Yet Another Photo of the Pinnacle

Just want to see how the new lens perform compared to my other lenses. It's hard to tell from the small image here, but from my monitor screen it's indeed much sharper.

Manual Focus is so much fun

First Try of My New Lens

A quiet moment at Point Lobos

Young Victoria

After my London trip (and hearing many royal gossips), "Young Victoria" is just the movie I need to remind me my wonderful time there.

P.S. you can see the crown Queen Victoria wore (and the scepter and other goodies used in the Coronation) in the London Tower. They also show the news footage of Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation. She looked so young.

Got My New Zeiss Lens!!!

Received my new 35mm Carl Zeiss Distagon today. It's my first German lens and feels very different from my other Nikon lenses. (I hate to say this, but it actually feels like the difference of Apple and Dell.) They even includes a test certificate, signed by their quality assurance person. Unbelievable! The manual focus is easier than I expected (and actually quite fun). The color rendering seems to be more neutral than my 14-24mm (which tends to be overwhelmingly warm) but still very saturated. The bokeh is very nice (in terms of a 35mm wide angle lens). Below are a few test shots. We will see how it performs over the weekend.

A flower way past its prime. The bokeh (background blur) looks nice. Is this the famous Zeiss 3D look?

Miti is not happy to be a test subject.

The 35mm Distagon, dwarfed by the Nikon 14-24mm. Except this one, all the above photos were shot with the new lens.

Sunset Which Looks like a Rothko Painting

Rock Details

Sunset at Pebble Beach

I start to have a love/hate relationship with my 14-24mm lens. It's a wonderful lens, incredibly sharp, rendering very saturated colors, but its not being able to taking any filter is killing me. (Yes, Lee did design a special filter for it, but that one is not easy to use either.) I have to do multiple exposures and combine them digitally. It's such a pain.

Buildings of London

The Angkor-like Free-Mason building.


St Paul's church at Covent Garden, many famous actors in history buried here.



The Russian egg and the bullet. Both are designed by the same architecture firm.


The Lloyd Building, you can tell its similarity to the Pompidou Center in Paris. Yes, it's by the same architect.




A classic is never out of fashion. This is the St Paul Cathedral.

Sketches from the National Gallery

To me, visiting the National Gallery in London was like a dream come true. I had been reading David Hockney's "secret knowledge" before my trip (the examples in his book were mostly paintings in the National Gallery) and was very eager to see those paintings first hand. When I entered the central hall of the gallery and immediately noticed "the tailor", I realized I was in such a feast I hardly knew where to start.

Here are the sketches/impressions on some of the paintings I saw:

1. If I have to choose one painting to represent the National Gallery, I will pick "The Ambassadors".


The painting is large (one thing you can't see from reading books is size, though you know the dimension, you don't feel it), the two ambassadors are life size. The details in the painting are unbelievable. You feel you can actually walk into it. The symbolic meanings of the objects in the painting are interesting. The distorted skull is fun to detect (like a 3D picture, once you can see it it's never the same). I like those paintings with skulls (to remind you the mortality). I will probably do a self portrait with a skull beside me someday.

2. The Caravaggio paintings are smaller (slightly smaller than real life size) than I expected. It's interesting I would imagine them larger, probably because of their larger than life emotional impact. I visited the Irving Penn exhibition next door (in the National Portrait Gallery) and noticed he actually borrowed one composition of Caravaggio in his portrait of Richard Burton.



3. I wonder how the wonderful blue color was created in "The Virgin in Prayer". It's an unbelievable simple but powerful rendition of blue, white, and red. Just looking at the folds on the Virgin's robe makes me want to weep.



4. Though they are not famous, I love the "Four Elements". To me they show such buzzing themes of market place and suit the crazy globalized 21th century perfectly.

5. I am not a biblical painting fan, but I found the landscapes depicted in those 15-16th century paintings very interesting. In fact, I was shocked how surreal the landscape in Giovanni Bellini's "The Agony in the Garden" looked. The color scheme and the dream-like atmosphere actually reminded me Dali. I think I will never look at a Dali painting the same way again.

6. The Vermeer painting is a let-down. It is so small, as if the patron didn't pay Vermeer enough to buy paint so he has to cut down the size (probably to show off his skill too). Somehow it looks better in reproduction.

