For those that follow my blog also knows that I sometimes use my little sisters music – and her song Autumn depression was a theme song on one of my videos (can’t reach youtube from China so I can’t find it nor link to it) but I just noticed when playing it to my parents in law that Kerstin updated the song and it’s now super great! :D

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To the song I give you my first Pixelmator edited photo, it’s tough to work in a new software and it was frustrating but I think result is OK. It doesn’t have any advanced sharpening – and RawTherapee that I relied on so much lately doesn’t work in OS X Lion – So I’m stuck with what I got. Not much. :)

Hopefully Pixelmator 2.0 will have everything that I lack right now, but then it’s too late as I’ll be back home to my safe PS. :D

If anyone has any other suggestions for great sharpening softwares outside PS and on a Mac – and free or not very expensive then feel free to shout!

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I love ev-bikes! I had one many years ago when I lived in Kunming and the other day we tried a few to see if perhaps it would be time to get another one.. They’re really awesome!! This one can do about 45km before running out of juice and cost around 2000rmb (€200) – And it’s foldable and battery is easily removable. Cool stuff!!

Good that I have Linn, she makes my photos look so much better! :D

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I will not post much until next release of SPP5 is out. It’s just an amazing amount of work to get anything right and out without looking too off from your original idea. But please enjoy this small selection.

All images taken using the Sigma SD1 + 18-50 2.8 macro.

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Images taken by two Chinese photographers using Canon and Fujifilm cameras in jpg mode. I tried my very best to enhance in LR3 but there wasn’t enough data really. Although we got lots of good memories!

Starts with relatives gathering – us dressing up and here we are ready to show humbleness and respect to the oldest, Linns grandmother  by bowing three times. Feels very vey strange but she looked very happy so.. :)

Then it’s time for me to serve green tee to the “head” relatives of the family. Here I serve Linn’s (and mine according to Chinese traditions) mom. I enjoyed this part much more. :)

After serving all of them the tee, Linn’s grand mother gives us two red envelopes with money. That means that she accepts our marriage. She’s 86 btw and a really tough lady. :)

After the ceremony I carry Linn down many stairs and to the awaiting car, a BMW X5 limited edition.. :) Some friend lend it to us, and we had it decorated China style.

We drove first to a park by the huge erha lake, and there the wedding photos bagan.

The park was fun, and lots of people were looking. :) I had to say Hello quite a few times.

After the park thingi it was time to go to the Hotell, a huge five star thing that was prepared for us. We stood at the entrence of the hotell giving candy and cigaretts to the guests and shaking hands. Mom and dad was standing there with us. The strange thing here was that lots of guests didn’t come for us, they came because of Linn’s father and they didn’t even look at me, walking straight to dad and congratulating.. hmm.. China.

Then when all 300 guests was seated, eating and stuff we came in walking to the front were a rental talk person stood doing the smooth introduction of our love (she had no idea who we were so this felt strange too) and she walked us thru some decorating steps, like cutting a small cake, pouring champagne on a pile of wine glas and finally to have the traditional drink with our armes around each other. hmm.. I got some shot of that but perhaps you understand.

We then walked from table to table, my bestman told eveyone to stand up and then someone at each table said something nice about the future of ours and then we drank.. :) I had water and they had rice wine. Most didn’t know but after 30 tables, rice wine would likely had me killed.

Now this is written in haste and I’m sure my English is worse then usual. But at least you got a taste of Weddings in this part of China.

It was raining and great shutter speeds turned into seconds. Well, what to do?  These are shots taken with the DP1. I have lots of this type of pictures as I love them. It’s a cool way of isolating a subject. Not always successful but always worth a try. If you have taken shots like this please add in commenting field, I’d love to see yours!
 

Bonus, really fast moving buss! :)

An old friend of mine is about to have a baby and wanted me to take a shot or two of them together. :) Lucky me I meet another friend that has a smaller studio – more made for passport type of photos but after rearanging some I got a ligth that worked ok (her husband is holding the flash and Linn is standing on a chair trying to take away stray light). Hope this isn’t seen as a sexy picture for my viewers as it has nothing to do with that. And no, this time I used a Nikon D90 – mostly because it had a lens better fit for this. Didn’t want the wider feeling of DP1 and 2.

When we arrived Kunming we headed directly to a hot pot restaurant where some friends already had eaten (buss was a little late) and so hungry as I was I took my chopsticks and started to move around in the pot to see what goodies I could find. The first thing I found was pigs brain! How about that! Now I tried that and grasshopper. I wonder what more strange food I’ll have tried before returning to Sweden. (It was a strange feeling to have meat and other eatable stuff in the same pot as a big brain.. but I was hungry!).

