My final destination in China - Shanghai.

Scenes from “The Bund” (the river flowing thru Shanghai). Included in the image are The Pearl Tower, World Trade Center and “The Bottle Opener” (guess which building that is).

Night shots from the very top of The Pearl Tower. Looking down at “The Bund” and the rest of Shanghai. The boats on the river are lit up like Christmas trees creating these “sweeping light effects” when photographed with a long exposure.

The Bottle Opener at night.

Pearl Tower, the Bund at night. One of my favorite pictures.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hangzhou, China.

Scenes from West Lake.

Henan province, China.

Martial arts performance in the Shaolin temple. The legendary birth place of Shaolin Kung Fu.

Scenes from The Long Man Caves.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yangshou, China.

Read the rest of this entry »

Guilin, China.

Boat ride down the Li river to Yangshou.

According to the legend the gods painted these mountains with their huge divine brushes and black ink. The mountain in this picture is “horse mountain”. If you look carefully you can see several horses in the black and white patterns on the cliff wall.

A few pictures from Xian, China.

The Terracotta Soldiers of Xian. Bigger version.

Performance in the citys bell tower.

The Drum Tower.

View from the top of The Big Goose Pagoda.

The Great Wall of China, somewhere between Jingshangling and Badaling.

Sunset in a park in central Beijing.

A man taking an afternoon nap at the Imperial Summer Palace just outside Beijing.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I bought myself a digital camera and I’ve been taking pictures with it for about 9 months now. It’s not like I haven’t taken pictures before but it’s always been a loaner since I haven’t owned a camera before. So I would say that buying this camera marked the start of a new hobby for me. This is the sexy little beast I bought:

Canon Ixus 980 IS

It’s my precious. :)

I’ll be posting some pictures in the coming days, primarily from my trip to Asia.

I’ve been working on some design changes to the site and fixing some display bugs. I got rid of the side menu in favor of a one column layout which has the benefit that it can accommodate wider and thus larger images and videos, something which you can already see a taste of in this previous post. As always, usability is my main design goal and I think the blog has gotten a step closer to where I want it. For all you hobbyist stalkers out there I have updated my about page with a more personal description of myself.

Much has happened in my life the last couple of years but little of that tends to end up on my blog. I’m not going to commit to more frequent updates knowing how I usually end up, but hopefully with all the bugs weeded out of the site things should run a bit more smoothly from now on. It is especially my running log which I am talking about. While I haven’t been running much for the past year, I have found new forms of exercise which I would like to write about.

Oh and I graduated from college and went backpacking in Asia. Guess I should mention that at least. :P I’ll upload some pictures when I have time.

/Sam