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.

Missed hoped-for chance: Berlin in the rain

Berlin is a great city for photos of modern (and restored neo-classical) architecture. But that needs good weather, or at least dry weather for the buildings to appear at their best. Last week I was there, with some extra time, and even with a special travel guide for architecture fans (on sale in bookshops all around the city). But it was cold and rainy--as I wrote to some of my readers before. Instead of a nice set of photos, almost the only thing that came out was this contrasting view of the TV tower at the Alexander Platz and a church spire: Who comes highest? Is TV more important than religion (maybe that was an intended message in DDR times)? And what does it mean that the TV tower disappears into the clouds?

Hotel view and panoramas in Prague

"It must be great to travel so much!", is what people sometimes say to me. To counter the idea that travel for work is as nice as traveling for pleasure, I once started to make a series of depressing photos from my hotel windows in famous cities--often the only thing I'd see, apart from conference rooms, airports, and the (traffic-laden) road in between. That series started in the days of analogous photography (but was not kept well-organised), and sometimes I still add to it. Prague is a great city to add to that series of sadness: although much has been restored since I first saw the city, just after the Fall of the Wall, there still are views of "maintenance wanted" situations and one of those was right opposite my hotel room, across a narrow street in the Old Town.

This time, the trip had its nice, touristy moments: we had some time to enjoy the panoramas of the city. Can you spot the post-processing, apart from the obvious cropping? I guess you can: in both cases I made the sky more 'dramatic' by reducing the exposure locally by about one stop. Of course I tried to make the effect as much as possible look as if I had used a graded neutral density filter.

By the way, these pictures were taken with a normal compact camera (it is not worthwhile carrying the DSLR for those few photo occasions). I am quite satisfied with the results of the Lumix TZ-5: good colour rendition, good resolution. Too bad it's all in Jpeg, though.