The Hunt for a Quality Camera Backpack

I went to Camera Street (博愛路 [Bo Ai Road] and surrounding streets, near the main Post Office) in Taipei last week to look for a quality camera backpack. Because I was going to be doing a lot of walking in Taiwan, I figured that I would probably find use for a nice, sport-oriented backpack or sling bag. Like a good, resourceful consumer, I did my research beforehand, hitting up all the big brands on the internet, like Lowepro, Tamrac, Tenba, Domke, ThinkTank, Kata, etc. Once I narrowed down the choices, I hit the streets and this is what I found:

1. Kata — I was really keen on Kata ever since I saw their 3N1 series sling bags. They just have really sleek designs that actually have purpose to them. Plus, they seemed to be well constructed (Kata also produces body armour for the Isreali forces).

** 3N1-20 **

Comes in three sizes, S, M, L. Note to Goldilocks: The large is too big! The small is too small! The medium is just right.

The 3N1 is probably going to be a really popular bag in the near future. It just came out this summer, so prices are still up there (although I think that Kata prices are reasonably priced for what they offer, compared to Tamrac or Lowepro). Most of the shops I looked at only carried the small and large versions (3N1-10 and 3N1-30, respectively) but the last shop I went to, which was an official Kata dealer in Taiwan, carried one 3N1-20 bag. Like I mentioned, Kata bags are great. They’re well made from top to bottom and well thought out. This bag almost gave me too many possible configurations to play with, that I nearly confused myself. You can see an in-depth preview here. The one thing I wasn’t keen on was that it was impossible to put a camera with a 70-200 f/2.8 attached, which I really wanted out of a slingbag. Only the large version was able to fit that in, but the 3N1-30 just looks heavy. Granted the side access of this type of slingbag, whether it be this, Lowepro’s Slingshot series, or Tenba’s Shootout, just doesn’t allow fitment of long lenses unless it is the largest version, impractical for a city-going daypack. Plus, they’d just look strange on my relatively small 5′ 8″ frame.

I also, at the same place, stumbled upon the Kata T-212. It was a bit small for my needs, but well designed, and looked like tactical gear for the Navy SEALs. I later found out that there was a larger version, the T-214, that would probably suit what I carry around.

** T-214 **

T-214. Looks and sounds intense.

So then it was off to look at other options. I saw a pack from Jenova, which the sellers claimed was an Italian brand manufactured in China. However, I was pretty sure some random company from HK decided to buy the rights to the brand name because the construction was pretty mediocre. Overall, the organization and the ballistic nylon wasn’t too bad, but what really raised question marks was the construction of the plastic buckles. They just seemed to reek of cheapness. I looked online and could not seem to find a picture anywhere.

I appreciated the fact that Yahoo! Sports used ‘Taiwan’ in the country column during the Olympics instead of ‘Chinese Taipei’

It might be because Jerry Yang is the CEO… just maybe…

I wouldn’t be surprised if the PRC banned all Yahoo! USA pages.

CKS Memorial Hall, 中正紀念堂

CKS Memorial Hall, 中正紀念堂, originally uploaded by tomscy2000.

I was having a terrible time trying to come up with how to write my latest essay in Chinese, so I decided to procrastinate all night, looking at pictures, reading up on all the Olympics buzz, etc. By the time I realized that I was losing some serious beauty rest time, it was already 4:30 in the morning. I had always wanted to go out and shoot in the early morning, since there are very few cars and it wouldn’t be so hot yet.

Thus, I waited to around 5:00am to set out. It took a while to get to CKS Memorial Hall A.K.A. Democracy Hall, and to my chagrin, lots of seniors were already out doing their early morning exercises. Still, there weren’t too many people, so I made a beeline to the central flagpole to set up my shot. The conditions would’ve been much better had an old geezer not had been getting in my way for about 10 minutes, but I finally framed my shot.

At ISO 80, I thought I was going to get some clean, well-exposed shots. However, they all looked like crap in the LCD. The sky was already way too bright for any good light gradations in the clouds. I knew I had to go for an HDR shot. I set the camera to f/8.0 (the minimum allowed on my camera), MF to infinity, and began snapping away. I started off a a pretty fast shutter speed 1/80 sec, underexposing by about 2 whole stops, and working my way to one whole second.

