Seeing today’s weather I was on the brink of just staying at the hotel. Luckily a shopping center with Starbucks, Coffee Bean, and a lot of restaurants is attached 😉 But then I thought…maybe rain is a chance for some great shots and set out to the Bund to catch some tourists. It worked out. And pretty quickly. The Plum Rain is not heavy, but so fine that it blows everywhere. An umbrella is fairly useless. There is just 6 minutes between the first and the last photos shown here. Add 10 minutes on either side to get from a subway to the Bund and back and you have a good estimate of my time spent outside today 😉

Left: Have you ever wondered why Shanghai sidewalks get flooded with the slightest rain falling? It’s because many drain pipes open onto the street…

Right: No, thats not me. But I have probably not looked much better when trying to fetch or put away my camera.

Now for the results…not too bad for six minutes, I’d say:

Left: Colorful Umbrella Parade at the Bund. OK…I’ve stolen the idea from Chinese photo artists selling their color key photos for much money in various markets. This one here is authentic by me 😉 And the umbrella colors are just the genuine colors of the umbrellas used. All quite OK, except for the black one on the right…would have loved that one to be a dark yellow. Done with Aperture’s fantastic Brush Away functionality with Edge Detection.

Right: The Shanghai Pudong skyline, though, was partly cut off by the low hanging clouds.

Left: From Tokyo? Hard to say…this ship was just pushed by the Bund. Part of the heavy vignette effect surprisingly came already by the zoom lense set to its longest focal length…pretty bad as such. But enhancing it even more it now looks like seen through a telescope, which fits the motif 😉

Right: While there was certainly a lot less tourist traffic at the Bund the few remaining tourists definitely wanted to have their souvenier photo taken. Even the professional photo booths (portrait taken and printed for 7 RMB) were operating.

Today’s Lesson: It’s Plum Rain season.

Categories: Shanghai

Originally Created: 06/25/2010 11:34:04 AM
Last Edited: 06/25/2010