As Seen by TV

Well, here they are.  Night #5 of Chinese New Year in Shanghai… once again putting my life in danger… and in the aftermath both camera & photography covered in ash.  All completely worth it.

Keep in mind it wasn’t foggy at all that night… those are all clouds from the firework explosions going on in every direction.  It’s mayhem at it’s finest and most beautiful. 

Enjoy.

CLICK HERE to see the post from last year: CNY – Year of the Tiger (2010)

A stroll through the streets of Old Shanghai…

I got the chance to borrow an absolutely wicked lens from a friend for the past week (Roy Frankland; check out his work), these are shots from days 1-2.  It is a Sigma 12-24mm… mix that with a Canon 5D MkII and this is what you get.

These are images I took just over a month ago from around my neighborhood, Xujiahui.  When I moved here, this site was just a normal block filled with shops and traditional Chinese houses (my complex is right across the street), which was then reduced to this construction site 2 months later, and is now subsequently, a massive parking lot.  So goes the large-scale urbanization of China.

My somewhat short walk took me from Tianping Road & Guangyuan Road, across Huashan, up Gongcheng, and back down Hongqiao to the XJH intersection (by the way, in case I haven’t mentioned it before, all the streets in Shanghai (well, most of them) are named after the cities and towns of China).

Well, it doesn’t happen very often, but it seems I totally forgot about a shoot I went on… way back in February.

Although I do have a good excuse, as right after that shoot something happened… the absolute mayhem that was Chinese New Year (see the amazing pix again).  That post incidentally still holds the record for most traffic to this blog (cheers for that, by the way!).

Anyway, so this post is the lost shoot just before Chinese New Year, just a stroll down my street (Yong Jia Road) to Fuxing Park, just to give a realer idea of what my [old] neighborhood was like.  Enjoy.

Last Sunday [while it was snowing!] I went with my girl to hit up the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center (Official site / Frommer’s site), which is home to the largest to-scale city model in the world: Shanghai 2020!

I have always been a architecture fiend, and this was a hidden delight.  Well, maybe not so hidden, as the Exhibition Center is located inside a massive modern building in the middle of People’s Square.  5 floors of exhibits chronicle the history and modernization of Shanghai, from the feudal dynasties (SH was a fishing village), to when the first Europeans arrived to trade (SH was a fishing village), through to today (when SH was a massive city), and on into the future (when SH turns into the worlds’ economic metropolis of the world (you heard it hear first!)).

Old photographs were what I found the most interesting, as the trasformation of this city is truly beyond words.  Just look at the image of the Pudong skyline in my last post, when I was in Shanghai for the first time some 10 years ago, only 3-4 buildings were built (including the Pearl Tower), so I can only imagine what Shanghai will look like in another decade in 2020… oh wait nevermind, on the 5th floor they have the worlds largest to-scale city-model in the world: Shanghai 2020!

The center obviously showcases much about the upcoming Shanghai Expo, and I can’t wait to see some of the structures they are planning to build, truly remarkable stuff.   Still can’t decide which one I will like more… Thomas Heatherwick’s UK Pavilion (consisting of 60,000 transparent rods) or the Switzerland Pavilion by Buchner Bründler Architects (which has a ski lift through, over, and around it  -no I am not joking).

For Tanley’s day-off we visited Jing’an Temple by day and then took the Line 2 subway (sorry for the bad pic, but someone was really asking what they looked like) over to Pudong and hit up Century Park by night…

October fourteenth… nothing special really, just fixed up a couple random images I overlooked the past couple weeks, enjoy!

The police car is the mighty Volkswagen Santana, which since its introduction in 1983 has sold more than 3.3million in China alone and had almost 50% market-share back in the 1990′s.