Right now I’m on the floor in a smaller hotel in Kunming – when we arrived I wasn’t allowed to check in because I was foreigner. Smaller hotels in China often has this very strange rule. Well, the place was pre-paid by a friend so after much friendly debating and paper showing we came in. And why on the floor? Because I found that a neighbor to the hotel has an open wifi!! So a little bit of internet for me, but if i move it’s gone. hehe.

Old: Tomorrow we’re heading for Kunming, leaving the fresh Dali for some smog. jaij! Not sure if I will be able to work online there but hopefully I’ll be able to. My mail works again too. Wonder what happened. had something like 140 unread messages. aaaargh.

Oh, and did you notice that you can upload a photo when you make a comment? That way you can ask specific questions about your own shots or any of mine redeveloped etc. Very cool stuff! Please try in this post if you have any shots you wanna share!

Now I took the time and downloaded Raw Developer 1.84 and oala I can save the day (sky and clouds that is)..

Bonus: Another fellow photographer.. :)

EDIT: It’s a DP2 shot. Not from Dp1.

I was fooling around with Raw Developer, old version too and converted some new DP2 shots to see what they would look like with noise reduction turned off and sharpening smoothing turned off. Colors are as opened on these two crossing shots. All shots below are saved as 200% size and opened in LR2 for the watermark and sRGB save. EDIT, just realized that my watermark is not applied. Still copyrighted!! :)

Above: Partial crop. Click for highly magnified view.
Original image available for your own peeking! Obs! 5272 x 3512 and sharpened for print.

And here’s some partials crops of above image: Click each for highly magnified view.

And some other shots developed with Raw Developer. Also DP2. Now I have to admit that I developed these lats night and I felt at the time that Oaaaa, they had such incredible colors but today with this screen I’m using it looks pretty boring so I have no idea what you will feel or see. Hopefully what I saw!

some more:

The following photos are all available as full size.

I’m back with more shots from Yunnan, Dali – I really enjoy my stay so far and my DP’s hasn’t run out of juice once yet. I have one spare battery for each and I charge every night. I film quite a lot too, will show later when it’s time. One thing is extremely annoying and that’s when I switch between the two use interface is slightly different so I often press the wrong buttons which has killed some good moments, perhaps there should be some option to make the DP2 mimic the DP1.. :)

As some of you know I had problems with my CS3 installation so I installed Lightroom 2.4 instead, so this time I have a wide mix between LR developed shots and SPP 3.3 developed shots (saved as TIFF from SPP and imported into LR for my little watermark and some post adjustments such as vigneting. Often none). Can you see what is what?

Self portrait!

Who is that?

This women is making one of Dali’s own famouse fried cheese with chocolate candy thingis..

These police officers helped us find a photo exhibition that’s we were invited to. And check out the bonus in the background.

The old man above wanted to sell some scroll (as you see on the ground three pictures up) and I asked him if I could take a picture of him, so I did and after that I went back to Linn, he ran after asking if he could have the photo sent to him. So he wrote down his address and the text says something like “please send me the pictures”.. He was very cute and of course I will send him. It’s not a marvelous shot but I’m sure he will be satisfied.

Below: So, finally we arrived to the opening ceremony of this much bigger thing than we expected, hundreds of photographers and thousands of visitors came to see a massive show of dancing minorities – Some very important persons were there and the association of photography in China was there with their president etc etc. It was very cool.

And the center of the show was the three pagodas. Over a thousands years old buddhist monasteries. This is said to be the third most important place on earth to buddhists. And yes, there was lots and lots of police everywhere. I felt very safe.

I was often photographed together with other photographers. Fun!. :)

Lastly, what’s the difference between these two shots?

Killed by a insanely sharp shot.. Just installed a Chinese version of Adobe LR2 trying to fix that color thingi with CS3 – well, developed this shot and realized how incredibly sharp it was. Click to open up full size! (DP2 at ISO100 and f7,1)

Jaij! I made it again! Another post. woohooo.. Alright, this time I included some of those cool skies from a couple of days ago, they’re in the end of this post. Also another note to all these shots. Some of them has two different developments put together from the same raw. One for sky and another for the rest. Also, one or two has two different exposures and what I did was dead simple, I just made a fuzzy cut out from one shot to the other to get some more DR. Sky behind pigs and the dirty work black and white with a truck and a man. Open them up full and you’ll see what I mean. I don’t have a tripod with me so everything you see is hand held. Developed using SPP 3.3 for everything.

The above and below lady is 92 years old and we visited her because she didn’t have many days left of this life and they wanted some pictures of her. I so much love to look at old peoples faces, listed to their voices and just imagine what life was back then.

Above: Using my sunglasses with some green fading cheap thing to bring sky for you to see.. very powerful – Lucky for us it stayed mountain side.

Below: This is acually shot at F14 using DP2. I cropped out some, the oof is very nice don’t you think? And woaa how sharp these lenses can be. DP1 is probably slightly sharper but Dp2 has slightly better bokeh. :)

Above: A really fast two shot sky magic thingi. Don’t look too close at the right side if the picture as it’s not a perfect match. I was shaking a little or something. Sat on a double seat bike at the moment (those bikes are so much fun!).

