Route Touristique de Champagne

We saw the bright yellow rapeseed flower fields from the airplane before landing.  We then saw them along the A4 highway but could not stop to photograph.  We had our first opportunity when we left Reims on D951 toward Épernay.

We did not take D951 all the way to Épernay but took the side road D26, Route Touristique de Champagne instead. It is along the edge of Parc Naturel Régional de la Montagne de Reims.  We drove through villages with the names of grand cru and premier cru champagne houses.  The rain started pouring, no place we had more than 5 minutes stop before the rain catching up on us.

Finally, we decided to get back onto A4 highway and tried to get to Metz before dark.

Reims

Driving from Charles de Gaulle airport, we arrived at Reims before 11 AM.  There were not much to see in Reims.  The G. H. Mumm Champagne House Tour was not as interesting as we thought and anyway we could only get in till the afternoon.  We thus gave up on the tour and went to visit the Cathedral, a very impressive building but most stained glass were destroyed during the war.

We arrived at Le Jamin for lunch.  It was such a treat.  I had goose liver, fried shrimp and veal kidney.  Grace had lamb thymus, a white fish cooked in grape sauce and warm Brie cheese.  We of course had champagne to start.  I also had a sweet wine to go with my goose liver and a red wine with my veal kidney.  We finished the lunch with a perfect home-made thin crust apple tart with ice cream and expresso.  After a 13-hour flight, a two-hour drive, an one-hour sightseeing and a two-hour perfect French lunch, I was so ready for the drive through the Champagne countryside and headed for our next destination, Metz!!!

Day Trip on Labor Day

The Labor day turned out to be a very fine day.  I have never see Taipei Harbor so clear before from our balcony.

 We first crossed 陽明山 at the back of our home. This 海芋 field is not at 竹子湖, but on 陽金路.  It is the place we usually stopped to buy at photograph the flower.  We have a photo similar to this taken a few years ago.  This time I went right away to look for the little frog in the flower, and I found it.

70-200mm lens could not photo the flower close enough.  I had to take them with the 24-70mm and used my usually formula of photographing flowers in a flower field using wild-angle lens.

If I had my 105mm Micro lens then I will photographed them differently.

I have to take five images at 1 stop exposure intervals to create this HDR image.

We then drove on the expressway 62 to 瑞芳 then from 福隆 to take 2丙 through 平溪 back to Taipei.  The 油桐花 season was at its peak, But we have photographed 油桐花 at 平溪 before thus we did not linger too long.

We were back at 敦化 at 1 pm, still enough time to do some shopping in the Mall.

Fort Santo Domingo and Old British Consulate

I took my 24-70mm lens and D700 to photograph this location.  I should have a tripod with me to get highest quality images possible.  I did not thus I had to tweak the prospective of each image in Photoshop a bit.  However, I was already lucky enough to have so few tourists in the photograph.  The whole exercise was more on waiting for the brief moment when suddenly all the tourists just walk off from the image frame.  I had to act quite quickly and tripod was not an option.

24-70mm is such a good lens, can you tell the image just seems a bit better than those taken with the consumer zoom lens, such as 28-300mm.

Two Remote Flashes Photography

This photo was taken using one SB-800 flash on the subject's upper left side and one SB-910 on the upper right side with D700 and 105mm/2.8 VR Micro lens.  Both flash unites had diffusion dome mounted on the flash head which pointed upward toward the ceiling.  SB-800 was set at "REMOTE", Channel 1, Group B; SB-9210 was set at "REMOTE", Channel 1, Group A.  The flash on the D700 was set at Commander mode (Custom Setting Menu: e3).  Built-in flash: "--" (Mode); Gorup A: TTL (Mode), -3 (Comp.); Group B: TTL (Mode), 0 (Comp.).

The camera exposure mode was set at Manual: ISO 640, 1/250s - f/3, -1.0EV.  Since the output of both flashes were controlled automatically using iTTL.  It was way too confusing to use automatic exposure for the camera also.  When using the iTTL flash, the camera is almost always set at manual.

Setting the Built-in flash Mode at "--" let the Built-in flash only used as a trigger for the other two remote flashes.  But in reality, the amount of light coming out from the Built-in flash can still influence the lighting.  Nikon makes a small gadget SG-31R that blocked the white light from the Built-in flash completely and only let the infrared light out to trigger the remote flashes.  A nice gadget to have, should buy it next time when I will be in the US.

I can see all three flashes worked as they reflected as three spots on each of the two round balls.  The left side flash is brighter than the right side flash.  The built-in flash that used to trigger the two remote flashes can also be seen.   I removed the three spots on each of ball using Photoshop.  An umbrella for each of the flash should solve the problem.  Over all, a nice exercise!

