Photoblog

Last month, we had a great trip to China, so we finally can compare this country with Japan that we visited 2 years ago. The structure of the two trips was quite similar: in Japan we visited Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and had few days in a beautiful natural surrounding, around Fuji mountain. While, in China we covered the famous triangle: Shanghai, Beijing and Xi’an and we spent few days in a really amazing area in Guangxi region. So, how was our travel experiences and how the two trips compare to each other?  And more important, what is our impression about the two countries in the light of those trips: Planning easiness: Both counties are fairly easy to plan. There are lots of information in English about both of them as they are quite popular for travelers. The regular photography websites that we used as source for our location scouting has lots of images from both countries, so we had no issue to have a large amount of locations to visit and photograph in both of the trips....

About Muslim quarter As the name implies, the Xi’an Muslim quarter is the area were the Muslim community of Xi’an is concentrated. It is located just north of the Drum Tower in the city center; the quarter covers several blocks and it is inhabited by over 20,000 Muslims. There are about 10 mosques in this area with Great Mosque in the Huajue Lane being the most famous and popular. But the area is not so popular among the tourists because it is the hub of the Chinese Muslim community in Xi’an, but because is a well known food and souvenir market. The main street, Beiyuanmen Muslim Street, about 500m long, is a really charming place; the street paved with dark colour stone has restaurants, stores and stands on both sides and all the owners are Muslim. A bit of history: In the old days, Beiyuanmen Muslim Street was the place for diplomats and merchants. Gradually, the population increase and the descendants of those immigrants are the today inhabitants...

  Some of the best photographic opportunities come unexpectedly. After a brilliant sunrise at XiangGong Hill, the guide asked us if we mind an hour break in a small village close by. Him and the driver were willing to have a breakfast and he offered us to either joined them or have a walk in the local farmers market. Being Sunday people were gathered from surroundings to sell all kind of merchandise, fruits, vegetables, meat, live animals and various snacks. We decided right away to use this opportunity to explore something that we could not have a chance otherwise; normally a farmers market in a touristic brochure is a place crowded with tourists, selling overpriced merchandise, together with souvenirs. So seing a genuine local farmers market seemed like a great opportunity. The guide told us that people might get annoyed by us taking their pictures; and that we should take good care of our belongings. We experiences the local ‘dangers’ few minutes later: a totally ...

I am writing this post few weeks after coming back from a great trip in Japan. We experienced lots of visually amazing places, especially in Kyoto, a city full of history and spirituality, however it was extremely difficult to achieve the images that we were looking for. Before the trip we did our share of scouting, unfortunately not as extensive as we wanted to; we had a quite clear idea of which should be the sunrise locations and which should be the sunset/blue hour locations. And few mid-day locations too. But things were not actually going as expected. We ended up shooting 3 early mornings, one sunset, one late evening (way after blue hour) and scheduling a day trip to Kobe for shooting its spectacular marina instead of fighting for a spot close to a temple at not so right moment of the day. But which were the reasons for not being able to fulfill our plan? 1. First of all most of the temples close at 16:00 or 16:30. This was 2...