Tag: tree

Imperial Past, Hue, Vietnam

I gave in to the inevitable recently and have spent the last couple of weeks uploading images to cloud storage. Around 39,000 image files of one kind or another, almost 700GB worth of photos. In the process I started fooling around with old photos. I keep telling myself I am going to add some galleries to this website. And maybe I will one of these days. In the meantime, this is an image was taken on the grounds of the Imperial City of Vietnam’s final dynasty that made Hue its capital from 1804 to the middle of the 20th century. It’s from a trip to Hue towards the end of 2016. Definitely a photoshopped image – “enhanced” sky, a lot of saturation, and two filters, one to bring out the greens in the foliage, a second adding soft focus and a bit of diffusion – going after the dreamlike feeling that comes with walking around this magnificent but rundown monument to the past.

Guozijian, Beijing

Guozijian, Beijing
The old imperial college (guozijian / 国子监) and Beijing’s Confucius temple are along this gorgeous tree-lined street. The site of occasional horn-honking traffic jams, the street is nonetheless reasonably peaceful most of the time. I had peace, quiet, and a truly beautiful, blue-sky Beijing day for my visit. The banner – almost impossible to translate into anything but stilted English – says something like “the sacred locale of the national academy, bringing virtue to the entire world”.