Took a great photo this Wednesday

by Sander Tams 28. May 2010 21:06

 Two beautiful Taiwanese students

Those two are my classmates. Also friends of Rachel - the girl who taught me Chinese before I went to Chihlee College. This picture was taken on a trip to Yingge which I have written about on boonbot.com. Link:

Yingge Ceramics Museum

I also made an RSS feed on the page now, so if anyone wants to switch their subscription over there, it should be fine. Of course you can always keep the feed from this blog as you can never know if I will still put some interesting stuff here.

Please enjoy. :)

Tags: , , , , ,

Dagligdag | General | Photography | Taiwan

Cosplay at Petit Fancy 12

by Sander Tams 26. April 2010 09:18

Thank you for still reading my blog. I will now reward you with an article about cosplay during Petit Fancy 12 at National Taiwan University.

 IMG_4128

Yeah, this what I came for! Look at all those people and hair colours already. And there's even a dude dressed up like Mio from K-ON.

 IMG_4127

The impressive gym building at 台大. Inside this towering dome you can do anything from swimming to playing squash or buying doujinshi. Well. Last one was just for today. If you come on other days, you might catch a computer game tournament or some other awesome events.

 IMG_4129

This Kagami dude doesn't look all that happy. I can't see why...

 IMG_4131

Just before you despair completely, I can assure you there's a lot of girls dressed up like female characters too.

 IMG_4145

But you know... I might actually have female readers anyway, so I'll not skip over the guys. (Actually I have a suspicion that most of my readers could be girls, hah. If I have any readers anymore...) ^^;

 IMG_4141

So many people there...

 IMG_4151

I wonder what kinds of characters these people are playing. Some sort of fighting series like Naruto or similar, perhaps?

 IMG_4154

Chinese traditional clothes are awesome.

 IMG_4155

I don't know if there were more cosplayers or photographers really. At the Taipei Game Show I wasn't in doubt, there were at least 20 times as many guys with big cameras as girls in those halls but here at petit fancy I'd say it's probably around 50-50. But then: Every cosplayer had their own camera too.

 IMG_4158

More guys. I admire their open-mindedness.

 IMG_4166

Most of the people seem to come here in groups or, at least, pairs. Few of them are brave enough to come all by themselves. I'm not entirely sure about this beauty, but she seemed a bit on her own, which just made her so much more cute.

 IMG_4171

Taiwan is an awesome place. So many beautiful people around.

 IMG_4179

That is a pretty big gun.

 IMG_4188

Asians have mostly brown or black eye-colour. Even people that are half Caucasian are seldom to have another eye color since the genes for brown eyes are dominant. The use of coloured eye-lenses is very frequent here though, and not just for activities like this. Some young people will wear coloured lenses to school everyday as if it was any other accessory or clothing style.
Here, of course, the availability of these lenses come in quite handy. After all, manga characters just don't have natural eye and hair-colours.

 IMG_4192

I think this guy looked pretty cool.

 IMG_4193

And this is just a strange scene... I like it though.

 IMG_4218

I especially like this girl. I think the lightning could have been a little better, though.

 IMG_4219

A real, female Hatsune Miku at last.

 IMG_4227

This girl looks just slightly like a teacher I have. She managed to get a lot of attention with those big fans of hers, but professional utilization of my structural benefits of being a foreigner allowed me to get this picture over the heads of everyone else.

 IMG_4231

She's not the only one with big fans, though. These girls have fans too.

 IMG_4235

Ah, hate to break it to you but all good things come to an end. There's just a few more eye candies on boonbot.com that you can find if you click the link in the beginning of this post that says "National Taiwan University". You could also just click one of the pictures to get to my boonbot site.

Hope you liked it. Please let me have some responses so I can see if I still have a few readers! :D

Tags: , , , , ,

Events | Photography | Taiwan

New Camera

by Sander Tams 6. February 2010 19:21

Got me a new camera now, finally. And that is some days ago already, just so that you know. A few problems arised and all of a sudden there were a game show going on, so I weren't able to post this article by the time that I wanted.

 DSC06928

My shiny new DSLR of walletbane.
It's a Canon EOS 50D with a Tamron SP 17-50mm F/2.8 Di-II attached.

Cannon states this camera is somewhere between novice and professional. As far as I'm concerned, it outputs signifficantly better pictures than my point-and-shoot Sony Cyber-shot, and is able to take many consecutive shots pretty fast compared to other cameras in its class. The lens is of course, probably more important to overall image quality. It's a wide angle lens that becomes normal when you zoom in. It doesn't zoom much for an all-around camera, but I'm still planning on using only this one for now. Am not taking a lot of pictures of landscapes or hard-to-reach objects, so my expensive lens should be enough. It deals with lots of people moving around indoors pretty well, and has surprising capabilities for portrait shooting. And then, it's not that it was really-really expensive. It's third-party after all. 18000 NT$

 IMG_0221

The sharpness of the lens is really great. And then it's good for taking pictures during night time, which is my top priority for now. The combination seems also to make the pictures more luminous. I feel that this way, I can snap photos that are more true to the extremely well-lit Taipei.
Above picture is taken with the new camera by 6.30 pm just outside Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition hall 3 (somewhere near Taipei 101).

