East Lake - A misty morning

[Yan Zhang]

Dear all,

I have been traveling in the last three weeks and away from this Forum for a while.
I promised to post some of my new photos after I come back. I came back home this morning.

East Lake is a very famous lake in China located in Wuhan city - a big city in Central China. In April I stayed one week in Wuhan near East Lake. I was trying to take some photos of this lake. The lake is very big, it should have great potential for nice photos. However, since air pollution was bad there, it hardly presented any color except gray all the time. I almost went to the lake everyday morning around 5.00am, hoping to see possible morning color or magic scenes.

This photo was taken in a heavy fog morning over the lake, I found the lake was so nice as all background became invisible.

I shot in raw and saved the jpeg file with a size of about 6MB, here I just insert the photo inline from my picasa site with a small size. If people interested, I can post the bigger jpeg file.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Yan,

You've certainly turned the fog to your advantage there!

That's a wonderful high key shot, I like just the hint of colour from the cover on the boat's cargo.

Brilliant.

Oh, and welcome back,

[milleniummuppet]

Hmmm very nice,
this could sell.
- Very well.
Awesome job.

[Colin Southern]

I could save a bundle on ink costs if all my canvas prints were like this

[Yan Zhang]

Dear Dave, milleniummuppet and Colin,

Thanks for your comments. It was a wonderful experience to go out and
take pictures. But I found that to take the best advantage, we should constrain
our expectation and focus on one or two good locations and stay longer there.

This time I was planning to go another place over a weekend, but bad weather over there
let me spend more time around East Lake and then I saw a misty morning over the lake.

[Roxy]

I agree with others.. this is a very appealing image empasizing the size of the size of the lake and consequent isolation of the boatman.
I visited China several years ago and found the atmospheric pollution an ever present factor in photography except of course for indoor shots.
Will look up and put up an example or two soon.

roxy

[Yan Zhang]

I agree with others.. this is a very appealing image empasizing the size of the size of the lake and consequent isolation of the boatman.
I visited China several years ago and found the atmospheric pollution an ever present factor in photography except of course for indoor shots.
Will look up and put up an example or two soon.

roxy

Roxy,

Thanks, would love to see your China photos.

[Colin Southern]

Thanks for your comments. It was a wonderful experience to go out and take pictures. But I found that to take the best advantage, we should constrain our expectation and focus on one or two good locations and stay longer there.

Hi Yan,

When I'm out shooting landscape for my professional collection it's very rare that I get more than ONE shot out of an evenings or a mornings shoot ... sometimes I go back to the same spot two or 3 times - sometimes up to 10 times trying to catch the conditions "just right".

I take the attitude that images for sale are "Digital Assetts" - they never stop earning (even when I've long since left this earth) - so one has to put the effort into getting them right; if it were so easy that one could shoot a few dozen each day then everyone would be able to do it.

For me, it's a case of trying to orchestrate perfect conditions - from co-ordinating sunset with certain tide conditions - to checking forecasts to try and get a "heads up" on what clouds and lighting might do - to using good equipment (for capture + processing + printing). The more things you can do right and the fewer things you do wrong means the better the result - and that's what people pay for.

[Roxy]

I got these up in a hurry .. will be back later to comment, main purpose is to demonstrate the trouble I had with pollution.
roxy

[milleniummuppet]

WOW .
Pollution you say?
Kind of amazing ..............

[iPhillip]

Its not amazing, at all.

More disgusting and annoying. I went to Australia a little while ago and some major cities there have a decent amount of smog, it was the summer there and it mingles with dust and it gets worse because theres barely any wind and it lingers around (worst affected areas around Melbourne and such, quite bad heading out on the Hume highway for some time - if anyone knows their australian highways here )

It made taking wide angle or large perspective landscape shots all but impossible and was quite a nuisance.

I can probably rustle up some shots of it alter.

[Yan Zhang]

Roxy's pictures show the bad air pollution situation in most developing areas of China: cities and countries. In recent years more and more professional and amateur photographers have been traveling to far North-West China for landscape photography where it is still very nature without much pollution, and we can see wonderful landscapes.

In Australia, I think anywhere outside cities is quite clear. It has nice sky color, sunrise and sunset.

[Wirefox]

Yan

A really excellent image. It's simplicity profound...love it

[milleniummuppet]

Its not amazing, at all.

'Amazing from a photographers point of view'
Doesn't mean you cant take amazing photographs, just different photograph.
In fact I have seen some taken when the lightt was VERY low, it then comes up very colorful.

[iPhillip]

Depends on what situation your in. Some times in can be quite hazard for photographers.

[milleniummuppet]

Yes i know.
But you would learn what was possible if you lived there =).

[Colin Southern]

Its not amazing, at all.

More disgusting and annoying. I went to Australia a little while ago and some major cities there have a decent amount of smog, it was the summer there and it mingles with dust and it gets worse because theres barely any wind and it lingers around (worst affected areas around Melbourne and such, quite bad heading out on the Hume highway for some time - if anyone knows their australian highways here )

I hate to say it, but one of the very worst in the world (some days) is good old Christchurch in NZ. I remember back in the days when I was young and good-looking (now I'm just old and good-looking!) I used to cycle everywhere in Christchurch - sometimes the only way to tell when I'd come to an intersection was when the gutter started disappearing around to the left ... at which point I'd dismount and walk across the road (quite a scary thing).

[Dave Humphries]

It's an interesting topic this pollution; in England (well UK really I guess), we did all that bad stuff between say 1840 and the late 1960's, I can remember when I was a kid, the household supplies changing from 'town gas' to 'natural gas' and also from real coal to 'smokeless' coke, all in an effort (successful) to put the London smogs behind us.

With that, and the decline of British industry, we're now very lucky atmospherically and although we do get car fume build up causing 'low quality air' in the stable, windless high pressure systems, these days it rarely kills people and is little more than a dirty mist.

It seems industrial revolutions, be they UK or further afield, are most often coal powered, with all that that entails.

[Wirefox]

I can remember soap suds from the local soap factory blowing off the Mersey and up the main street of the town. At times they were pink! Also remember my mum putting a hankerchief over my face to go to school (no smart quips please, the hankerchief covered the paper bag). This was done on smoggy days and when the white hankie was removed there was a black circle of residue from the air passing through the hankie. Photography should capture images of good and bad.

I have to agree that the UK is now pretty clean for the most part. Our town has certainly cleaned up, 35 years ago your first breath of morning air was a pungent mixture of coal smoke, hot hops, soap flakes and tannery. Now its just McDonalds and chinese takeaway residues. Thankfully I live away from the town now so the first breath is of BMW leather, muesli, barbeque lighter fluid and joggers armpits....perhaps there was something to be said for hot hops and coal smoke after all

[CNelson]

Hi Yan: I just saw this image for the first time and I like it. The boat isolated in the pollution or shall we call it "mist," is very interesting and the reflection in the water is important to the image. Perhaps the soft and distant look you have here is best with this image but have you tried to crop a little closer to make the boat and reflection larger and pushed the contrast and color a little....just to see what it looks like. When I look at it I want to see more of the boat and reflection but perhaps that unfulfilled tension is what draws me into the image.

It's a keeper. Thanks for sharing this one!!!

Chuck