Robert Thompson on all things China.
Took way to long, only reinforcing the fact that I still need a book or something. But now I have my stock 450px template for photos. This is a cha hua, anyone know the name of it in English? I thought it was the camellia? They were on sale in Chuxiong, Yunnan last month, some for up to 100,000 RMB.
Photoshop CS3’s Photomerge feature is the best. No tripod needed. Auto-stretch option. Just set your camera to Manual mode, shoot RAW, get a reading of the sky and set shutter and f-stop accordingly, pan across the area you want to shoot, shoot 1 or 2 stops under 0, stitch it together in PS3, flatten layers, in Levels (RGB screen) move the top right slider over to the left to the “end” of the histogram, crop the shot, don’t fret if there are white spaces in the shot, once it’s cropped use the Transform tool and click the “warp” feature to move those white spots out of the shot and BOOOOOOOOOM, you got a panoramic like no one else.
SEE THE NEW GOOGLEFIED GALLERY!
It’s just wrong. Why am I putting ads on my photo galleries?
Anyway, it’s not difficult to do, but if I get enough interest I’ll post a step-by-step guide on how to add Google Adsense to your Lightroom gallery. Takes less than a minute.
Note to self: Next time create web gallery 768 wide. Use CSS to margin add in the right place. Can lower JPG res.
Photos to come, will be semi-offline for two days. It’ll be our third time in the area.
Check out the latest photos from my recent trip in Yunnan, China. The town is called Ejia, but it’s not really important because it’s not on any tourist map, and no Chinese tour company will take you there. You have to know one of the 600 people that live in the village. And again, it takes 10 hours to get there from the capital city of Kunming, which is only about 60 miles away.
A sunrise over a fogged-in valley between two mountain ranges in Yunnan, China.
All this for less that $0.30 USD. It’s like going to Whole Foods. We have tomatoes, broccoli, red peppers, and cucumber. Lunch.
I hiked up about 400 feet above where we were staying and got myself in (I believe) a little wheat field, set up the Italian tripod, manual setting, exposed for the sky, and shot six portrait shots.
PS CS3 stiches them together very well, much better than CS2. This is the result, just to give you an idea of what the rural part of China looks like.
I’ll be posting GPS coordinates soon.
CLICK HERE (go to the FAQ section, bottom of page)
People asked some questions, I went out and relayed the questions to Chinese farmers, took photos and videos of things, and returned with answers.
After this latest trip to E Jia I took about 800 RAW format photos. Now I’m faced with the task of selecting a few, editing them, exporting, creating galleries, making prints, etc. I’ve found that by converting them to DNG format I can save space while keeping the RAW format options available.
Adobe DNG Coverter is a useful app to “compress” your RAW files down a little (but keep the RAW functionality) and at the same time is creating a standard for all those different camera types.
Some stats: DNG compressed (loseless) some NEFs down about 35%, and some CRW down about 18% (average of 800+ files).
I found a detailed web site explaining the benefits of DNG.
onOne’s Mask Pro 4.0 is hella cool. Masking software, I know, it’s been around forever, but I never used it until now (someone was showing it to me when it was still Extensis, and it was cool then.)
It has about a 5-minute learning curve, but if you watch their online tutorials, it’s very easy to use and works very well. Their tutorials are inline with what I would make if I were a developer trying to sell software. Anyway this app is very useful, well worth the $150+ USD.
I hope these two little apps will help me along with this major photo project.
VIEW PANORAMIC PHOTO OF DALI
VISIT GALLERY
ENLARGE
ENLARGE