Lightroom 3 makes a difference

Lightroom 3 Beta does make a difference against version 2: one of my favourite photos of this summer was the dancer's portrait made with impossible light conditions and impossible camera settings: ISO 6400--the highest sensitivity on my Sony A700, so that noise ("speckles") was guaranteed. Nevertheless, I liked the result and put it into this blog on 2 Sept. ("Beauty in 36 Months"). But now I re-imported the picture from its RAW form into LR3-Beta and lo and behold, the noise level was already lower on the rough import and after using the Noise reduction option it got even better. Maybe the dancer did not need that many speckles to be a nice photo after all.

Shanghai is some sight

Couldn't access my blog while in Shanghai, but luckily photo cameras are not yet dependent on continuous web connections to store the photos (is that an idea for camera makers: no more memory cards, just direct upload to a web gallery?). Some are already on Flickr, but here's another one, symbolising how Shanghai is changing beyond recognition, even for its own (older) inhabitants! The 'rive droite' area, Pudong, was only rice fields twenty years ago, we were told, and now skyscrapers are mushrooming faster than rice could grow ;-)

The photo was a snapshot upwards to a higher level of walkways along the river boulevard, giving a great perspective and at the same time giving the contrast between the people's amazed expressions and the all-too-modern (for them, it seems) buildings in the background.