Category Archives: HDR

October 24, 2010 · 8:08 pm

HDR: Hsinchu City East Gate

Today, Yuling and I went to the Hsinchu City Glass Museum to check out a culinary festival.  There were a few photo opportunities there and while we didn’t eat enough (we stupidly had lunch before we went!) I did get a chance to check out a gate I alluded to at one point in the past in this blog, the Hsinchu City East Gate.

The gate was built when the Chinese began heavy colonization of Taiwan.  Hsinchu is actually one of the oldest cities in Taiwan, dating back about 400 years.  Before the Chinese took control of it, the city was a Taiwanese aboriginal settlement.  In 1827, it was completed by the Qing dynasty, though the Japanese colonizers later tore down much of the wall when they redesigned the road system.

I liked how this shot shows not only the gate, but the other things that have sprung up around the roundabout that surrounds the structure.  The advertisements and signs of an affluent 21st-century city contrast in an interesting way with the structure.

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September 27, 2010 · 8:32 pm

More from Beipu

Below are some more shots from Beipu.  Starting with a small “local god” set up in a tiny altar in front of a farm:

Followed by a group of statues of the goddess Guan Yin situated across the street from the smaller altar:

…followed by a cobblestoned street in a nearby park.  Check this one out in full size in Flickr for the full effect.

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September 26, 2010 · 6:23 pm

Churches in Hsinchu

These HDRs are two churches I saw right before  our visit to the zoo yesterday.

While Christians make up a small part of the population, they are visible in most cities.  Some other groups do include Mormons (with the infamous name tags and black ties – both Taiwanese and American), Catholics, and offshoots of Taoism and Buddhism such as I-Kuan Tao and the Red Swastika Society (the swastika here is used as its original intent – a symbol of good will from the Hindu and Buddhist lines of faith) – though these other groups often melt into the larger Taoist and Buddhist sects.

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September 22, 2010 · 10:27 pm

Jhubei in HDR

I never intended on making this blog a full-on photo blog in the first place – though it has interestingly kind of become an outlet for this work.  I also never intended to consider this blog for only HDR photos, and I definitely mix it up between what kinds of photography appear here.  However, when I made my first real successful HDR photo with Photomatix of a small church in League City, Texas a few months ago, I was hooked.  As I learned more about the postprocessing, I was able to satisfactorily take a few photos of Firelands Scout Reservation’s lake – a boy scout camp at which I worked during the summers of 2000-2004.

I’ve noticed that HDR is a type of photography that needs constant practice.  I’ve taken good HDR shots and bad ones (some of which in that latter category ended up on this very blog) so it’s good to reflect as to why they turn out.  A recent example in a local temple (which I may retry) had me mistaking the correct ISO.  Whoops.

This brings me to this photo of a blue truck.  Blue trucks might not seem like that big of a deal in the States or outside of Taiwan (I’m not sure about China on this) – but here on “Ilha Formosa,” these are ubiquitous - especially in a booming city like Jhubei.  Since they are used for manual work including construction, they crawl around the area where the school I teach is located – as buildings seem to be growing from the ground.

Here’s the HDR – taken this evening with some dying sunlight:

At first glance, not bad.  When you enlarge it, you’ll see that the HDR takes the imperfections and makes them obvious – which is GREAT for a subject such as this.  In addition, the glow from the house next door gives some extra color.  I did take down the blues in the saturation panel on Aperture for obvious reasons.  I really like this photo.  But there’s one major flaw with it.  You see, these trucks are flatbeds.  I made it look like it has a back trailer with some poor compositon.  Whoops, again.  A good lesson to learn.

Anyway, off to some shots of Jhubei earlier this evening.  We have Moon Festival today – so I got the day off work.  This allowed me to travel to nearby Beipu, and I will be posting some photos of that trip later.  I do have to say that 50 minutes on the scooter makes your butt very, very numb.

I’ll first post some more HDRs of Jhubei.  We had a nice sunset, which gave me plenty of beautiful tones to work with.  This is a very pretty city – though I have to be creative in how to frame it in order to capture it well.

I’m going off on a tangent again… I’ll stop.  Photos below.

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September 21, 2010 · 7:20 pm

More from Sinwu

I managed to miss posting some great shots last time that I took in Sinwu.  The main reason was that when I got back on Sunday, I didn’t feel like processing them all.  Here are some more from last weekend:

The above is obviously a grassy field.  Typhoon Fanapi makes up the cloudy section of the sky.  You might notice the garbage can to the bottom right – I would’ve cropped that out, but I would’ve had to take out the beautiful sun… or the interesting irrigation ditch that kind of leads the eye.

Finishing off with a country house – much like you’ll see in rural Taiwan.  These are interesting… kind of a mix between urban architecture along with the countryside.  Much different than American styles when it comes to architecture or city planning.

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September 16, 2010 · 10:56 pm

The Park by the River (Again)

I have previously taken photos at this large park near the river which acts as the border between Hsinchu and Jhubei, but I wanted to go out again tonight as we had a perfectly clear night for a change.