Previous attempts I made of tonemapping in CS3 were terrible. I simply couldn’t get the tone changes subtle enough without making the entire picture look bland. I needed something else to help me convert HDR photos. Thus, I plunged into Photomatix. After merging in CS3 as a 32-bit *.hdr file, I did the tonemapping in Photomatix Pro 3.0. It was a bit amateurish with the overprocessed look and everything, but I thought it was a good, honest, effort. With practice, I’ll be able to get it to be more subtle yet eye-popping at the same time.

Four Patties >> Two Patties

I was at McDonald’s tonight for dinner, and as I was about to bite into my BigMac, I saw a a huge poster in the corner of my eye. It was a poster of the ‘無敵大麥克’ a.k.a. Mega Mac a.k.a. Double Big Mac, flanked by Taiwan’s Olympic medal hopefuls in Taekwondo, the dude 朱木炎, and his girlfriend — I forgot her name. As part of McDonald’s Olympic campaign, they released this variant of the Big Mac with not two, but four all beef patties. Looking at the 24×36 poster of the Mega Mac made the Big Mac in my hands look lilliputian. Not only that, but the promotion made the Mega Mac meal only 135 NT, merely 20 NT more than the standard Big Mac meal. I so wanted to go up to the counter and upgrade my sandwich. All they would’ve had to do was add in two more patties, and I would be kicking some Taekwondo butt too.

Taiwan High Speed Rail 700T

IMG_1983, originally uploaded by tomscy2000.

Interesting thing about the Taiwan High Speed Rail train; most people think it’s just the Japanese Shinkansen 700 Series imported to Formosa. However, it actually has a number of modifications that make it significantly different from the Japanese model.

When THSR was designing their railway infrastructure, they somehow decided that the European system was more suitable, as it had wider tunnels, thus allowing for more quiet trips, amongst other reasons. So, when they chose their train, they could shorten the nose (the normal 700 Series has the nose of a platypus) because the aerodynamics of entering a wider tunnel is easier. In addition, the 700T had to be outfitted with more powerful motors, so that the maximum speed could be boosted from the normal 700′s 285 km/h to 315 km/h.

It’s interesting riding at 186 mph. They post the speed whenever the train attains speeds of 285 km/h and over, I think, so it’s always a cool thing to see it say 300 km/h, which is the maximum operational speed. The great part is that the acceleration and deceleration is so smooth on the train, your body doesn’t feel any inertial response. It’s a little louder than usual at top speed, but still plenty quiet. I don’t demand a Lexus cabin experience, especially at nearly 200 miles an hour.

This was taken at the Chiayi station (actually in the Taibao township) during my first trip ever on the THSR, on my way up to Taipei. The trip is so short. It’s pretty amazing how you can get from Kaoshiung (Zuoying) to Taipei in less than two hours (the nonstop trips) now.

If there’s one thing that isn’t convenient about the THSR, is that the stations — with the exception of Taipei area and the not-yet-built Kaohsiung station — are so far away (relatively) from the actual cities themselves, so it takes a while to get to the stations. They were obviously taking into consideration noise and price issues when building these stations out of the way of the real urban areas, and I don’t actually think it’s that big a deal. Only a small handful of Taiwanese commute daily across the island, and those are the only people who would truly require convenience. An educated guess puts these people at Taipei, Hsinchu, and Kaohsiung, and at these places, the convenience of getting to THSR is much better than at other places. The Taipei station is inside the main railway station, and the Hsinchu station is near the science region, which most of these commuters would be going to, if it’s for work. The Kaohsiung station is not yet opened, but will be soon, and it will also be in the railway station, connecting to the trains and to the newly constructed metro there.

Focal Length: 6mm (36mm Full-Frame)
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 1/160 s
Exposure: Tv Priority, Evaluative Metering

Taipei 101 at Night

Taipei 101 at Night, originally uploaded by tomscy2000.

I’ve been taking a bunch of pictures at the same exact spot today, through this little porthole along the side of the stairs next to my room. It has a little ledge on it, so I just sit my camera there and snap away. The perspective is getting stale, but this is the last picture that I’m going to take of Taipei 101 from there, since I’ve already taken a day picture, a panorama, a closeup, and now a nightscape.

In retrospect, I should have widened the aperture for this shot so that a little more light entered the lens. When the picture came out, it was underexposed by about 2 EV. I had to pull up the exposure in Photoshop, increasing noise a great deal.

