spring2life take2

since 20 years december 1st is celebrated as world aids day. it’s only too easy to perceive this as a problem of “the others”, subconsciously letting your prejudice block the thoughtful observation. It’s a task for all of us to show solidarity and support, it is this what makes us human.

fighting this terrible disease deserves our attention and help, especially when when it hits the poorest among the poor. but it also deserves attention when teaching our kids, in order not to offer only oversimplified solutions, but the open, clear and concise knowledge how to avoid the risks.

the picture to the right is copyright united nations. you can download it from here. the lead picture shows a chinese condom vending machine, found in nanjing.

everything else I do know precisely thanks to the exif data, even the place:

This is the result on clicking on this link and switching to satellite map. technical background? a cheap gps logger, the transystem bt 747 and (because i am a dedicated linux user and programmer) some perl code to find the correct coordinates via the exif time stamp of the picture. similar software is available for windows and the mac. nice gadget, and saves some note-taking.

late night wandering through nanjing. having experienced all the noise during the day, it’s astonishing that street life pretty much closes down at 8 pm. only in the biggest shopping malls you might find open shops now, and it’s better to find a place in a restaurant soon.

not only the people have transferred a lot of activities to the street, also the pets sometimes live out in the open. carefully taking a picture of those birds in cages, to my utter shock the dog started to bark at me. i should keep the not-on-the-viewfinder eye open…

any questions in which direction to go? where you are?

there is one major challenge when wandering alone through a chinese city: how to come back. the namecard of the hotel is a lifesaver, so i always had two in my pocket. but not every taxidriver has good eyesight and/or knows the way. to make it more difficult, nanjing for example had 4 nanjing hotels, and it took me a while until i knew to ask for the jinjiang nanjing hotel. and even then: the hotel was in a corner of a block and had 3 entrances, looking all different. people you ask in the street don’t speak english and/or don’t know where they have to send you.

so once i left the shuttle bus to walk the rest of the way late at night, got the wrong direction and landed in a cul-de-sac, which fortunately turned out to be the end point of a bus line. showing the hotel name card, i was sent from one bus driver to the next and motioned into a bus, where a lady of maybe 25 year in white cotton gloves started to maneuver the bus through the nightly streets. after 20 minutes of silence she suddenly gestured to show the card again and urged me to get of the bus right there. so out on the street i was, and after several tries to get information from the rare pedestrians, i finally got a cab. this cab drove the street for 150m, turned around, went back again 150m, entered through a gate and after another 100m dropped me – in front of my hotel door.

strolling at night, in the rain and without tripod usually is not a standard situation for good shots, but having only 8 days in china i wanted to get out the maximum of it. and this construction site offered some dramatic light effects, especially when the welding startet.

street photography in the true sense of the word, and dangerous it was: in europe we don’t see and electric bicycles, and in china when you see them it is already quite late: quiet and fast they are, and in the rain the drivers were not too willing to take care of a mad photographer…

backyards in nanjing are not meant for foreigners. just 150m away from the main road i found this parking lot, chinese style. trying to work out the best way of visualising the sheer abundance of bicycles, after 5 minutes i heard somebody speaking in my back. lucky enough i did not turn around immediately but shot some more frames, this one among them. a short break on my side was used by the voice to approach me. it turned out to be a policeman, who friendly (thou shall not annoy the foreigners…) but firmly insisted by gestures that i had to leave this place. my guess was that there is nothing like a right to photograph in china…

backyards are very rarely enjoyable sights (there is a reason why they are backyards anyhow) but they usually offer good insight how people are living. in the present case the officials probably regarded it as disrespectful if this normal side of life of their citizens gets photographed and published.

taking a break from the roster-determined duty hours in our booth, i used my time to closely watch some artist in an exhibition hall creating their pieces. light was low and of mixed quality, so again high iso had to come to the rescue.

checking again bibblepro for linux, i found its built-in noise ninja far superior to any other solution i had tried up to now. i am still missing lightzone’s ease of use and stringent workflow, but especially with high iso shots it’s definitely not up to bibbles class in terms of image quality.

the world urban forum of the united nations in nanjing was also used by the chinese government as a platform for showcasing achievements in tourism and real estate development. one of the booths sported this forest of tree silhouettes which was consequentially used as a picnic arena for the local visitors.

the middle of the hall was filled with flower pots, scented osmanthus in this case, and only under close inspection it was – again – revealed that those were artificial plants. good optics, yet no substance.