Huntley Meadows

I was reading Jim Brandenburg's experience of Nikon D800, he mentioned that for his landscape photography, one of the lens most often used is 70-200mm 2.8.  He discussed how Nikon demanded that he should not use Photoshop for any touch up of his image and can only open up the RAW file with Nikon's software (NX2).  This gave me the inspiration of trying to get the sharpest image using the equipment that I have (D700, 70-200 2.8 VRII) and the technique that I could master.

Huntley Meadows was not too far away from my daughter's home at Falls Church, VA.  I went to this place earlier with my D700 and 28-300mm lens and got some descent images.  The Spring was just starting with all the colorful new leafs coming out.  The second time I went, I was fully equipped.  I have Gitzo GT2541 tripod, RRS BH-40 LR ballhead, Nikon MC-30 trigger release, HOYA CIR-PL polarizer, D700 and Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 VRII lens.  The images were taken either with mirror-up or Lv.

Photographing with Lv was some inspiring experience.  During the focusing process, I enlarged the focusing area on the LCD screen and could see the detail of the area that the camera was focusing and the camera movement, only till the focusing is 100% sure and the camera movement is completely steady then I released the trigger.

I took three photographs to compose the above panorama image.  I did not pay too much attention to the nodal point of the lens.  The foot of 70-200mm is probably very close its nodal point already and at 70mm or above, I usually have very little distortion when stitching the images together in Photoshop for panorama.

The only processing that I did to the RAW image is to use the "Landscape" setting of Picture Control in NX2.  The sharpening is at default of "4", which is more than enough for the image.  I used to set the sharping at 7 and even use Unsharp Mask to further sharpening the image.  A good lens and proper technique produced sharper original image.

The panorama image at 300 dpi is 9 x 32 inch in size and the TIF file is 144.2 MB.  I printed it out by a local photofinishing shop near Washington, DC using Fuji Frontier printer on 10x30 paper.  Very nice, and worth all the effort!  The photographs that were taken during the previous occasion using 28-300mm lens offhand have no comparison.

However, panorama image does not show too well on the web.  Here is another image at standard 4x6 portrait format, hope the quality of the image can be better experienced.

ABC Wednesday: V is for A Beach with A View

 A few weeks ago, I took a day off to drive to central part of Taiwan for a photographic trip.  I have shown my visit to the Camomile Tea Plantation and sunflowers field of a flower show in my two previous blogs.  My final stop of the trip was for a beach near Taichung harbor.  It is a location well known for photographing sunset.  When I was on the highway driving west toward the beach, I saw an amazing colorful sunset. The sun went down earlier than I thought in the winter month.  I was not too worried, photographing sunset does not always mean having the bright red sun in the picture.

As I arrived at the beach, the light in sky and the reflection from the water surface was just perfect.  The beach is a wide open mud plan of a river outlet by the Taichung harbor.  The wind mills built by the Taiwan Electric add interest to the sunset scene.

 The mud is as smooth as silk, many young people walking miles out to the ocean and play the mud with their feet.  As sun was setting, I have to move quickly and have little chance to set my tripod in the mud. The VR on the lens worked reasonably well which allowed me to photograph till really late.  If I used tripod and slower shutter speed, It would not be possible to freeze the blades of the wind mill.

Finally it was really too dark, I walked back to the parking and took this final picture with the light from Taichung harbor as back drop.  I leaned my camera on a lamp post and used slower speed to blur the action of the wind mill.

To see more entries of ABC Wednesday click here.

ABC Wednesday: U is for Upstairs, Downstairs

Upstairs, downstairs, we are not talking about the British television drama of the 70's.  We are talking about the two restaurants of Musée d'Orsay, of Paris.  Grace was in Paris for several meetings a few weeks ago and went to the museum.  It has been totally renovated (I first saw the museum when it was under construction in the 80's).  She was late for lunch and went upstairs to the Café Campana just by the Impressionist Gallery.  It is a typical Parisisn brasserie and designed by the famous Brazilian designers, Campana brothers.  As you can see it was almost two thirty in the afternoon, the restaurant was packed.  No place for her to sit.

She could not get close to the clock at Campana, instead, she went through the Impressionist Gallery and photographed through the clock at the opposite end facing towards Louvre.

Down stairs, there is Le Restaurant, the former restaurant of the Hôtel d'Orsay.  It was first opened in 1900, when the place was the Gare d'Orsay.  The new construction was by the architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte.  It is as magnificent as ever.

Here is a more detail view of the ceiling from the original 1900.  You can imagine where Grace finally ended up having her late lunch.

