Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

Saturday, September 8, 2012

The Sony WX100


It does capture my cat's eye color but only in sunlight. It won't capture it inside.

So I just got a Sony WX100 on the recommendation of my techy-dorky friend. For awhile I was using Brendan's old professional Canon, but while I got a few great shots out of it, mostly it was clunky, too heavy, hard to use and far too conspicuous (and it didn't help that it was older and I had no idea how to actually work the buttons. Oh, and the viewfinder was the only way to see what you were photographing - you couldn't see from the digital screen). 

I was also using my iPhone for photos, which is fine if you see some bad English in the night market ("Let's Happy Together!") but I wanted something better. Something more. Something I could take on trips to Orchid Island (next week), home (Christmas) and Sri Lanka (Chinese New Year). 

But, as much as I am an enthusiast for good photos, I'm no pro. I do think I'm pretty good at composition - but not good at technical stuff. So I asked a friend - a friend who, I swear, memorized all the specs of all possible cameras and ran them through a computer program in his head to determine the best one, because that's just the way he is - and he recommended a Sony WX100 for my needs.

So far, I'm really happy. It's been one afternoon, but still, I'm pretty thrilled with the photos I'm getting. The shots in this post are ones I didn't try to hard to take - imperfect lighting, not a lot of time to really look at what I was shooting and adjust, and in the end I still got some good pics. Obviously, I played with the fancy new settings.

By the way, if you want one, they're NT$9900 at Guanghua.
This is my living room window - when I take a photo like this with lights off in the living room, generally, other cameras pick up so much glare that you can't see anything but light out the window. The WX100 is the first camera that made a decent shot of this. 

With background blur - pretty good, although if I edited it I'd make the black metal parts a bit brighter.

Very clear with primary color capture - set on blue obviously

Not as good capturing my bougainvillea - it would have picked up red but pink is difficult. Anyone know if I can do something about that?

Indoor light, background blur with my cat


Green only is pretty good
Need to focus on getting it to select color and focus on the thing I want - it focused more on the spices than on the anti-evil eye charm.



Saturday, April 7, 2012

Jump: More Photos From The Baosheng Cultural Festival


I'm not really going to comment on this one - the photos say it all. I'm sure you're mostly familiar with the Baosheng Cultural Festival, which takes place every year around this time at Bao'an Temple (one of the best temples to visit in Taipei) to celebrate the birthday of Baosheng Dadi (保生大帝), who is associated with good health and medicine. There's a parade, there are operas, there's firewalking - this year we made it to the parade and will see an opera tonight, but not the firewalking, which I've been to twice previously.

Pictures are in order of the troupes they appeared, and were taken in front of a school on Yanping N. Road (I think Yanping Elementary School), where the road is wide enough to do full performances, unlike in front of many temples in that part of town. I personally enjoyed the last fighting troupe the most - the guys from Kaohsiung in blue and white are SERIOUS fighters, even if this performance is only for show.

I've noticed as I posted these that the photos look kind of darker on Blogger than on my computer. I'm not sure why that is.

Enjoy!











OK, I'll comment on this one. Oh my.


My sister, doing duckface with a tall god






I love the city bus going by in the background in this one.