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. :)

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Dagligdag | General | Photography | Taiwan

The Views from Lulin Mountain

by Sander Tams 16. May 2010 19:09

Took ages getting to write this, but now it's here: My post about pictures that I took while in Lulin Shan, Yu Shan mountain range.
Just a tiny bit of info:
Yu Shan or Jade Mountain is the tallest mountain in Taiwan. It is surrounded by Yu Shan national park and you need to have special permission to get to the mountain. Wikipedia has a lot more to tell about the place here: Yushan Mountain article on Wikipedia. I'm just going to show off some nice sights here.

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I will start out with this photo that I took in the evening just before it got really dark. The house below is where we ate dinner and breakfast and was also the place where all the girls got to sleep. Boys had to sleep in some small cabins further up the mountain. It was really cold.

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This was taken in the morning, on the day after. Still has lots of blue.

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Later, we were up in the mountains to see the sunrise and it was really foggy.

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It felt really strange. Kind of mystic fantasyish.

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Could so much make a film here. Whether it be a Mew music video or something similar to The Lord of The Rings.

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It's really steep so watch where you put your foot.

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There was a big forest fire here some years ago, so you can see a bunch of burned down trees.

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Clouds are leaking into the valley. I happened to see this phenomenon a few times while there and it was really cool to see every time.

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Suddenly everything looks so clear. I'm really far up in Lulin mountain at this point.

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Very strange cloud formation.

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I guess that's how a mountain range looks from the inside.

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That's the place we came from. Now the fog is almost gone and you can spot some of the burned down trees if you look closely.

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And there it comes: The "sunrise".
Well, the sun had already come up long time before, but we couldn't see it for the mountains until now. Still looked kind of cool but I would've loved to observe a real sunrise as I hear that should be a really beautiful thing to see.

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Look at that strange cloud formation.

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And this looks really strange too. If that guy takes a two steps backwards, he'll fall down a few hundred meters.

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Maho, the Japanese girl, wanted me to take some pictures of the clouds. Personally I think picturs of clouds are boring and something you can always take. You don't have to go to a mountain for that. I guess for Taiwanese or Japanese who lives so close together, you actually do have to climb a mountain to see clouds. Megacities don't often have skies over here. Besides: I got a bit of Yu Shan crammed into the picture anyway, so it's still a unique picture.

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This is really a cool place. The side of the mountain from here is so steep.

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See?

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Then suddenly, another cloud rolled into us and it got really foggy again.

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Amazing isn't it? Can't see a thing clear.

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At this time we're heading back again. Time for some more mysticism.

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This place was really awesome to photograph but it was really troublesome when we had to climb back up over it.

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The mountain is completely vertical over here. Before it was not possible to see the ground but now I realise just how deep this actually is. You should really watch where you put your feet, haha.

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Yeah.

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Later that day we went to the other side of the mountain. Notice how the colors have changed with the sun being higher up in the sky?

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It's such a beautiful place to walk in. So void of buildings and other human artefacts. (Except for the weather measuring devices that is.)

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Wow, incoming!

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Yeah! Woo. Awesome picture.

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One of the last pictures I have from Lulin Mountain I guess.

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This was nearby. We stopped here on the way home just before we went all the way down from the mountains. This is not as high up as the other place so you don't need any special permission to get in here I think. You still need to drive a lot of course. There were a few other people at this place too, as well as some tourist information about a bunch of more or less historical figures who went here a few generations ago.

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It's still very beautiful so I wonder why it isn't totally crowded.

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Prevent forest from fire accident and felling trees unlawfully, cultivating farms arbitrarily.

Oh well. That's it. Hope you liked some of the photos I took. If you bothered as much as reading this, please leave a comment, even if it's just to say that you read my blog and nothing more. ^^

If you click an image on this blog, you will be taken to that images page on boonbot.com. From there, you can click on the same image yet again, and the website will send you the full version of that image. You can do this if there's any photo here that you really like. You can use my pictures for wallpapers and other private stuff but please ask before you do anything else such as redistribute on the internet or something like that.

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Photography | Travel | 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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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...) ^^;

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So many people there...

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

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Chinese traditional clothes are awesome.

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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.

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More guys. I admire their open-mindedness.

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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.

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

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That is a pretty big gun.

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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.

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I think this guy looked pretty cool.

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

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

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A real, female Hatsune Miku at last.

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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.

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

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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

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Events | Photography | Taiwan

HuaJiang Bridge

by Sander Tams 11. April 2010 09:11

That Bridge somewhere over near Jiangzicui. I went there again. And even bothered with finding it's name through Google Maps. HuaJiang Bridge it's called.