With the 18-55 lens, I got some regular landscape photos and a shot of a tower which carries powerlines.  They are somewhat obnoxiously right on the trail – but good for an HDR from a different perspective:

I was also happy with this HDR of Jhubei.  My apartment is nestled somewhere in the middle of the buildings.  I would consider this to be a “newish” part of town because as it is indeed newer than the winding, crowded streets of “Old Jhubei” further to the west, it pales in scope to the newer section of town which is being billed as a “New Taipei.”  It certainly is getting that feel – I just hope we don’t have a construction bubble on our hands.

Anyway, be sure to click on the photo below to see a larger version in Flickr.  This blog’s limits make me keep photos small.  This was also taken with the 18-55mm.

…and finally, a bird shot taken with the 70-300mm – of course the glass was stretched out as far as possible.  I’m not sure what kind of bird this is – please let me know if you’re familiar with Taiwanese fauna.

Things are still going well here.  I will be having a day off in a week due to the Moon Festival – I’ll be sure to post any photos that come up as a result of that experience…

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September 15, 2010 · 9:23 pm

Around the Apartment

OK – to straighten things out first, only the first three photos are new.  It amazes me… whenever I have time to shoot photos outside, it rains.  When I don’t (and end up not getting home until after-dark), it’s… well… dark.  This has been annoying as of late.

I do have good news, though.  Over the summer, I entered an HDR image of Sri Meenakshi Temple in Pearland, Texas (click on the title for that post/photo) to Harvard University’s Pluralism Project.  The Pluralism Project exists to educate people about America’s growing religious diversity and I was excited when they had a call for photos.  Well, I am one of the winners, but I can’t say that I got the grand prize.  That’s OK – the grand prize definitely kicked everyone’s butt… it’s a beautiful shot of floating lanterns.  My shot wasn’t bad, but looking back, I realize that I still need to keep working on framing.  I liked the dramatic perspective this one had and will try to improve on it in the future.

Anyway, as for tonight’s shots – the first three come from a quick jaunt out for some rice and pork at a Japanese-Taiwanese restaurant.  It was pretty good and cheap… nutritious, too… so no complaints here.  The first shot is a nearby restaurant’s paper lantern:

After dinner, Yuling and I walked around the neighborhood.  We came across this temple which was located right next to a park – the first shot includes some bokeh in the background as I was trying to get the obligatory temple incense shot:

I had mixed feelings once I was done with the following shot.  Since these were taken at night, I was playing around with ISO settings on my camera.  I set the ISO on the following shot a little too low/slow (OK, “a lot” too low/slow) and it came out a bit blurry.  At the same time, I like the effect on the colors and think the blurriness might work for the photo…

The following photos were taken and recently re-touched.  The first was on this blog earlier – I decided to lighten the photo some in order to make it “pop” out more:

…followed by a Taipei photo I dug out of the neglected batch:

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September 14, 2010 · 11:01 pm

HDR: Boats in Danshui

While it’s been a while since I last visited Danshui, I decided not to long ago to take another look at my photos from that trip.  These boats were seen along the water, and I somewhat recently realized that I had three exposures taken of them.  HDR below.

I’ll be getting more photos up in the near future – the tricky part is having time and good weather to take them with – lately this has been my biggest obstacle by far.

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September 4, 2010 · 3:44 pm

It’s Been a While…

…yes, it HAS been a while since I posted to this blog.  The biggest reason being that I started work on Friday the 27th and we got students the next Monday, the 30th of August.

Since I am teaching a… wide variety of classes, I have no shortage of preparation.  The good news is that most of this has been done for me – and teaching 4th grade isn’t extremely difficult as long as you can include games and activities to keep the kids’ from going insane.  In addition to 4th graders, I also have some 5th graders (only one class), some 7th graders, and my other main group, an advanced Junior High class with students who all plan to move to the US or Canada for high school and/or college.

I haven’t even touched my camera this week, unfortunately.  I will probably try to do more with it this week as I get used to a new apartment, new routine, and new school.  In the meantime, I do have some photos outside of my NEW apartment window.  These are HDR shots looking across the street from my new balcony.  I think these are a little too saturated on one hand, but do like how they turned out.  There’s some ghosting on the one that shows the intersection as I didn’t bother to mask out the moving people.  They’re not TOO noticeable…

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August 24, 2010 · 9:03 pm

Looking Out the Window

I know I’ve posted my apartment view before (see this), but I thought I’d include some recent photos that I took of the same view… plus a few out the other end of the building.  These shots really show the amount of growth in my area, and it’ll be interesting to see how different it is in 1, 5, or 10 years.

The first two are HDR… one looking west and the second is looking east.

…followed by a single exposure looking west.

…and another looking west.  This last one is a bit of an experiment – it’s a mix between a nighttime long exposure (see the previous post) and a single-exposure HDR shot turned black and white.  Let me know what you think.

As always, you can click on these for full image sizes.  The reason I do not have the full size here in the first place is to keep load times on this page fast.  If you want to see the full size, click on the photo and click the magnifying glass above the picture.  If this isn’t big enough, you can click “view all sizes” to choose.

In the course of the next few days, I’ll have a lot to photograph.  You might remember my post at the beginning of Ghost Month.  Well, the month has come to a sort of climax and there are a lot of festivals this weekend – this time that I know of beforehand.  It should be interesting.

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