However, I did want the picture as sharp as possible, although I realize now it would not make too much a difference, as the thermal noise in the air and leftover haze would’ve obfuscated the marginal sharpness I would’ve achieved by shooting at f/8.0 instead of f/4.5 or some other value. Furthermore, the lightstars are not the prettiest; you can tell that the S3 lens has a 6 bladed aperture element from the six-sided stars produced. This shot took the entire 15 second maximum shutter time that the Canon PowerShot S3 IS allows.

Focal Length: 22mm (132mm Full-Frame)
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 15 s
Exposure: Manual

Childhood Simplicity

Childhood Simplicity, originally uploaded by tomscy2000.

I was just walking around my residential neighborhood in Sinying (Wade-Giles: Hsinying, Hanyu Pinyin: Xinying) on a Thusday afternoon when I saw a couple of kids, presumably brother and sister, running around an empty, abandoned parking lot.

They seemed to be having so much fun, with the older boy riding around in his bike and his little sister running alongside him. Yet, if you saw the entire shot instead of this crop, you would’ve seen that they were literally behind a rundown set of apartment buildings, with overgrown grass all around them.

As a 22 year old, I couldn’t understand, at least, not anymore, what the fun was about running around outside in 82 degree, humid, sunny weather. But their playing brought back memories of when I was about the girl’s age, and my sister was the boy’s age, and we would play in the parking lot of our aparment complex much in the same way. My sister, decked out in her then new rollerskates, would skate from post to post, while I would try to catch her with my boundless 5 year-old energy.

From a technical standpoint, this shot is terrible. The kids are out of focus (the contrast AF system in a body like the S3 IS is far too slow to track the childrens’ movement), and even with them in focus, I had this zoomed all the way to 72mm (432mm Full-Frame) so the clarity would not have been so good anyway. I used the OOF blur to my advantage, however, and converted the original color photo to black and white, tinkering with grayscale translation of colours to give it an aged, saturated look. The high contrast of the now B&W photo allows the kids to stand out in the frame, and I cropped it to keep them in the center of the frame, and to cut out the multiple cars next to them that would ruin the feeling of nostalgia in the photo. I couldn’t do anything about the cars directly behind them, however. I then sprinkled in a little noise to make the background a little more homogenous, and to emphasize the feeling of an aged photo.

In the end, I believe I was able to achieve what I set out to do, despite this photo being a technically flawed shot. It was a spur of the moment, unplanned shot, but the subject matter really shined through in the end, and multiple people commented on how much they really enjoyed this photo.

Focal Length: 72mm (432mm Full-Frame)
Aperture: f/3.5
Shutter: 1/125 s
Exposure: Av Priority, Evaluative Metering

羅斯福路四段

羅斯福路四段, originally uploaded by tomscy2000.

I took this picture during my second trip to NTU. My parents and I mainly walked around the 公館 (Gongguan) area, looking at the surroundings. At 9-10 pm, the area was still bustling. I took this photo at almost 11pm, when a number of people left already, but this made for the perfect time to get some nice light streaks from the scooters riding down Roosevelt Road.

Taken at the middle of a pedestrian bridge, set on top of the railing, with 2 second shutter delay.

Focal Length: 6mm (36mm Full-Frame)
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 2.0 s
Exposure: Manual

洪師父牛肉麵

http://www.taiwannoodle.com.tw/noodle/

I went to eat here today, at their store in the East Metro Mall, near the Zhongxiao Dunhua MRT station. It was expensive as hell, but pretty darn good. Better than the one I had at the 101 Shin Kong Mitsukoshi food court. I sampled one of their entries from the 2007 Taipei Beef Noodle Day Competition. Apparently, they win top prize from the contest all the time.

I got beat by a fat, out of shape kid in basketball

…and it was altogether too embarassing. Sure enough, I’m also fat and out of shape, but not to the extent this guy was in. I allowed him to shove his significantly large behind all the way to the basket way too many times and let his sloppy ball handling get away with things too much.

It made me realize that although I have a ton of time here, I haven’t done much with it. I could be working out hours a day, instead I’m only shooting hoops every other day. All my time has been spent locked up in the confines of my air conditioned room or looking at skirts I want to chase after but not actually making chase. This is the time for me to get in shape before the academic year brings new things to the table. I will up my regimen.