 IMG_0036

This picture is of the park by Banciao Main Station - which contains the MRT station nearest my current home.

 IMG_0230

And there goes another shot in Taipei 101's neighbourhood. A lovely well lit place with lots of people around.

 IMG_0383

Went to Taipei Game show again today (Saturday), and snapped some more pictures. I'm quite amased at how easy it is for me now to get really great shots of single people. On the point-and-shoot I used before, I had to point at the exact right position and then make the planets align. Obviously, that's the idea of point-and-shoot, and there's a good reason people are willing to pay so much more on the bigger cameras. Still, I am really surprised at how easy it is to do this. Can decide amongst a number of autofocus points and the camera focuses exactly on the object I'm interested in. The camera adds in a little bonus bokeh (blur on out-of-focus objects) by itself. Actually I don't need anything but to zoom and the auto feature gets the other stuff just right. And that is, much more just right than the unintelligent Cyber-shot that doesn't let you pick anything.

 IMG_0286

Yet, I pretty quickly got to love control. Setting ISO, Aperture and shutter speed by yourself actually isn't such a big work to do, and I'd say it vastly improves the photosnapping in changing conditions. High ISO speed causes ugly, digital noise. An aperture that's wide open will reduce picture sharpness, (although it's pretty hard to see the difference with my lens.) And finally, low shutter speed blurs out moving objects. High shutter speed, low ISO and narrow aperture makes the photos darker - less exposure. It's really that simple it seems. You pick the lowest shutter speed when not much movement is going on. When outside during night time, slam the aperture wide open (that is, set it to the lowest possible setting) as well as setting the ISO up around 800-1600 (or 400-800 if your equipment is awesome) depending on the shutter speed. (Lotsa cars and people around this place, so I can't leave it too low.)

That's what I know so far at least. You can find that stuff all over the internet pretty quickly. They're well explained too, but to me, it seems really just terribly advanced when you read it compared to just snapping photos yourself. All that stuff about how to take it the right angle and golden panels and whatnot, I'm not an expert on currently, but for just 3 days of rampant snapping, I feel the manual control is no bother already. I can never go back to point-and-shoot again, that's 100% sure.

 IMG_0181

Now, to be a little Canon EOS 50D specific, there's one feature for this DSLR body that's worth noting. As stated earlier in this post, it can spree photos pretty quickly. 6.3 photos a second, actually. Which is just great for taking photos of giveaways where people have to catch the stuff. - Or perhaps more likely, sports. I don't have such a great control of this feature just yet, so the pictures I've taken so far are not really the best of those I have.

 IMG_0468

What an awfull lot of people.

 IMG_0474

I wonder what kind of blog post this became. Some sort of cross between review, guide and computergame exhibition? Or just ramblings in excuse of posting more cute Asian girls?
Sorry to dissapoint you again, eventual female readers.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Events | Taiwan | Photography

Taipei Game Show 2010

by Sander Tams 5. February 2010 21:53

 IMG_0167

Went to the annual Taipei Game Show today. It's on from Friday 2/6 to Tuesday 2/9, so I just reached it on it's first day. A bit late though. It's open from 10 am to 6 pm. As with the book exhibition last week, I arrived at 4 pm. Too late to try stuff. But still plenty of time to locate all the booths and take pictures of loads of stuff. Took 148 photos while there, which is almost half of what my camera can contain. And that's in just 2 hours. (I make it save a raw together with a JPEG, so total size per shot is usually about 22-23 megabyte. I could cut it down to 2-3 per shot by not saving raws, should I have to snap more when I'm going back.)

 IMG_0172

In this place there's many booths and several stages for different kinds of performance. Some of them they have turnaments. At others, you can just jump up on and get a brief instruction like this guy above is, and you're in a competition of some sort, competing for freebies.

More...

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Computers | Events | Taiwan

Ads

Boonbot

Please note that I now do most of my blogging on Boonbot.com. There, you can also find many photos that I take. Try and have a look at my post about Taipei Game Show 2010 or my posts about Computex. My little article on a few of my favourite Taiwanese Foods has also gotten quite popular.

E-mail subscription

Need some extra e-mails? Put in your adress here and feedburner will send you some free ones whenever I blog.

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

About Me

My name is Sander Tams.
I am an exchange student from Denmark in Taipei, Taiwan.
I'm mainly focusing this blog on how it is to try and live a life as the locals here as a foreigner, commenting on the differences in culture and whatever I find amusing or interesting.
Have fun with the info about my life here. 

 Me

Should you decide to leave a comment when you drop by, please enter only your own name and personal website or blog, should you have such. Any comments linking to a non-personal website such as a commercial one will be deleted unless related to the article in a usefull way.

Add to Technorati Favorites

RecentPosts

RecentComments

Comment RSS

Privacy

This website participates in the Google Adsense Programme. This means that third-party advertisers participating in the Google Adwords Programme can place cookies in your browser and utilize web beacons to analyse and optimise advertisement campaign efficiency. If you will not allow this, please leave this site at once and delete eventual cookies already downloaded by your browser.