I met up with Winfred again, this time he brought the ‘boss’ of his photo society and a few chicks from his school to act as models. We headed roughly to the same place as last time, although this time much later in the day. We decided we’d try get some sunset shots. The weather was less than perfect in terms of visibility and it was cold as well. This made our relentless march up into the hills less than enjoyable for our dainty model friends, but… in the end, certainly got some good photos out of it…
This is Gao Jin (高金.) The first of our models. She majors in Chinese and speaks very little English, but a very polite girl, and photogenic. 🙂 (This is how you have to say a girl is “pretty” when you have a girlfriend 😉 )
and this is the infectious smile of Zhu Hui (朱惠.) An art major who again, speaks no English and while is stereotypically shy — she’s very charismatic.
Winfred was representin’ with his usual combo of D90 and 50mm 1.8
and our new partner in crime, Li De (李地.)
This cloud/hill combo reminded me of the Windows XP default desktop wallpaper.
Zhu Hui thought it was A-OK too.
As the sun got lower, the sky got more and more interesting.
There were no flowers to pretend to look at, so we had to settle for these strange plant things.
Took this before our ascent. If you look in the background, you can actually see a herd of sheep being…herded. The greatness of shooting in Weinan.
Trying to stay warm.
Zhu Hui has a real “deer in headlights” gaze.
I quite like this obscure shot.
As the sun got lower, I decided to break the number one rule of photography, and start shooting into it.
Interesting eyes!
I normally don’t like black and white, but found it worked well with the soft, haze-filtered, low sun.
I continue to love my new 24-105 F/4L lens!
Cute smile!
Colour is still my numero uno though. Especially with some warm lens flare thrown in.
I love playing around trying to make my shots look like film.
I like the colour treatment on this one too.
Shooting from just 50meters away and the hazey smog really softens the image up.
I quite like the hazy, washed-out look.
The sun getting low, low, low, loooowwwww. Peep my Adidias.
One of my favourite shots; I like the pink, blue, yellow combo.
Some behind the scenes stuff:
Winfred getting busy.
Winfred’s 25 year old Chinese film camera. I’ll have to find out more info on this, but it just looks cool!
The boys and their toys.
All about the peace.
Not forgetting yours truly. 😉
While heading down the hill, I snapped some of these:
One…
Two…
Three. China is a purdy place.
You can see 170+ photos from the day, here.
Or, just the 36 best here.
I took the opportunity of this blog post to experiment with super-large portrait-orientation photos. Usually most of my photography is landscape, but this time most of my goodies were portrait, so to really show ’em off, I have to go big. I’d appreciate your thoughts on how it worked out. Too big? Did they look purdy? Lemme know in the comments, or shoot me an email.
Maybe just a touch too big, I had to scroll to see the full picture on most of them on my 21″ screen…but those eyes! Beautiful!
Thanks Kay! The huge portrait images is something I’m “umm”ing and “aww”ing over a lot. I like how it makes you examine the photo in detail, like standing next to a piece of art in a gallery, and having the scan the painting with your eyes (not that I’ve ever actually done that – I’m not one for traditional art) but at the same time, you can’t really stand back and take the whole image in. Hmmm. Maybe I think about these things too much!
Deer caught in the headlights. You would know!! Dad
i saw the photoes ,there are beautiful photoes that you and your friend took them . they are nature and it shows you are a good photographer. maybe you write an album of weinan .