Cool, someone else linked to my Nanluoguxiang pictures...

A blogger who writes in Spanish about Beijing and life in China, linked to my Nanluoguxiang photos. I think that is the third or fourth link to that gallery so far, referred to them as 'fotos excepcionales.' Here is the blog entry, http://loschinocuentos.blogspot.com/2008/10/la-calle-al-sur-del-tambor-y-la-campana.html. The entry is about Nanluoguxiang and includes some of the blogger's own photos. I was interested to see that he or she referred to Nanluoguxiang by a literal translation of its name into Spanish, 'La Calle al Sur Del Tambor y La Campana' i.e. 'The Street to the South of the Gong and Drum.' I was pleased that I remembered enough Spanish from high school to at least make out the main idea in the paragraphs in his post.

It is nice to see that particular gallery of Nanluoguxiang pictures being linked to, now if only people would link to some of the other galleries on my site. I guess I need to get out and take more pictures of places that people are interested in!

Interestingly, at least for the time being, that particular gallery now comes up as the first result in a Google search for 'Nanluoguxiang' , ahead of pages at TripAdvisor and so forth. And it isn't even my favorite gallery of photos from Nanluoguxiang.

Haines Hall on the UCLA campus

For various reasons I went to Haines Hall on the UCLA campus several times in September to take pictures, mainly at midday and early evening. It is one of the older buildings on the campus, and right next to such landmarks as Royce Hall and Powell Library. I shot with a Tokina 11-16 f2.8 and a EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS. I ended up with several hundred pictures, most of which I deleted. From the ones I kept, I made a selection that I uploaded here...

http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/gallery/6221732_NSWb3

Most of these photos have had perspective correction applied in GIMP 2.6. I am really impressed with the latest iterations of GIMP, the user interface is much more straightforward than it used to be. My needs are pretty basic and it seems to do everything I would like. Increasingly I am heading towards using Lightshop for basic editing like cropping, simple touch-up, rotation, white balance and tone corrections and then RAW conversion, followed by GIMP for perspective correction.

Here are a few favorites...

Still more pictures from the UCLA campus...

I was out last week wandering around UCLA with my camera, from around sunset into the early evening. This time I had my Canon 17-55 EF-S f2.8 IS. I spent most of my time shooting a particular building, and I will upload a selection of photos from that in a few days, but in the meantime here are some shots from elsewhere on campus...

http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/gallery/6155425_YUQ9V

One thing of slight interest in this latest batch is that I used perspective correction in the GIMP on a number of photos. I have had the GIMP installed for some time but haven't used it much, then a friend of mine recommended I take advantage of the perspective correction tool, and sure enough, it works quite nicely. From here on out I will probably be applying perspective correction fairly frequently to my wide-angle architectural shots. Overall, after using the GIMP to edit these photos, I was impressed. It has come a long way from earlier versions I played with that were generally a bit hard to use. The user interface is now much more straightforward.