Digital photography enthuastic banned for life aka never let anything nor anybody compromise your artistic integrity

On my previous blog I was whining about the difficulty of obtaining a shallow depth of field with mid-range digital cameras like mine. The one I have is not a DSLR, it merely looks like one, although it has manual settings and an optical image stabilizer, aspheric all-glass lens with 12 x zoom and a matte box for attaching filters. Still, it's a piece of junk when it comes to professional photography.

A'right back to the shallow depth of field, you know those nice portraits where the model is in perfect focus but the background's blurred. All this gives a professional look, makes the photo more 3-D like. The object comes out from the background, instead of a flat portrait where buildings or whatever is in the background is as sharp and detailed as the object.

The culprit is the tiny CCD panel; it's cheap to manufacture small CCD/CMOS panels. However if you know the laws of optics - or bother to google a bit - you can get a shallow depth of field with a small CCD panel, at least for somewhat still objects, but F1 racing cars, not really.




We decided to rendez-vous in the afternoon with my other half at Zhong shan Metro. Well, as usual, one of us was late, and I entertained myself with shooting the above uninteresting photo. At least it has that shallow depth of field. While playing with my toy it was getting later and later, like a race against the setting sun, and the sun always wins.
The plan was a cosplay shoot-out in Zhong shan Park, but no, the sun tumbled down below the horizon rendering our plans pointless, yes it did not set, it tumbled, I could feel the sunspots were re-arranging into a pattern that I am too scared to describe. I mean, being geek and all, you don't want to be stigmatized as a sun storm maniac who sees fractals and thinks he can predict the outcome of his next job interview from them.




We did visit the park after sunset and ended up doing some stop-photography and then had a dinner at the close by NineClouds Shopping Centre. I am not a person to give it all up so easily, so I managed to take this photo before the manager claimed that we were disturbing other guests. Eventually we were thrown out of the restaurant, but I did get my shallow depth of field photo. Well it was a cheap price to pay for a semi-good photo, to be banned from Nine Clouds Shopping Centre for life.

How to Differentiate a black taxi from a regular taxi in South Shanghai Suburbs?

This is a crucial bit of information if you want to enhance your urban survival skills. Let me introduce the regular taxi of South Shanghai Suburbs, this is what it looks like, and although it is dark colored, it isn't entirely black.




Yes it is quite obvious with the taxi sign on the top and all, and I'm in no way taking the piss nor in any way under-estimating my readers. Really.
Alright now the actual black taxi which fares start from a mere 5 Yuan. They all look the same, but come in a wide variety of colors. This is how they look like.




I mixed up the registration numbers with Adobe Photoshop, and the photos may give the illusion that the vehicles are parked on the middle of the road, but it isn't so, it's just me practicing my novice photography skills on how to shoot fast moving objects and avoid blurry photos, although sometimes that is a nice effect to give an illusion of movement. Please no comments about the dof and sports photography to a man who is using a camera with a 1/2.5" CCD panel.

Once I manage to obtain a Canon 1DS Mark III or Nikon D3 - 35mm full frame sensor pro digicams - I will be ready for shooting at the next Shanghai Formula1 Grand Prix.

Life on Post-Shanghai Asteroid

It came down heavy and hard. No, it wasn't normal rain, I could tell,
but some kind of industrial piss, probably waste water
from a translunar megaship.

Thank sys-god for my ferrovinyl skin-upgrade.
The smell got unbearable.
I felt like throwing up. I did. But I remembered to turn away,
just in time, before the puke hit my shoes.
This was my accomplishment for the day,
the theme of my blog entry,
before I initialized runlevel zero for the night.

If you’re ever caught in a filthy downpour,
even if your expensive designer shoes get soaked,
you can at least try to keep them free from half-digested crab,
or whatever else you had for dinner,
walking around the downtown pathways of
Post-Shanghai Asteroid, looking for a job,
praying for some generous human employer
to jump out of the shadows and say,
Yes, we hire ex-machines, we accept rehabilitated biobots.

You see, I was not fully human, not then, but now I have aspired to
live and work like one.



Paraphrased by myself from an original by Don Bosco.