Old Buildings and a Garden and Stuff

I couldn't think of anything witty or interesting for a title. I mentioned previously that I was in Suzhou. It's about an hour outside of Shanghai by bus and has quite interesting things to look at/take photos of. There is a Chinese saying that goes "Above there is heaven [or paradise], below is Suzhou". There are a couple of rather nice preserved old school high walled gardens that you generally see in Chinese films that house aristocrats/bureaucrats.

I went to a couple of them, but the one that is generally somewhat famous is called 'The Humble Administrator's Garden'. It's considered one of the finest in southern China. The footprint of the whole place is quite big, some 50'000m² (I may have googled that) and it's a bit less than 500 years old. It was cut up and divided at various times over the years, but was pretty much sewn back together after the civil war. Anyway. It's an interesting place to wander around. I happened to go the week before Chinese New Year (新年快乐, by the way), so it was pretty quiet, and there was still a little snow lying around so it was very picturesque. Well, sort of. It was nice as there were so few people around, as it probably gets heaving in the summer, but since it is still winter there are just about no pretty colours. It's all a bit grey. Which is good for me, as you aren't really missing out with black and white.

.

Next to where I was standing there is pavilion where you can sit and look across the rather large pond/small lake thing, and see the pagoda in the background. Annoyingly there were people sitting there doing just that so, I stood to the left and got pretty much the same view. 

 A lot of effort goes in to these things, they are very interestingly sculpted gardens and lots of different pavilions so you can sit and enjoy the different scenery from different view points.

 There is something special about this corridor, something to do with the length of it and the square holes in the wall, and looking through it. I wasn't quite paying attention at this point when it was explained to me, but revel in it's wonder if you will.

I'm slightly annoyed about this photo for a couple of reasons. I cut the bottom of it off, because I was trying to take it quickly, but mostly because I stood there for ages trying to frame in a nice way, and there was not a single person walking around. As soon as I wanted to take the picture, these people started walking past. Well not these people, but just a bloody great long trail of them and not one cottoned on to the fact that I wasn't quite interested in taking pictures of them. I didn't really have the patience to wait any longer either. It's intentionally off centre though - I feel I should point that out... 

As is the next one.

 This is just the other side of it. I have been meaning to find out why they have doorways like this.

I will try and head back when the weather is better because I imagine the colours would be quite impressive. Particularly for these.

It was a nice day, and I liked the look of this thing. 

 I would have liked to have been closer to catch this kid running. But as you can probably guess from the slightly off angle I was in a hurry to take this (actually, these are usually slightly skewed).

 Like so. I was trying to get the doorway and the open window and make it look cool and interesting, but I probably should have moved back.

I just like the way there is still snow on the ground. Stupid people wouldn't get out of my way, and well I have a no doctoring pictures policy (bar that one from Bristol. Shhh).

Service Interruption

I can't seem to get on to blogger long enough to upload photos before getting kicked off again (up until Thursday I was just being a little slack). New updates in a couple of days. Hopefully.

Our Forests The Pylons of High Tension Wires

Street level: Slightly more interesting...

After my trip around Bristol, and taking photos of random, yet eye catching graffiti, I have started paying way more attention to little things you tend to see about cities. In Shanghai it's usually the bicycles that always stick out in my mind, particularly as there isn't a whole lot of street art. Not that there isn't, it's usually just a little harder to see so much. But it's not only that; I think it is also the way you see certain things, juxtaposed to others. There is a sign on a wall I used to walk past fairly regularly in Oxford saying: 

Bill Stickers 

Will Be 

Prosecuted 

and underneath someone has scrawled 'Bill Stickers is innocent'. It's just one of those things that makes you smile. Unfortunately I never got round to getting a photo of it, but you can see it here. 

I like things like this. It was written on to the window of a bar/club thing that I walked past. And since I love cities, I'm a bit of a sucker for things like this.

