completely boring, the expo halls in nanjing however had no distinctive chinese elements. it was more smoothened international, global and therefore exchangeable steel and glass style.

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2008/11/20

park tree, nanjing

park tree, nanjing
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nanjing is an extremely busy city - 8 lanes roads, skyscrapers, noise and smog. but when you enter one of the parks, by miracle all that negative aspects of city life stay behind and you are in a different world.

park lanterns, nanjingchinese garden design is not that renowned here in europe, we usually take japanese, zen style gardens to be sufficient representative for east asian gardening. and of course china was long enough almost inaccessible for travelers, no wonder everybody concentrated on the available japanese examples of this region's garden style.

evening in the park, nanjing so when the light went and the park closed, i took one look (and a picture) back to this enclave that had made me forgotten in which busy place i was. the way back to the hotel in a subway with only chinese directives was an adventure for itself.

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old and new, china

old and new, china
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the mixture between old and new drew my attention. deducing from publications, reports of friends, as well as own short time experience in one chinese city, development in china happens at blazing speed - that is, in the cities. a lot of young, western style well dressed people in remnants of old architecture and traditional colors that get surrounded by steel/glass/concrete skyscrapers. should i ever have the opportunity to come back to china, i would love to see the countryside as i guess the life in the villages is extremely different from the cities, in way that we don't see any more here in europe.

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2008/11/18

chairman mao

chairman mao
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found in a gift shop next to the fu-zi temple in nanjing. in china there seems to be a still unbroken reverence for the former chairman. from a westerner's point of view this seems a bit bewildering, just having read wikipedia's entry about this leader of his people: the number of victims of the chinese revolution and the following 30 years is estimated as 10 millions. strange - as so many things in china.

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2008/11/17

more roofs

temple roofs ii
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in case you don't know: munich, capitol of bavaria and the city were i work, has a chinese tower. built 1789, it nowadays is the center of a beer garden. absence of abstinence in my case not only leads to a certain inclination towards beer, but also to chinese roof constructions. the fu-zi temple area in this respect was a treasure trove, whilst the chinese beer i experienced as not really convincing.

temple roofs, nanjing the temple is surrounded by a number of buildings from the imperial times, besides a museum many of those houses now host shops for gifts and souvenirs.

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2008/11/16

dragons on the roof

dragons on the roof
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this is a roof detail from the fu-zi temple in nanjing. at this first encounter, i was overwhelmed with the fine details and the expressiveness of the sculptures. and despite of the many (chinese) tourists, the place had kept the feeling of a religious area, whereas not so intensive as the temples i have seen in chinatown quarters for example in indonesia. communism and cultural revolution for sure have taken their toll.

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2008/11/15

smoke and konfuzius

smoke and konfuzius
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i am a fan of these temple sceneries (just see incense in the chinese temple), but nanjing offered nothing such. an official mission of course is not the ideal setting for pursuing private photographic interests, so i took what was offered.

ridge turrets the scenery to the right unfolded itself just outside of the temple, quietly and unspectacular. glad to have my long tele zoom with me, i just had to wait for the worker to take the right pose.

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2008/11/14

lucky charm tree, nanjing

lucky charm tree, nanjing
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the trip to china brought +20gb raw files. going through the directories (when shooting in big numbers, i organize my files one folder per day) i still am in day 2 and try to discover the keepers or at least the not so-so ones. the shot above i like - otherwise i wouldn't show it, of course - as it depicts that scenery outside of fu-zi temple in nanjing as a typical chinese urban mixture of young people in western style clothes, but again the temple and the connected philosophy and its symbols as nowadays again appreciated setting.

fu-zi temple area, nanjing riksha kulis, nanjing nanjing as a megacity of 7.5 million inhabitants is as modern and/or western as it can be in the contemporary china, but still using traditional symbols as decoration. even manpower-driven rikshaws are present, in former times deprecated because of the exploitation of the kulis.

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2008/11/13

cook and konfuzius, nanjing

cook and konfuzius, nanjing
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in the big crowd gathering on the rare banches in front of the food stalls in the fu-zi temple area in nanjing, this cook sat self-forlorn (or maybe just tired), closely watched by a statue of konfuzius.

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2008/11/12

street sweets, nanjing

street sweets, nanjing
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the already mentioned 're nao' holds true for street vendor businesses also. even late at night, the crowds at the food stalls are loud and busy, queues tightly packed. europeans with a certain affinity for less body contact when waiting immediately find themselves at the end of the queue for quite a while.

sweets stall, nanjing at the food stall, it was quite easy for me to adapt to local queuing policies - hunger or appetite make up for a good motivation. it was considerably less easy for me in the public toilets, where you have again to queue up almost touching your front man busy with his business at the urinal, otherwise you have to wait for quite a long time...

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