This Thursday it rained again, so I decided to go for it. School ends early on Thursdays for me, so I went and saw a film in the library! My school has this kind of MTV like place where you can go borrow a bunch of films and watch them there. For free, (but only if you're studying there, of course.) You can watch them by yourself, or you can have a room for watching them in groups, should you have good classmates that aren't busy running to work part time as soon as they're off from school. So I watched The Happening.

After getting disappointed over yet another American film, I go home and pick up my umbrella and DSLR Camera. When I go home I usually take bus from Xinpu MRT station for a few minutes. I then find a free bus back to Xinpu station almost right after walking out the door, and decide to walk all the way to HuaJian Bridge from there.

At the time I arrived there, the weather had cleared a bit so it was quite light, also because I went there so much earlier in the day. I decided to take some photos, then read in my Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Great book, great writer. Under a bridge like that is almost the perfect place for reading such books! It's like climbing into the bottom of a dried up well for me, going to that bridge during rainy days.

If any of you guys have read Haruki Murakami, please feel free to share your thoughts. Or if you have had something with bridges or other special places that normal people would just pass by. I'm now going to show you some of my creations from that day. I used Adobe Lightroom to capture them out of RAW files and decided to put some creativity into some of them.
Enjoy.

 Under The Bridge

This was taken later on the day, a few minutes before I went to have dinner I believe, so it was rather dark, especially since the rain had increased. Exposure time is 8 seconds, no flash. Have been working for a good time in Lightroom to make the bridge itself more visible and reduce the high exposure from light in the background. Look closely and you will see the roof of Taipei's second tallest building (Shin Kong Life Tower) far away on the left side of the bridge.

 Two Stray Dogs

 The Other Side

The other side.
You'll also find Taipei 101 in the distance, second tallest building in the world. Damn you Dubai.

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The bridge earlier on the day looked like this seen from below. Mind you it was raining all day.

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Standing atop the bridge, this is what I see: Taipei City seen from afar on a rainy day.

 Rainy Day

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It was a little cooler this Thursday compared to Tuesday when I went here first. It was not that bad though. There were this guy running around (exercising) in the area below the bridge with no shirt on for a while, so it wasn't that cold. I sat pretty still though, reading my book.

 Logistics

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Finally I decided to part with the bridge. I was starving and believed I had to hurry a little if I wanted to go to Taipei and eat. I got to Taipei Main Station faster than I had expected, though. So I was able to stay around for a while after, drinking expensive coffee and buying really, really sweet candy. Might as well have been half as sweet as usual Danish candy, which meant that the classmates with whom I shared the candy would leave most of the jellybeans and extinguish the not-so-dense candies.

Hope you liked the pictures. Here's a Slovenian guys take on the bridge during less rainy daytime: A day of a good walk from Jiangzicui to the Huajiang bridge. I also took few more pictures than these. Some more of them made it to boonbot.com and you can see all picture from this bridge here: HuaJian Bridge.

If you feel like using any of the pictures that I've taken and put on this page, feel free to do so. I assume you will be nice and attribute and put up links, should you decide to redistribute them in some way (on the web or any digital media as well as newspapers or books.) Please have a talk with me before you start using them for commercial purposes, though. If you want to use them at a website with heavy traffic, please mind that hotlinking could put a strain to my small webhotel solution.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

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Dagligdag | Photography | Taiwan

Taiwan High Speed Rail Photos

by Sander Tams 26. February 2010 21:24

Drove high-speed train for the first time in my life on 24th of February and brought my DSLR Camera. Here's some of the pictures I took.

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First picture taken while travelling the HSR from Taipei to Kaohsiung. Exposure time: 1/400 sec, ISO speed: 200, Aperture: f/2.8. Wtf was I doing?

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Second try. ISO changed to 100. Of course it has to be 100, it's in the middle of the day! Exposure is still way too high, but the camera actually managed to capture a somewhat sensical photo. Shutter speed can still get higher. Train is still accelerating at this point.

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Shutter speed is now 1/1600 sec. Is damn bright today.

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Now at 1/2000 sec. Objects close to the railway are almost clear, so I'm satisfied with this setting. Exposure is still a notch too high, but hard to manage when moving so fast. My Canon 50D can shoot at speeds up to 1/8000 sec, but didn't want to set it that high as I would probably have to increase ISO and thus, make more digital noise. Not that it would be a problem of course.

More...

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Photography | Taiwan

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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. 

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