participating in a trade fair late in the year, the scenery above is what you usally get at the end of the day. no daylight, little photography – not only because of the light but the feet and the eyes are sore and the nee for a shower and some food is just overwhelming.

chinese representative architecture is first of all BIG. architectonically at least not completely boring, the expo halls in nanjing however had no distinctive chinese elements. it was more smoothened international, global and therefore exchangeable steel and glass style.

nanjing is an extremely busy city – 8 lanes roads, skyscrapers, noise and smog. but when you enter one of the parks, by miracle all that negative aspects of city life stay behind and you are in a different world.

chinese garden design is not that renowned here in europe, we usually take japanese, zen style gardens to be sufficient representative for east asian gardening. and of course china was long enough almost inaccessible for travelers, no wonder everybody concentrated on the available japanese examples of this region’s garden style.

so when the light went and the park closed, i took one look (and a picture) back to this enclave that had made me forgotten in which busy place i was. the way back to the hotel in a subway with only chinese directives was an adventure for itself.

the mixture between old and new drew my attention. deducing from publications, reports of friends, as well as own short time experience in one chinese city, development in china happens at blazing speed – that is, in the cities. a lot of young, western style well dressed people in remnants of old architecture and traditional colors that get surrounded by steel/glass/concrete skyscrapers. should i ever have the opportunity to come back to china, i would love to see the countryside as i guess the life in the villages is extremely different from the cities, in way that we don’t see any more here in europe.

found in a gift shop next to the fu-zi temple in nanjing. in china there seems to be a still unbroken reverence for the former chairman. from a westerner’s point of view this seems a bit bewildering, just having read wikipedia’s entry about this leader of his people: the number of victims of the chinese revolution and the following 30 years is estimated as 10 millions. strange – as so many things in china.

in case you don’t know: munich, capitol of bavaria and the city were i work, has a chinese tower. built 1789, it nowadays is the center of a beer garden. absence of abstinence in my case not only leads to a certain inclination towards beer, but also to chinese roof constructions. the fu-zi temple area in this respect was a treasure trove, whilst the chinese beer i experienced as not really convincing.

the temple is surrounded by a number of buildings from the imperial times, besides a museum many of those houses now host shops for gifts and souvenirs.

this is a roof detail from the fu-zi temple in nanjing. at this first encounter, i was overwhelmed with the fine details and the expressiveness of the sculptures. and despite of the many (chinese) tourists, the place had kept the feeling of a religious area, whereas not so intensive as the temples i have seen in chinatown quarters for example in indonesia. communism and cultural revolution for sure have taken their toll.

i am a fan of these temple sceneries (just see incense in the chinese temple), but nanjing offered nothing such. an official mission of course is not the ideal setting for pursuing private photographic interests, so i took what was offered.

the scenery to the right unfolded itself just outside of the temple, quietly and unspectacular. glad to have my long tele zoom with me, i just had to wait for the worker to take the right pose.

the trip to china brought +20gb raw files. going through the directories (when shooting in big numbers, i organize my files one folder per day) i still am in day 2 and try to discover the keepers or at least the not so-so ones. the shot above i like – otherwise i wouldn’t show it, of course – as it depicts that scenery outside of fu-zi temple in nanjing as a typical chinese urban mixture of young people in western style clothes, but again the temple and the connected philosophy and its symbols as nowadays again appreciated setting.

nanjing as a megacity of 7.5 million inhabitants is as modern and/or western as it can be in the contemporary china, but still using traditional symbols as decoration. even manpower-driven rikshaws are present, in former times deprecated because of the exploitation of the kulis.

in the big crowd gathering on the rare banches in front of the food stalls in the fu-zi temple area in nanjing, this cook sat self-forlorn (or maybe just tired), closely watched by a statue of konfuzius.

the already mentioned ‘re nao’ holds true for street vendor businesses also. even late at night, the crowds at the food stalls are loud and busy, queues tightly packed. europeans with a certain affinity for less body contact when waiting immediately find themselves at the end of the queue for quite a while.

at the food stall, it was quite easy for me to adapt to local queuing policies – hunger or appetite make up for a good motivation. it was considerably less easy for me in the public toilets, where you have again to queue up almost touching your front man busy with his business at the urinal, otherwise you have to wait for quite a long time…

back home again, there is still a stack of photos from china i would like to share with you. these are from nanjing again, showing a food stall selling shao mai, the typical chinese dumplings. when you are not too picky about the settings, those small shops can offer excellent food and a pleasure for the eyes as well. having learned only two words of mandarin in the last week, i was still able to by my food and/or ask for permission to take pictures. wandering in the streets was an experience i wouldn’t have wanted to miss. of course the card of the hotel was like an insurance for getting back by taxi as a fallback, but even bus drivers speaking as much english as i do speak chinese were very supportive and helped me find my way.

