Categories
in china

the snow

snow berries

“the snow outside looks like someone is sprinkling powdered sugar on this pancake world“.
the phrase is not mine, but it fits perfectly to the kind of weather we have been enjoying here in shanghai. white skies, soft snow, freezing cold and icy roads and bridges. it’s fun for us, while the power supply is still stable and we can use the ac to (mildly) heat the house.

today though, when we entered the elevator, it didn’t move! instead, we heard a guy talking above us… no idea why the elevator wasn’t out of order if someone was fixing it, but it managed to scare the hell out of me – i’m not too fond of malfunctioning elevators.
we managed to get out, i calmed down and we walked the 31 floor downstairs since the other elevator was quite busy and frankly, i didn’t really feel like using it.

from what we hear though, all around china the weather has been giving people a much harder time – especially now, on the week before the chinese new year, the most important holiday week on the mainland. it’s the time of the year where migrant workers return to their home villages to spend the holidays with their families (their “christmas”), so it’s kind of sad that this is stopping people to get where they’re headed. adding to the usual seasonal shortage of train and bus tickets, there are also people stranded in train stations and airports all around china, because of delayed or cancelled flights/trains.

and it has just started snowing again…

Categories
photography

“i’m a fan of all things cheap and plastic”

JS: You still prefer (and will probably always prefer) film to digital photography. Why is this?

HPC: To my eye, there’s something integral to photography that’s not translating from film to digital. This isn’t to say that I think that digital is crap, but there’s definitely something missing.

I also think that a photographer’s relationship with shooting is quite different when it’s film and when it’s digital. If I buy fresh Polaroid film for my pinhole camera, it’s roughly $3.75 a shot. Shooting with an SX-70 is roughly $1 a shot. The choices that I make are an important and necessary part of my process.

With digital, you pretty much shoot ‘til your card’s full. I guess, I miss the ongoing interior editorial conversation that happens in my head.

taken from a recent interview with heather champ on photography and her web presence.

heather is one of those people i really admire: she started the mirror project (back in the day when i was trying to tame the zenit), takes magical pictures with different types of cameras (like the polaroids above) and is also the community manager at flickr.

check out her new ongoing project, polaroid 366: a polaroid a day for a (leap) year.

Categories
in portugal photography

d. manuel II, o patriota

depois do último post, procuro por “portugal” na galeria. dois insólitos resultados: uma infantaria em estranhos preparos (mas tão portuguesa) e uma foto do rei d. manuel II.

o último rei de portugal. eis que (mesmo sem ser monárquica) ver um rei português assim, a preto e branco, me deixa quase sem palavras face ao realismo e à próximidade temporal.

nas pinturas a óleo ou nos painéis de azulejos que nos habituamos a associar à nossa monarquia, tudo ganha uma nuvem de misticismo, de tempos longínquos… numa foto não. um rei nosso a meio passo, visto assim sem poses, no flickr.

[english summary: the post is about the last king of portugal, which i found in a flickr photo from the library of commons – and how unusal it is for me to see a portuguese kind on a photo. portugal’s monarchy ended in 1910].

Categories
photography

the library of congress colection on flickr

flickr has recently started “the commons” project, in colaboration with the US “Library of Congress”. Subtitled “your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photo collections”, they ask users to help enrich the pictures with tags, descriptions and comments. the pictures were taken from the beginning of the century through the 40s and their themes spread accross several subjects, from ww2, to sports, railroads and aviation, women training, celebrities, political activities, world news, life in ny…

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world. (from the commons page)

now wouldn’t that be nice?

“Native Quarter, Shanghai” in the picture, also from the collection.

Categories
in china

say what?

a piece of chinglish hidden on today’s chinese lesson. can you see it? :P

say again?