These photographs were taken using the new Nikon V1, a much smaller mirrorless camera with interchangeable lens.  Consider its size, the results are not too bad.

To see more entries of ABC Wednesday click here.

ABC Wednesday: T is for Camomile Tea & Today's Flower #172

Camomile tea is one of the favorite for Chinese, now it is also a popular herbal tea in the Western world.  In China, it is planted in large area and produced in huge quantity.  But Taiwan still claims to have its own camomile fields.  It is mainly concentrated in 銅鑼 at Miaoli (苗栗) county.  Every year there is a camomile festival.  This year, it was held between November 13 to 21.

More scientifically, Camomile is known as chrysanthermum.  In the US, they are commonly known as mums and are planted in Fall.  It is a major color attractions in the garden during the cold Fall and early Winter season.  The chrysanthermum used in Chinese medicine is Chrysanthemum morifolium (菊花 juhua).  There are usually two colors:  the yellow kind called 杭菊 (huangjuhua) and the white kind called 甘菊花 (ganjuhua).  Here is a detail description of the medicinal useages of the two types of camomile.

Huangjuhua, the yellow flower, which is sometimes called hangjuhua, as it comes from Hangzhou....Huangjuhua especially enters the lung meridian; it is more effective for expelling wind-heat in the upper burner and is often used in cold infections, feverish sensations in the head, and headache.  It can also be used for acute infections of the eyes, such as acute conjunctivitis...the steam from juhua decoction can be used for painful and itchy eyes...moreover, the cool decoction can be used externally to wash the affected eye.

Baijuhua, the white flower, is also called ganjuhua, which means sweet juhua.  It is also sometimes call chujuhua because the white juhua growing in Chu county is considered to have the best quality. Baijuhua is sweeter and cooler [than huangjuhua], and can slightly generate yin and clear heat.  Because it enters the liver meridian, it is more effective in cooling and pacifying the liver and benefiting the eyes.  It is used for dizziness, blurred vision, dry eyes, and a tired feeling in the eyes, which are caused by yin deficiency or yin deficiency with uprising liver yang....

Sum up, if you have a cold drink yellow camomile tea.  If you have too much heat (火氣大) drink white camomile tea.

Grace has been in Europe for two weeks already and I have been planning of going out for a photographic trip by myself.  However, the weather has been miserable and only clear up till last Monday.  Thus, I grabbed my camera and headed south to 銅鑼.

Nothing romantic of farming camomile flowers, the hand picking process is hard work.  It is carried out by old weather beaten farmers.  They usually covers themselves completely to protect from the sun, a very Asian farmer's tradition.  Her garment was quite fashionable!

I arrived at the end of the festival, the flowers were in full bloom and ready to be picked.  One more week and they will be all gone.

Here is the yellow kind, of cause it makes more colorful photographs.

The palm trees in the background, which make the scenery so Southeast Asia, in reality is not your common palm trees often linked with the South Pacific Islands.  Locally, it is called pinang, the malaysian name of the tree.  The scientific name is Areca catechu.  The seed has medicinal use in Chinese medicine.  But all over Southeast Asia, including Taiwan, there is a culture of chewing the pinang seeds.  It is addictive and can give person a high.  Thus the hard labors and truck drivers especially like to chew on the seeds to keep their spirt high during the long hours of working or driving.  On Taiwan's highway, we can often see scantily clad girls maned the pinang stand selling the seeds to passing by drivers, a distinct Taiwan culture phenomena.  Chewing pinang is a major cause of oral-pharengal cancer for all Southeast Asia region.

To see mopre entries of ABC Wednesday click here.

To see more flowers from around the world click here.

ABC Wednesday: S is for Sunflower & Today's Flower #171

It has been raining and miserable for the past two weeks in Taipei.  On Monday, the weather finally clear up a little bit.  I grabbed the chance and drove to Sinshe District of Taichung City in the central part of Taiwan to see the yearly flower show.  The show has been famous for the mass planting of flowers in the field, from a distance, they look like multicolor carpet.

I headed straight to the sunflower field.  For the sunflower, its head often bending downwards.  From the first picture, you may think that the day was so brilliant bright.  In reality, it was still a very over cast day as show by this HDR image.

Here is a more normal image that I did not shot the flower against the sky, but using other sunflowers in the field as background.

Or I can turn around with my back to the sun and use the blue sky and distance farm house as background.

I also always like to get closer to have detail image of the flower.

When I get really close, the image becomes almost like an abstraction.

We can shot the flower from the front, but do not forget the back.

The future sunflower seeds.

Finally a busy working bee covered itself with pollens.

To see mopre entries of ABC Wednesday click here.
To see more flowers from around the world click here.