Shanghai: Exposcapes

Waiting for a crowd would be a mild statement. 70 million people are allegedly embarking on Shanghai for the World Expo which will start May 1. However, for Shanghai — the Expo began a long time ago. Preparations for the most expensive (over 4 billion USD directly funded) and largest World’s Fair ever started a long time ago. I’ve made three trips to Shanghai this month starting up a new publication for China Daily. We launched a 16-page weekly tabloid called Exposure last week, which will be covering the Expo for the next six months.

Exposure is the official English language newspaper of the Shanghai Expo. Once again living out of a hotel as the local Tenenbaum, I’ve been working out of the Shanghai bureau of China Daily setting up the infrastructure of the publication in attempt to have the publication run smoothly, without me being there. Here’s some pages of the first issue of Exposure, which is largely based on the recently redesigned China Daily.

Spending a month in Shanghai, I’ve gotten a chance to finally develop an opinion on the infinite debate between Shanghai and Beijing. Expats seem to fall on either side of the fence — and after a month here, I’m confident I fall on the Beijing side. In many ways, Shanghai doesn’t seem so much like China to me. People follow the street signs, people don’t seem to be spitting everywhere, people are even Queing. Bootleg DVD stores are hidden out of site and I’ve actually purchased a single beer here for over $20 USD. When you are used to paying 15 cents for a beer, 20 dollars seems to a bit out of proportion.

While working here, I’ve gotten a chance to have a wonder around the Expo site. While 70 million people are on there way here, when I was walking around there was almost no one there besides workers. Almost like walking in an Expo ghost town, the three-five hour lines that will soon form, were nowhere to be found.

As for the site itself — it is really pretty remarkable. The architecture is reason enough alone to wonder around all day. Everything is larger-than-life, and you really feel miniature walking around the global village. A lot of these photos were taken with my Canon EF 14mm f/2.8 USM II. I happened to get a rare blue sky day – and some unusual cloud coverage. With an interesting sky and bizzarre buildings, the 14mm did a great job making some interesting frames.

Digital Picture Review:The Full-frame corners are impressively sharp for a lens this wide. The biggest noticeable difference in image quality generated by stopping down the aperture is from the decreased amount of corner shading. The Canon EF 14mm f/2.8 L II USM Lens delivers a smoothly changing but somewhat strong amount of shading in full frame corners when shot wide open. This is not unusual for a wide lens – and is mostly gone by f/5.6. Users of 1.6x FOVCF bodies will notice little or no vignetting.

Shanghai: Cityscapes

Life outside the Expo garden is still very impressive in Shanghai. The recently remodel Bund area is a site worth seeing, although — like most tourist attractions in China, you will be seeing it with about 1 million of your closest friends.

The Shanghai Bund has dozens of historical buildings, lining the Huangpu River, that once housed numerous banks and trading houses from the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Russia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as the consulates of Russia and Britain, a newspaper, the Shanghai Club and the Masonic Club. The Bund lies north of the old, walled city of Shanghai. This was initially a British settlement; later the British and American settlements were combined in the International Settlement. A building boom at the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th century led to the Bund becoming a major financial hub of East Asia. The former French Bund, east of the walled city was formerly more a working harbourside.

In large part, I was stuck in an office during the day while I was here, so I got a chance to test out the Canon 5D Mark II’s ability to shoot at high ISOs at night and I’ll agree now – the camera does perform exceptionally well compared to my Canon 1D Mark II. Many of these shots, are taken with a Canon L series 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM are taken past 1000 ISO, without a tripod.

I do use Noise Ninja, by Picture Code to help eliminate fractals and noise issues common with high ISOs and night time photography. I’ve tried lots of noise reduction software, but I am huge advocate of this product. I’ve purchased lots of worthless Photoshop Pluggins in the past, but this one has real value.