Category Archives: monument

Giant Pandas, a giant lunch, and a giant Buddha

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My next-to-last day in the Sichuan province of China was a big one. Giant, even. It started with a trip to Chengdu’s Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding where I got to see everyone’s favorite living plush dolls. The babies were especially cuddly, but were unfortunately kept behind glass and visitors were ushered past fairly quickly as they were being fed their breakfasts:

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The bigger fellas were all busy eating or hanging out and napping in trees:

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There were also Red Pandas in attendance:

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Hard to watch all those critters eat without getting a little famished yourself so, after a decent drive to Leshan, lunch was our first stop. We’d had a lot of buffet meals on this trip so it was nice to have a more traditional meal (although we still didn’t order for ourselves — come to think of it — I don’t think we ever did). Several items were brought out, including:

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some kind of a hot bun filled with a melty, brown-sugary filling that was simply amazing,

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barbecued beef,

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Kung Pao chicken (I was surprised to find out this was an actual thing in China and not an American invention akin to the fortune cookie),

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and a sweet and sour chicken that was much more complex than anything I’ve ever encountered in a Chinese restaurant in the States. I think this may have been my favorite meal of the trip and I stuffed myself accordingly.

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That’s Leshan, above. The restaurant where we ate was just about on the right edge of the frame in this photo, overlooking the river.

We were in Leshan to see the 233-foot-tall Giant Buddha which, according to Wikipedia, “is the largest stone Buddha in the world and it is by far the tallest pre-modern statue in the world.” The Buddha is carved from a cliff overlooking the river on the far side from the city of Leshan. To view it, we would take a tourist boat out. The boats make a quick pass down-river, then come back up where they take a position just across from the Buddha so that tourists can have their photos taken with the Buddha in the background.

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If I ever get back to Leshan, I want to take the time to visit the Giant Buddha from land and explore the trails and stairs that encircle him. This time the river view would have to do, though, and I think it was a good way to take in the scale for a first visit.

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Boating back to Leshan:

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From here we would be heading for Mount Emei, the highest of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China. We’d be staying in a hotel at the base, but spending the better part of our last day in China making our way to the top. Before leaving Leshan, we visited the markets to lay in a supply of snacks for our hike:

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I love markets like this and especially enjoyed seeing this man with his bicycle modified to haul an oven for roasting sweet potatoes on the back:

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One more day in China, and it would be another big one.

Vicksburg, Mississippi

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Just a quick note to say that I’m back from a short jaunt to Mississippi. It may give hope to others that live in my part of the country that Spring is only a day’s drive away. While in Jackson, Vicksburg and Natchez, I saw iris, daffodils and forsythia blooming and the tulip trees were actually already past their prime. Spring is on its way, folks. Take heart.

Oh… and the photo is from the Vicksburg National Military Park. More on that and other stops soon.

I like my water clear, thank you

Adjusting this photo from Saturday’s NE Kansas excursion was a little more work than it needed to be. This is the Buffalo Soldier Memorial at Fort Leavenworth and apparently someone thinks the water looks better dyed an unnatural blue/green color. That, or it’s been this way since St. Patty’s day. Maybe there is some other perfectly reasonable explanation for the water’s color, but it looked really, really strange in the falls below the sculpture. You can see for yourself in the un-fixed horizontal version below:

Note to all fountain owners — green water doesn’t look better! In Lightroom, I had to go through a whole process of selectively desaturating the aqua range of the color spectrum and painting in with the adjustment brush a combination of increased contrast and desaturation until things were looking somewhat natural again. Whew.

By the way, I was also putting a new camera bag through its paces on Saturday. For my upcoming Fiji trip in just a few days, I picked up a new Think Tank Sling-O-Matic. Here’s a photo of it from their site:

I had originally planned on getting the smaller Sling-O-Matic 10 but it wasn’t in stock locally and upon seeing the size of the 20, thought it might better fit my gear. This bag is slightly smaller than my Think Tank Airport Ultralight and is a sling-bag instead of a full backpack. While I’ll miss the distribution of the weight across both shoulders, I welcome the ability to swing the bag around to access lenses without taking the bag off.

The bag worked great on Sunday and I look forward to seeing how it does on a longer trip. My Ultralight fit nearly every overhead compartment I encountered although it was a bit tight in some. This one should slide right in, but the laptop will have to be carried separately in its own sleeve. There is a side pocket that will take the laptop on the Sling, but an inch or so sticks out and I’d be a little nervous that it might work its way out while out of my view on my back (the way the pockets work is that they’re top-opening when you sling the bag ’round front, but are side-opening when worn on the back).

I’ll report back after the Sling has logged a few air miles.

Stumbling blocks

Monuments and memorials always used to be large statues and obelisks that you couldn’t miss, but sometimes a more powerful statement can be made with subtlety. Take these stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks” that I ran across in the narrow streets of Regensburg, Germany:

Artist Gunter Demnig has been installing these brass-covered cobblestones all over Europe outside of the last homes of those deported and killed by the Nazis around the time of the Second World War. This stone reads roughly; “Here lived Gisela Loewy”, birthdate, date of deportation, “murdered”. I have to say, finding these scattered through out the streets at every turn is extremely moving. These small stones do more than any enormous obelisk ever could.

Here’s an article about Demnig and his project from Canada.com.

Revisiting Greece

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I thought I’d try something a little different tonight and revisit an old file — one that I didn’t really consider a keeper before — and see what I could do with it. I went back to the first international trip I made after switching to digital. It was a trip to Greece in 2003.

It’s not that I hadn’t shot digital at all before this, but Greece was the first trip I made with only a DSLR and no film body. I was shooting RAW with a Nikon D100 and this particular image was made with a Nikkor 17-35 at 17mm.

I’d never made a serious attempt to post-process this shot because it had a huge contrast range that made keeping the church tower from blowing out while holding the detail in the shadows very difficult. This evening I made two versions in ACR, one exposed for the highlights and one for the shadows. I put the highlight image on a layer above the shadow image and painted in a mask using a Wacom tablet to let the shadow detail come through. Throw in a few smart filters and there you go. Not perfect but not bad for a few minutes work.

Could I have done this with the software that was available back in 2003? Probably. But I’m pretty sure it would have taken me a lot longer. It’s pretty great having old RAW files around knowing that, as the software progresses (and hopefully my skill level as well) I can go back and reinterpret images to get better or at least different results.