Jakob Montrasio ⁽²²⁴⁾

I was talking with a friend about chinese tea when I remembered that I had one bud of a chinese flower left. Now this is no ordinary tea, this is something I have never seen outside of China. You put the bud into a big glass, then you add hot water. The next minutes you will stare at the glass as the bud is blooming all…

NEW TUTORIAL FROM 2009 HERE!

Here it is, the promised Nikon D50 HDR tutorial or 'How To Make A HDR Image Out Of A Single RAW file'. Do you want to make a image like the one above? Then read my tutorial and try for yourself. Now I didn't teach everything myself, I learned a lot from 'stuck in customs', but there are some things I do different. Let's get started.

Following the chinese tradition, we had a couple of wedding images taken yesterday. Funny, in China you have to shoot these pictures before and not during the wedding ceremony. They will give us three books, some framed images, invitations and whatnot for the money we pay them. Anyway, it was a long day, a long shoot, and after changing six times our energy was literally gone.

Seit dem Beginn des neuen Jahres bin ich ziemlich ausgelastet und komme daher nicht so viel zum bloggen. Wenn die Zeit es erlaubt, werde ich meine Erfahrungen mit der Stadt Chongqing, 32 Millionen Einwohner, niederschreiben. Das war wirklich unglaublich... Aber im Moment bin ich schon froh, wenn ich abends mal eine Stunde Zeit habe, um ein bisschen mit Photoshop herumzuspielen. Auf der einen Seite startet grade der neu angelaufene Verkauf von Neumaschinen für uns in China, auf der anderen Seite muss ich mit meiner Frau unsere Hochzeitsfeier vorbereiten. Daher kann ich euch im Moment nur ein paar in letzter Zeit entstandener Fotos zum betrachten anbieten. Das Foto oben habe ich geschossen, als ein Freund aus Deutschland da war und wir die Sehenswürdigkeiten von Shanghai besucht haben.

Image is a collage of different HDR settings, quite crazy layered. Anyway, as you can see, Pudong 'leaks' over to Puxi. Don't you feel, that more and more parts in 'old' Shanghai start to look like Pudong, too? There's a new area here in Zhabei, Zhabei! And it looks exactly like Pudong. Hope they can save some of that good old Shanghai feeling. Taken in the…

I like pictures. I like to take them with my Nikon D50, I like to share them on flickr, I like to show them off on my blog. Sadly, there seem to be very few elegant Wordpress themes that support a 'normal' blog as well as an image blog. Why? Because most themes try to get the content into a 400 pixel or less wide space. Sure, makes sense, as it is much better readable than a 600 pixel wide content area. But how about making it 500 pixels wide, exactly enough for the so-called 'Medium' resolution that flickr has to offer? And in return, making the content font a few pixel bigger? When it comes to blogging flickr images, you can go with 240 pixel wide or 500 pixel wide images, and 240 pixel were just too small for my taste. A workaround is to download the images you want to blog, resize them in Photoshop and host them yourself. But what do I pay flickr for? So I sat down, designed this theme, and since I release almost everything under Creative Commons, why not this Wordpress theme, too? There is another interesting thing about this theme that I didn't mention yet: The content comes first in the source code, then come the Google ads, then the menu and sidebar. Look at the code if you don't believe me! This way, the advertising bots from Google read my content first, then the menu and the sidebar. This way, the ads should be even more focused and related to my entries. Tricky, huh? Well, the technique I used was called on some other blog 'a weird method, that only print designers use'. I don't care, works fine for me! The magic is: 'position:absolute;' in the CSS file. With this attribute, you can position whatever you want wherever you want.

A(n) Story / Fable / Truth / Level / Poem / Love-letter / Exposé / Thought / Encouragement / Explanation / Hope / Future? / Revealing / Life / Release / Screenplay? / Reminder / Decision / Biography? / 34341 characters long text / Analysis by Jakob Montrasio I would have never found the love of my life if Mr. Zhang wouldn't have come to Germany,…

Chinese love cards, or at least I think so. I had, before moving to China, these cards in my wallet: two german bank account cards and a german insurance card from DKV. Now, after living more than a year in China, these cards somehow made their way into my wallet: a Bank Of China card, a Eastern Miles card, a ctrip VIP card, a Priority Club…

I went with a colleague to Chengdu in the Sichuan province of China for some business, and after we did our stuff thee, we took a train to go to Chongqing for some more business. During the four hour long train-ride I realized that Sichuan is the Tuscany of China with it's gorgeous yellow flower fields and the beautiful dark red earth everywhere. What a sight!