Petite France, Strasbourg

We arrived at the old town of Strasbourg, Petite France, in the early afternoon of Sunday, May 6, after a 2-hour drive from Metz.  The rain was still following us.  We decided to have lunch first and we wanted a typical Alsace meal.   Here is a Choucroute  with six different meats, that was for me.

Here is the famous local Alsace dish, tart flambé.  It is almost like a pizza but uses fresh cream and onion as base instead of tomato.

 This is the restaurant that we had our lunch.

 It is a very old building, it seems that not a bone in this house is straight!

 The restaurant sits right on the river and you can see the name of the restaurant, Restaurant Marco Polo.  A very typical touristic restaurant, it was just what we wanted.

After lunch, the rain stopped, we walked around the Petite France area a bit before heading south on A35 to our next destination Colmar.  The area is very beautiful but with a lot of tourists.  With much skill and patience, we managed to avoid most of them in our pictures.

Metz

Metz is the capital of Lorraine region.  It has the largest urban-conservation area of France.  We really only had time to have a glimpse of the city.  This photograph was taken from the Moyen Pont.

I woke up early in the morning of Sunday, May 6 to have a quick tour around the old town.  After Grace got up, we did another round.

It was actually a very gloomy day with only occasional sunshine.  I had to do some fancy HDR for most of these pictures.

This is Temple Neuf, the most photographic place in Metz.

 I had my polarizer with me, it not only darkened the sky but also made some amazing reflection from the water surface.

During my first walk around, I bought some croissants and different pastries from this shop to bring them back to the hotel for Grace.

I refused to take a photo of this cathedral.  But Grace insisted on having one for tourist's sake.  I then have to really work on it to make it worthwhile.

This is the road leading to the Cathedral.  We had another nice breakfast in a French tearoom just next to the Cathedral.

 By the time we were ready to go back to the hotel, it started to rain and then it poured.

Another highlight of the stay at Metz is the Hotel.  It is the old military school, Citadel, just next to the city square.  We were amazed at how big and nice the room was.

This is the governor palace just outside of the hotel.  I was attracted by this morning light to go out at 7 o'clock in the morning to photograph the city.

 Our room was actually just behind this round building.

The hotel is on Avenue Ney.  This is Marshal Ney, you must read about him on Wiki, an amazing piece of history.

Well, another high-point of staying at Hotel La Citadelle Metz is its Micheline starred restaurant.  But we were so tired from jet lag, Grace had to walked around to stay awake for the 7-course meal, or was it 8, 9 or 10?  The only thing we clearly remembered was the impressive cheese cart and each one of us had four different cheeses. I had the most smelly cheese in my life, it was not bad!

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.