It’s hard for me to go up to a stranger and talk to them, let alone asking for a photo. They were wearing very colourful clothes for breakfast and they obliged. I wanted to take a full length photo of them but this was the last shot.
Shot with a Hasselblad 500cm. Acros 100 film.
Canon 50mm 1.4 shot at F5.6
Taichung is, I think, the third largest city in Taiwan. It is about 40 minutes by fast train from Taipei airport. It is not exactly on the tourist map but it does have quite a few attractions. One of them is the Fengia Night Market, purportedly one of the largest and best in Taiwan. We stayed around this particular area. I would say the city centre used to be at the conventional train station, ie slow train. Fengia is on the west of the city and is now not far from the High Speed Train station. It also has a university closeby. This means it is quite crowded and popular on the weekends and most nights. This wasn’t always the case. This area used to be farmland. Now it is slowly encroached by tall residential buildings.
Jiufen, north of Taipei, is an old mining town carved out from the side of a mountain, is now transformed into a tourist town of sorts. It is famous for its old street and tea houses. The name Jiufen means nine pieces/plots, because the area was originally divided into 9 plots for the nine founding families. If you look around there’s another town called Shifen – as in 10 pieces/plots. This area is full of all many tourist attractions. We were a little ambitious and had about 5 items for the day, ranging from a small hike to catching a local rail, to lighting sky lanterns, to seeing a waterfall, walking a suspension bridge, to checking out an old Japanese provincial house. That’s 6 items on the agenda in case we had time leftover. As it turned out, we ended up doing one thing – the Old Street of Jiufen. We were so charmed by it, we spent the whole afternoon there. Next time we are back, we want to put aside 3 days for this part of Taiwan.
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This is a small food market that we went to in central Taipei, not far from a metro station. It takes up an entire side street and was quite crowded.
This is a temple outside of Taichung, about 30 minute drive from the city. It is quite a popular local temple. We went there on a weekday and it was quite busy during the lunch hour. It must be packed during the weekends and festivals.
This was an exercise in post processing. I took this picture in a temple right in the afternoon with the Fuji X100 ISO 800 and aperture priority at f8. The first picture is the Jpeg SOOC.
Click on the pictures for a better view.
Lifting Shadows 