Tag: photography

how convenient

ah, so many unfinished half-written posts that never made the frontpage of this blog…
we haven’t been lacking in adventures and errands to run… but they end up draining all our energy and force us to crash on the sofa whenever we arrive home.
the fact that we’ve moved here without a limit date to return gives us time to appreciate the city slowlier than usual. we don’t have to like it right away and smile so that we look good on the pictures. so we’ve been taking it easy and enjoying every little thing we stumble upon.

yesterday was rainy and cold outside. we reserved the day to reading hundreds of feeds, answering emails and resting our feet from the wedding frenzy on saturday. i was one of the bridesmaids on a traditional chinese wedding (our dear lulu and tommy’s wedding), which was a great experience and lesson on culture and traditions (more on that when i have my pictures). funny detail: 4 out of 5 bridesmaids had been in groningen (netherlands), studying. how small is the world?

also in the news, tomorrow i’ll start working here in shanghai. after two weeks of interviews, i’ve chosen a swedish company as my employer. they’re young, expanding and diversifying their product range, and they seemed like a good choice. besides, one of the bridesmaids has a swedish boyfriend and she explained how sweden is out and about to conquer the world through all the companies they own… we agree. a set of 3 sharp knives and a wok in ikea for less than 50 yuan (5 euros)? hell yeah!

bonus:
* durão barroso (a previous portuguese prime-minister) appears regularly on a spot on cctv9 (china’s english news channel) stating that china is a good oportunity for investment blablabla. we still laugh everytime he speaks, just because his voice sounds so familiar and nonetheless, so strange when he speaks in english…

* we found a place which sells b&w films (100 asa, 36 pictures) for 8 yuan (80 cents in europe).
just around the corner, a dvd stall sells copies of the latest movies for 5 yuan (50 cents) – considering a movie ticket in here can cost more than 10 to 20 times that, the alternative is quite attractive.

photography

where does the good go?

from here, seen on lecool amsterdam, this week.

in portugal just life photography

3, 6, 9, 12, 3.

this new years, i’ll try to photograph what i’m doing at 3pm, 6pm, 9pm, 12pm and 3am. a sort of “a day in the life of”.
we’ll be staying at home, i believe, so you won’t get any grand party pictures, but we’ll see. this entry will be updated around those times.

if you can, do it too, and then link back to binary bonsai (the author of the idea). let’s see what people come up with. :)

here’s the first one. 3 o’clock, joão was showing me how to control the tv+dvd using his qtek. troy is playing on tv.

at 6pm, mom and i are cooking “mexidos”, a typical portuguese dessert, for those days around xmas. look at the mess in the kitchen :P

at 9, i was on the phone with my nanny, who has a terrible cold. :)

well, fireworks and champagne at midnight, naturally… happy 2007. and i guess that will be it, at 3 i think i might be sleeping… :)

just life photography

sometimes…

… don’t you wish you could go back at being the little well-combed kid you used to be?

photography

megapixels race

this article in the new york times blog explains exactly why you shouldn’t be only looking at the number of megapixels on your new digital camera, through an interesting experiment:

On the show, we did a test. We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.

Even the technician at the photo lab told me that I was crazy, that there’d be a huge difference between 5 megapixels and 13.
I’m prepared to give away the punch line of this segment, because hey—the show doesn’t air till February, and you’ll have forgotten all about what you read here today, right?

Anyway, we ran the test for about 45 minutes. Dozens of people stopped to take the test; a little crowd gathered. About 95 percent of the volunteers gave up, announcing that there was no possible way to tell the difference, even when mashing their faces right up against the prints. A handful of them attempted guesses—but were wrong. Only one person correctly ranked the prints in megapixel order, although (a) she was a photography professor, and (b) I believe she just got lucky.
(…)

In THEORY, you should be able to see a difference. But you can’t.”

exactly. besides, more megapixels mean bigger files, for equivalent quality. focus on the lens quality and the image sensors behind it, and start spending the rest of the money on trips to the places you want to photograph instead.