Below the below shot and the below shot: Cool with all these old style trucks!  Not so cool with environment in mind. Also x3 fill light is used for many of these shots.

Above: Spiders!!! These are BIG things, totally dangerous for flies and stuff. :)  And they come in massive amounts, I don’t like spiders too close to me..

Below: Sky is double exposed. Copied with fluffy border to fit nicely. I moved too much between shots so it’s a bit dirty. But works.

Above and below: Would you mind being here?

Below: Some of those shots from a couple of days ago. We went up for 276 stairs and enjoyed the view. If you open up some of the portrait shots you’ll find lots of dragon flies. There was literally thousands of them, especially higher up. They said it was because of rain coming. Pretty big too..

Above: Dragonflies!! See this shot even bigger, or you can’t really see any of those flying thingis..

Above: Lastly, a special breed of dog from Tibet, once made to protect tibetans from Tigers and other predators. This one is about a year old and will become much bigger. It’s nothing you really wanna play around with even if it looks like a family dog.

All shots can be viewed bigger. Not full size but with very low compression and higher resolution.

Hi again, now I developed some more from last days. I took some today that I hopefully can post tomorrow of the lake here. Very dramatic weather these days. Oh, and we’re on 2000m elevation (height?) and mountains around are just below 3000m. Very cool environment. :) And these are developed using none calibrated screens. I checked on some other computers and it looked ok. Mixed DP1 and DP2 shots, click each for bigger and with info regarding DP and ISO. Exif should be there too.

Something you drink always, tea! Like in Britain only it comes in more visible form. Often they have some herbs inside that they call medicine and doctor told them to drink. When eating you always get green tea to the food, lots of people carry a tea thingi with them at all times such as these below.

I was teasing Linn telling her that modern China used VC machines to cut all those fancy patterns and images they have everywhere in windows and chairs and stuff. How wrong I was. Lots of those are man made. I walked on a street with a huge amount of smaller companies with people making really really beautiful stuff such as these below. Light was worse than I though so ISO should have been higher for better sharpness. My fault.

Pictures below are from Dali ancient city. Very cool place.

Above shot isn’t ISO400 as image says. It’s 100. Too fast work. Linn is waiting for the computer. ;) She wanna develop her shots now. aaaaaaa

Food, what can I say? Chinese cooking is just from another planet and something to die for. A restaurant often looks something like this and you point your finger on whatever vegetable, meat or mushroom or whatever is visible and they’ll tell you one or two ways to cook it – you select one and oala you have your dish. So if you point a tomato they will most likely make a tomato egg mix that is very nice.

I went with friends to some different restaurant these days and I took some shots to show you what it looks like with many dishes on a table. And I’ll ask Linn to fill in some short info on what’s being served but in short it’s donkey, pork, water living vegetable, beans etc etc – even grasshopper (but not on any of these shots) and the candle is not there to be nice – but to keep flies away.

Developed on uncalibrated equipment, tried to make sure they looked ok using histogram. Not that easy with colors. Oh well. Will update with some text later but now I’m off to that hot spring to swim. Big thing with Linn’s relatives etc. They have high hopes for my swimming style. haha.

Oh and under each picture you see if it’s DP1 or DP2. Most is DP1 as it’s wider and suites my photography style a bit better.

Human power. Or the power of humans. It’s quite amazing how some of these people work and you can’t really see it on this shot but if I wanted to take a picture of him he would most likely give me a big smile and treat me a cigarett (which I would have to decline). And no, I’m not talking about any of the guys sitting there..

I have shoe size 46 in European size, that’s extremely uncommon in China and maybe if I lived in Beijing (Northern Chinese are often bigger, they say it comes from them eating less rice and more bread) I could find something but down here in the south it’s nearly impossible. So above is a shoe maker that I ordered sandals from. I had to paint what I wanted it to look like and everything. The bottom layer is made from an old car tire too. How cool isn’t that? Well. In another week or so I’ll know the result. And price? He was a bit on the expensive side. 60RMB

Above lady has Bai minority clothes on, the same minority that Linn comes from.

No money to read the local newspaper? No problem! :)

Back in 2005 when I still lived in China I had the opportunity to meet the Swedish crown Princess Victoria. She came to the Nordic Gallery that I often used as my work place back then. Linn talked to her more than me, I thought her body guards was more fun.

Anyways I was asked to take a group shot – and it really isn’t much to see. I used the SD9 and it was a quick and dirty setup – I wasn’t prepared (no one was) and I more or less asked them to stand as a group and find a spot where they could see my lens with both eyes. :) But it’s a cool memory that comes to life now when preparing for the third trip. Jaij!