nanjing is not at all accustomed to foreigners traveling without a guide or translators. the overwhelming friendliness however made up for most of the difficulties, also in the restaurants. not beeing able to use chopsticks is a major drawback here, as one restaurant we visited had only 2 forks and two knives for those westerners not wanting to accept the challenge.

taking a rest from ‘re nao’, the chinese expression for ‘hot and loud’. for me, who is coming from a small town in the bavarian mountains, a city like nanjing with 7.5 million inhabitants is really stressful. so i did enjoy this quiet garden with the harmonious forms of the roofs, the ponds and the plants which look nice even in late autumn.

this bonsai i found in zhonghuamen, a restaurated gate in the 12 m high city wall – the longest in the world as the guide told me proudly – and an elder couple was taking care of these trees and enjoyed my attention. unfortunately i was to shy to ask them for the opportunity of a portrait…

zhonghuamen itself consists of three gates in a row, in between deep spaces where every enemy would become easy prey for the soldiers standing on the wall. notice the modern skyline of nanjing in the smog, not so far away.

even with all those 8-lane roads in nanjing, very often nicely framed by newly planted sycamore trees, the bicycle remains the major means of individual transport. bike lanes are broad here, adapted to the masses that use them. astonishing for me is the number of electric bicycles which are a good example of eco-friendly and environment-friendly individual mobility.

air quality however is deplorable as you can guess from this shot. some bicycle riders use masks covering nose and mouth, but those of course will filter only the largest particles. as long as the factories and power plants around are emitting unfiltered, the air quality will not improve.

usually i don’t show photographs of public viewing events – quality is bad and it’s in a way only a third hand experience.

but this was so touching i almost cried, a fact that should happen only once every 5 years. this couple, lacking one arm and one leg, moved so harmoniously, alone and together, it was really incredible.

reflecting, i admit having had some uneasy feelings afterwards, too. the chinese try so much to impress that this performance only too probably can have been just one world’s first of a kind with which they wanted to impress us. but anyhow, for me it was a deeply moving experience.

coming from a city where the average age is almost 50 years, china at first sight is a country of young people. but in the quieter places you can see the interesting faces of the elderly, taking a walk, doing tai-chi in the parks or simply walking backwards for training purposes. the latter is not a joke, as i had thought at first, but writing reminds me that i have to take a picture of this.

walking the bird is another habit unknown in western countries but frequent to see here in china. in zonghuamen here in nanjing people gather with their birds in cages so that the singing out of one cage stimulates the other birds to do the same. the whole thing for sure is not without problems as the cages are probably too small and many of the birds are captured from the wild.

my thanks go to athine. of course you don’t know who athine is, so i will tell you. for the current world urban forum in nanjing, the chinese organizers recruited more than 2000 volunteers, mainly students with a major in english. athine is one of them, and she accompagnied our bus from the airport to the hotel. chatting with her, she gave me the advice to go to zonghuamen early in the morning, where i would find locals doing free air exercises. this way i got the chance for this picture of that girl doing her exercises and getting advice for improvement

china is definitely worth many words, a lot of praise, but i also see the restrictions: numerous blogs i can’t read, http://blog.andreas-manessinger.info/ to name just one example. why? i don’t know, but china is like this…

i came to china open eyed – ok only partly after that long trip – and open minded, and up to now my astonishment is a positive one, in all respect except the fog. i do hope it’s just natural fog and not heavy air pollution, because if so, it must have killer qualities. the people i met were friendly, the food is just gorgeous and the visual treatments abundant. i need more time to process my images, so this is just a treat for the images to come. stay tuned – internet is slow here, so commenting will be difficult, but at least i can upload and blog.

and before i forget: high iso with the a700 is just great and indispensable here, as fog means low light already at 04:00 pm. the picture above is just a normal bibble pro/noise ninja registered conversion. If you want to se where it is, just follow this link to google maps. the coordinates were taken with a small i-blue bt747 gps logger.

i had planned to post this before leaving to nanjing, china, for the world urban forum. but as quite so often the workload plus time for the kids and my wife consumed all reserves i had calculated and now i am in nanjing, after 28 hours traveling. so for today be it this shot, it has a good relationship with traveling.