Here’s one from when I visited an old tea house in Chengdu. These are becoming more and more rare with all the modernization in China… This also uses one of the new presets!
We had to search high and low to find one of these traditional Chinese tea houses, and this one was about an hour north of Chengdu. We were super happy to find it and we had some incredible tea. One of my favorite things about it was all these old communist posters on the wall. I also kind of like that the place was mostly a wreck… they make great tea, but they’re not the best at tidying.
I just finished watching this illuminating video on darkness retreats. I think I’ll try one.
Chengdu is famous for its hotpot restaurants, which basically means you have a pot in the middle of the table and everyone dumps various ingredients inside to cook. Then people just kind of use their chopsticks to pull out random stuff to eat. This particular restaurant was pretty cool and extra Chinese-extravagant.
Every Sunday you get a new how-to video and today’s is a pretty cool one from China. You can always unlock it if you are a Passport Member and you’ll get access to another 200+ videos as well. Enjoy!
In this video, you’ll see how I HDR the three base shots in Aurora and then how I use Photoshop to make a few final edits to make the bridge look bigger (relatively) and use vignetting to bring focus to the bridge itself.
While I was working on this video for today’s Passport Sunday, I was convinced this bridge was in Chengdu. But now maybe I think it’s in Tianjin. It totally doesn’t matter, but I’m amazed at how so many Chinese cities blend together in my mind. Many of them have cool bridges like this. I don’t know. I guess it is Tianjin. Or maybe even Beijing, but probably not. Who cares, it’s a cool bridge and I think it would be pretty cool to live inside of a bridge.
If you’re a Passport Member then today you’ll see how I edited the photo below from three original brackets.
In this video, you’ll see how I combined three brackets and then did a few extra cleanup moves in Photoshop. Enjoy!
Chengdu is known as the home of the Panda Bears in China. I don’t love the way they treat animals and stuff in China, but it’s still a beautiful place. I try and imagine Panda Bears swinging around free and eating bamboo ice cream or whatever they eat.
While in Chengdu, China, we visited this really old tea house. I thought it was pretty incredible watching these guys make tea in the old way like they have for thousands of years. These places are become and rarer… the only people inside that seemed to be enjoying the tea were people that seemed to be at least 100 years old, so I don’t see their target market hanging around a lot longer…
I don’t know if you’ve seen this or not, but both the final scene and the outtakes are hilarious!
Final Scene:
Outtakes:
Sir Patrick Stewart and Ricky Gervais cannot stop laughing while filming a scene from videos
A lot of these old communist tea houses have been destroyed in the new age of China, but I found one that still existed. I think (artistically) some of the colors and lines look really interesting. My favorite bits are the old propaganda posters on the back wall. I decided to give this one a rather harsh HDR treatment because I like how it emphasises the blacks and reds.
I saw this cool campervan on Reddit. I think this would be fun to own but I would have no idea how to actually build the thing.
Chengdu is known for its hot pot restaurants. It’s basically a huge boiling pot where everyone tosses in meats and veggies and stuff. It’s sort of a fun communal thing, I guess… but it’s also one of those places where they trick the customers into cooking their own food. During dinner, there is this Chinese opera that is being performed. However, while I was taking photos and really paying attention, I realized they were all lip-syncing and the performance was not actually real!
Today’s Passport Sunday how-to-video is from Chengdu, China. I do a rather aggressive edit today, as you’ll see! Either way, here are some of my other favorite photos from Chengdu.
Here’s a RATHER extreme HDR treatment! I don’t usually go this whole hog, but this place had such a Communist dystopian feel that I decided to go for it anyway! I hope you enjoy 🙂
Here is a rather detailed report about bloggers. It’s based in the UK, but is a pretty good sample size for the whole world. If you ever wanted to know more about the “biz” side of blogging, that is chockfull of data.
Man, these old dudes in the outskirts of China really seem to get a kick out of drinking tea and smoking all day. It seems like the thing to do. And everyone seems really quite old… someone they just keep tickin’ along. Although, I guess this is not really a fair sampling because I’m technically not seeing all the dead ones.