I'm annoyed that this is slightly out of focus, but never mind. I think they are cooking oil and paint canisters, but I honestly have no idea.

Rock on.

With all the buildings, and rather confined space, you get these pretty cool looking short alleys. The fisheye helps I guess.

Same goes for this one really, although, I like this one a little more because of the way the scene is busy just in one corner, but you still get the light coming down across the wall.

I just like the colours here. And the lines look like they might not be parallel.

I always notice these, and I guess that's the point. It's hardly advertising, or maybe it is, and I must confess I always like to read them. This lamp post is at the bottom of a steep set of stairs so you end up fairly close to it, and at eye level.

No Bills, but drawing on the walls is ok obviously.

Cheerio.

Cityscape

When I went to Hong Kong, I wasn't sure what to expect from a photographic aspect. Obviously there are loads to see in cities, so there wasn't going to be a lack of things, but I just not sure. I have been there before, indeed lived there briefly yonks ago, but I wasn't entirely sure after a 13 year absence. I had a very good time whilst I was there either way. I pretty much wandered around for 4 days with two cameras slung around my neck and just kind of had a nose around. 

I only really have one other photo from a city in this kind of way and that was from New York, where I basically took one picture of buildings at funny angles. Here I was trying to do the same kind of thing.

Hong Kong island is a bit hilly (really hilly in fact), and you can kind of get a sense of the gradient by the distance of the people in the left hand side of this picture, but what I was more interested in is the bamboo on the right. I love the fact that you will always see bamboo on construction.

Cookie cutter concrete jungle. 

Right, this is the observation platform on Victoria Peak. The picture's a little grainy, and even though it is pretty empty as a photo, but I was pretty fortunate to get the plane in it.

All the land in the bottom is reclaimed land. 

Hong Kong will be great when they're finished building it.

The alleys are pretty cool to use a fish eye lens on. Just to get the street level and the tops of buildings in one shot. You get a much better idea of the scale of things.

So I've probably ripped off loads of other photos here, but whatever.

Whoever lives here is really bloody lucky. The views are great. Not that you can tell from the picture, but I was on the Peak, looking down, and you get a great view of Kowloon.

This view in fact...

I Hate The Snow

It's cold, and wet, and icy; just lots of things I don't like.

It's actually snowed here in Shanghai a couple of times over the winter, and settled. Fortunately, where I live it's pretty quiet so when it settled it was largely undisturbed. Also, as it's right outside my front door, I don't have to spend too much time outside wishing I was inside.

You get the idea... Since it's a rather busy city, I figured the snow wouldn't have settled so much on the streets so I didn't bother to have a look.

I got quite a few pictures of these chairs. But I really like the fact that I was using a fairly quick shutter speed to get the snow falling a little more clearly.

Same goes for this one really.

This is literally outside my front door.

I was carrying about two different cameras. As I have vaguely mentioned in a previous post, I use an OM-2 as well as an OM-1. The main reason being so I can switch between taking colour photos and black and white. It means I can get a lot more photos, and try out different things with different lenses with out having to sit and think too much about it. What with the snow I figured black and white would be just as good as colour, because there aren't a whole lot of flowers and colourful things about this time of year, but luckily I was a little prepared.

There was only about 2 inches of snow, if that.

This is actually from when it snowed in December, I went out later in the day and it was obviously a lot darker. There was more snow that time around.

Many Hands Make Light Work

I have a confession to make - well some explaining to do at least: I recently spent some time using a digital camera. I have a legitimate reason for this. One that is rather irrelevant at this point. Either way. I needed to practice using one. Now, I'm not a particularly big fan of digital cameras; I think they are needlessly complicated sometimes, and I hate autofocus, and yes I am sure you can get around it, but I am not inclined to learn this malarky when I have perfectly good film cameras.

