Christmas lights

Dear reader,

After reading a post on strobist (here at Blogger) on how to capture Christmas lights I decided to go out and give it a shot myself. Only one problem arose and a big one at that. Most places here in Beijing think that the lights do not need to be turned on till it's pich black dark outside (which would be 5pm) and that is catastrophic for the photographer. Strobist is telling us that you can only catch great lighting for about 10min and that is at around dusk. So much for me and experimenting. But I am not giving up and shifted my point of focus to a different new technique (for me that is) which is zoom photography. You take a point of interest and zoom in while taking the picture. Since it is difficult for me to set the aperture right I decided to use my TV function (shutter speed manual and aperture auto) and set it to "1. Keep your camera steady, point, shoot and zoom while the picture is beijing taken. For some swirl effect try twisting the camera 45 to 90 degrees or so.

See here the result.

End of the line - lost in Beijing

Dear friends and visitors,

This blog will not be me talking about trivial things that keep us all busy (I hope), but about sharing what I have learned and will learn about photography. I am not claiming to be....wait let's rephrase this....I am by far not an amazingly great photographer. I am simply someone who loves to go out and capture the city I live in, my travels and now als my friends through the lens of my camera. I feel comfortable looking through the view finder of my Pentax and shutting out the world around me.

My first entry here will be some picture of an assigment I assigned to myself. Last weekend I went out with the photography club I recently joined (BeijinGX). The purpose was to have an outing called 'the end of the line'. We hopped on the Beijing subway and went to line 8 (also known as the 'Batong' line) and went to the last stop, called 'Tuqiao'. Since we would be a bit out of the city I was hoping to find wasteland, ruins and torn down walls because it would be a great surrounding for an idea that had formed in my head. I had promised my friend's 13-year-old daughter that I would take some portraits of her and asked her to join me on this excursion. The assignment: Lost in Beijing.

I hope that these pictures are giving you the feeling that this 13-year-old girl is trying to find her way back.