7. I wonder how the lighting condition can be recreated using studio light in "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump". It's such a wonderful depiction of the scientific movement. How come I have never seen any photo on modern science which gives me the same sense of suspense and wonder?

Now That I Cannot Visit Iceland

Hard to believe I might still be in London had I scheduled my vacation a few days late. (It's only a two-hour flight from London to Iceland. My ex-coworker Mark, who works in UK now, told me it was a lot of fun so I had been tempted to include Iceland in my trip.) Now that I won't be able to visit there in the near future, I can only do some "armchair travel" by enjoying these wonderful photos from Bruce Percy's Iceland portfolio.

Next London Trip

Only a few days back from my London trip, I can hardly wait to plan my next one. So many things to see, so little time! Here is a list of things I plan to do in my next trip (God knows when):

• visit Nature History Museum
  
• watch Agatha Christie's "Mousetrap"
• visit Sherlock Holmes museum
  
• climb the dome of St Paul
• verger tour of Westminster Abbey
  
• back stage tour of Shakespeare's Globe
• explore second hand bookstores at Charing Cross
• tea at Tate Modern
• Greenwich
  

Dispatches From London (Clouds)

I was always amazed at the beautiful clouds in Joe Cornish's landscape photos. Now I can see them first hand. You can rarely see this kind of cumulus clouds in California, a price we pay for the famous California sunshine. Not bad for our last day in London.

Dispatchces From London (Cats in the British Museum)

British museum is full of all sorts of interesting objects. It's a perfect place to use a D700 or D3. Now I will have to make do with Chinchih's point-and-shoot.

P.S. I will spare you my other museum photos because
A. you can find better ones in the museum catalog
B. you should visit it yourself

Dispatches From London (National Gallery and St Martin In the Fields)

National Gallery at Night

The past two days we spent our time exploring the great National Gallery (and National Portrait Gallery), and enjoying concerts in the St Martin in the Fields church. I heard my first live performance of Handel's Messiah. I have to say, it is heavenly.

Photos Below:

Photo 1: National Gallery and St Martin in the Field, you can see how close they are to each other. About two blocks away is China town. You can easily spend days here.
Photo 2: St Martin in the Field
Photo 3: Inside St Martin in the Field, the design of the cross on the window is pretty innovative.
Photo 4: The beautiful pipe organ inside the church
Photo 5: The crypt (underground) of St Martin in the Field. It has a very nice cafeteria.
Photo 6: An interesting statue in front of St Martin in the Field, representing the "flesh out of word" of Bible.

Dispatches From London (London Eye)

Looking at London Eye from Westerminster Bridge

London Eye turned out to be more fun than I expected. The view is really spectacular. Here are some highlights.

Photo 1 and 2: looking at London Eye while waiting in line
Photo 3: here comes our capsule
Photo 4: looking down when at the top of the London Eye
Photo 5: looking at Parliament from the capsule
Photo 6: a view on the Thames

Dispatches From London (London Tower)

By the time we realized our booked one-day tour was "today" at 8am, it was 7:55am already. Incredibly, we managed to get on the bus at 8am. Because of the "shock", we were both quite awake and you could tell from Chinchih's photo she's looking much better today.

Our tour guide was a retired teacher, full of character. The most interesting part of the tour was not the history of England but the gossips of the royal families (to some they are the same). Since we were visiting London Tower, I would say it's quite appropriate.

Photo 1, first look at the tower
Photo 2, where the king used to keep lions (lion is the symbol of England)
Photo 3, Chinchih and the tower bridge
Photo 4, Our Yeoman Warder
Photo 5, The white tower (cleaned up for 2012 Olympic)
Photo 6, Traitor's Gate (if you had watched the movie "Elizabeth", it's where Elizabeth entered the tower when she was imprisoned by Queen Mary.)
Photo 7, Bloody Gate (the bodies (or skeletons?) of the two princes were found, probably murdered by their uncle Richard III)
Photo 8, Where crown jewels are displayed
Photo 9, Where Ann Boleyn was imprisoned
Photo 10, the oldest English chapel (1000 years), inside the tower