Anyway. Thanks to some rather fancy technology, you can get these little extension bits to digital cameras (some of them at least) and mount manual lenses onto them. As I have mentioned I use an old Olympus OM-1 as my default camera (I actually also use an OM-2, but that's also another story, for another blog post - most likely the next one). I have the use of an Olympus Pen, which is a pretty nice bit of kit. But as it stands I can whack on my OM lenses to the Pen. So this post consists of digital images that I have taken recently (my first actual attempt being some random shots of Shanghai from ages and ages ago when I felt like a wander about the city - but that was a pokey little camera that I was also trying to get used to using).

I went down to Suzhou for the day. It's very picturesque, lots of things to see. I went mainly to see some rather elaborate gardens and a water village, but I managed to get a chance to go around a silk factory. Silk Factory No. 1 as it is somewhat formally known. It's rated as the best in China, and as China is rather famous for it's silk, it's a pretty big deal. Now as I wasn't originally planning on going to see this place, I was somewhat uninclined to use up the films that I was carrying, so I figured it was the perfect opportunity to try out this digital camera, since I had brought it along anyway. I was also using a 50mm lens, also something that I haven't actually used a whole lot of in the past year. My first blog post with pictures is the only other example of my using a 50mm wide angle lens. I had found it a strange lens to get used to, and was more interested in using my 35-135mm and 35-70mm which are basically my two standard lenses I use all the time for obvious reasons. Anyway. What follows are some images of me wandering about a small factory and what I saw, using a camera I was not used to, and a lens I was not used to either. The title of this post will make sense.

So silk is quite interesting stuff. The way it is farmed is just as interesting. Here a woman is sorting cocoons, separating bad ones from the good ones.

After they are separated they are put in hot water and the threads attached to these things that run it all together in spools. You can't really see what the woman is holding, but trust me she is holding a bit of silk. Did you know silk is actually just silkworm vomit? Well pretty much. The cocoon is the silk and the silkworm is killed before it turns into a moth. 

The thread that comes out of a silk worm is one single piece and can be more than 1000 metres (yes, one kilometre) in length. Eight strands of silk are wound together to make one thread since one alone is too thin (this is a very basic run down of the procedure, but it's interesting nonetheless).

Moving away from hands for the minute, but this is a cool image.

The main area where the threads are run into spools is quite a long room with a lot of people working on them at one time.

Also a cool picture. Tools make things work too.

This is a woman opening up the cocoon and getting rid of the larvae. They stretch out the opened cocoon once it has softened in the water. The strange thing standing up is what the silk is stretched over.

This is a better view.

They move it from a smaller one, to a larger one seen here.

Larvae from the cocoon.

After it's all dried and and spooled, they make all sorts of things, here four women are stretching it from something that is about a foot squared, to something the size of a mattress.

And then made into the blankets... Silk is meant to be better for the lungs, and therefore better for sheets and covers and whatnot, due to the fact that it doesn't kick up dust the way cotton and feathers do.

I love these two photos together.

Fun in the work place it seems...

More News

I'm having a terribly hard time getting on Blogger at the moment, so updates are going to be slightly here and there (and everywhere). Will do what I can when, when I can.

Progress And All That

Ok. The final bit of Hangzhou is more along the lines of things I find curious. I wasn't so much trying to frame photos and make them look kind of pretty and all that. More just having a nose around. 

There isn't so much to tell about this picture. I was using 200ASA film, which I think I am not too fond of,  if I am being honest. The images are kind of bland. But then the above picture is generally kind of grey. What is interesting, and will become more apparent, is what's in the bottom right corner. 

Obviously there is a big to do about how the Chinese just develop things without regard to people who live in the places where this development is supposed to happen. This is a good example of that. What with the building site, the advertising and the laundry hanging up.

Building sites double as play areas it seems.

I kind of still feel a bit weird taking pictures of people when they are looking right back at you...

... Clearly the guy didn't seem to mind so much. He started waving and having a laugh with his mates.

I am go to be away for a little while in Hong Kong, but will return with some pictures of snow in Shanghai from December, and whatever I come across in HK.
Cheerio.