SHANGHAI and BEIJING – Another travel day. The trip from Shanghai to Beijing is only two hours flying time but the disruption in the day, and the time spent in taxis and airports, is the enemy of my photo a day project. I managed a few captures in Hongqiao Airport and some images from a walk after dinner in Beijing.
This was taken with my Leica M9 and a 50mm Summilux lens:
Hongqiao Airport
Leica and 35mm Summilux lens. This is an apparently wealthy young Beijinger photographing his girlfriend – and assistant (who is out of sight) is holding a reflector to soften her shadows.
SHANGHAI – I spent the better part of the day walking around the French concession in Shanghai. This area has not been overbuilt (so far). The southeastern portion has a gritty vibe. The more northerly and western area feels like the Upper East Side of Manhattan with leafy side streets and children wearing private school uniforms. My watch developed an issue with its battery – I stopped at a watch repairman in a covered food market to capture this with my Leica M9 and 50mm Summilux lens. I’m posting multiple images for today in light of the visual richness of what’s going on here.
Watch repair
In the late afternoon Maria and I met at the Shanghai National Museum. This was a fairly disappointing experience. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts (at the US end of the China trade) and the Metropolitan Museum have more extensive and better curated collections of just about everything. I suspect this is the product of the Cultural Revolution and the fact that the Nationalists, when they left the mainland, took many of the best treasures, which now reside in the National Museum in Taipei. Anyway, the building was nice. Taken with my Leica M9 and a 24mm Summilux lens.
Shanghei National Museum
Finally, an “I was there” shot from M Restaurant above the Bund with my Leica M9 and 24mm Summilux lens.
SHANGHAI – Back in Shanghai. Where do I begin? Yes, it’s true, everything here seems to have been built within the last 20 minutes. There are few traces left of old Shanghai, whatever that means. The few traditional looking small scale buildings that you see may well have been built in the traditional style in the 1950s. I came to Shanghai to meet Maria who came here directly from the London Book Fair for meetings with her client, Shanghai 99 (who have been our hosts and guides).
I took a walk on the Bund, later meeting Maria to go to Annabel Lee. I’ve gotten lazy about editing – I’ve included three images for today, all shot with my Leica M9 and a 50mm Summilux lens.
Sunny day on the Bund
For the above image I sat on a bench on the esplanade that runs along the Bund. A young Chinese man sat next to me – he had a posse of three older guys, one of whom was carrying a back pack for him. It turned out it was a brand new camera bag full of new Nikon gear, including a D3x and every lens known to man. He put a lens on the body and stared snapping a pair of startlings on the grass behind us – a total bore – he was all gear and no action. Kind of confirms what people say about the children of the very rich in the People’s Republic of China.
SHANGHAI AND HANGZHOU – This morning we took a high speed train to the lovely city of Hangzhou. The idea was to spend the day and a night at Hangzhou, a medium-sized city surrounding an extensive system of shallow lakes. It was the capital of the Song Dynasty and has an extensive group of Buddhist temples, and Buddhist statuary carved into living rock. We went via a hypermodern Hongqiao rail station – the Chinese are sensational at designs for moving people. Here is the rail terminal (Leica M9 and 24mm Summicron, two frames stitched) and one of the Hangzhou temples (Leica M9 and 24mm Summicron):
Hongqiao rail station ShanghaiRail terminal ShanghaiTemple Hangzhou
SHANGHAI – Well . . . Shanghai at last, but I’m jet-lagged in irritable. After crossing multiple time zones and the International Date Line how am I supposed to figure out what’s a “day” for purposes of “one photo every day”? The short answer is I keep all of my cameras’ internal clocks set to UTC (which used to be called GMT in a less politically correct time) – in other words London time. In general I rely on the time stamp in the photograph’s metadata and produce on picture per UTC day. At home I base “days” on local time. Anyway, I captured this out my hotel window before I collapsed. Shot with my Leica M9 and a Cosina Voigtlander 16mm lens.
