Tastes of Taipei

Everything I have heard mentioned about Taipei and Taiwan is how great the food was so on a recent trip I tried to make sure I captured my impression of the flavors and sights.

I only tried a few things, but these bacon wrapped around spring onion BBQ tasties were certainly a highlight of the street food experience.

I also tried a local corn on the cob delicacy which was yummy but a bit too sweet for my tastes, I was missing the chili dusted corn grilled in Mexico. I'm not sure exactly what these strips were but they came in a variety of shapes (cubes, ribons, etc) and I loved the texture.

Dumplings and buns were a huge hit on the streets with these being representative of the genre, but this point we'd already had a dinner as well so I couldn't fit anything else in but they sure smelled like awesome gyoza/dumpling cousins.

These were awesome looking. It starts out as a doughy batter that is poured into boiling oil, then an egg is cracked into the oil as well and eventually they combine them into one eggy-fried bread bit of yumminess.




Finally, I loved these shots of these plastic BB pneumatic gun contests they had where you shot at balloons. Definitely wasn't expecting to go out on the town in Taipei and get to practice sharpshooting.

The Rialto Market, Images Galore

Traveling to Italy is defined by the food and it all starts with amazing ingredients.

We stayed near the Rialto Bridge in Venice home to both the bridge and a great open air market that includes the city's fish market.

I'm big on texture (in both my food and my pictures) and particularly loved the sardines, but the color of the artichokes and strawberries was amazing. Suffice it to say the trip included lots of good meals. Yum.

The Gondolier

Just got back from a great trip to Italy with the whole family including my parents. It was a hoot and I was so pleased to get this shot of the quintessential Venetian image. We were on a moving ferry and the gondolier was heading in the same direction as us, I'm not great at capturing these stop motion shots yet so I was excited to capture both the image as well as a sense of the motion.

What a great effect

So I've always been fascinated by mirrors, especially when you have mirrors facing each other so it looks like you are looking to infinity.

Well some clever artist came up with this vertically stacked column of books that has a mirror for a ceiling and floor so that when you look into it you are in a never ending stack of books. When you put your head in there obviously a great deal of the space is taken up by your mug, but when you simply put your iPhone in there the effect is very cool.

Kudos to the artist.

Petronas Towers

You've seen them in the movies or on TV, the Petronas Towers make for one great photo. Also fun, when you get to go into them for work. In my case to a Microsoft event at the Microsoft offices in MY in the towers. All in all, I'm only bummed I didn't have my camera to take better pictures.

TrIpods are cool

Tripods are Cool!!!

So I don't know about you, but it never even occurred to me that it might be cool to put your camera on a tripod then set a slow timer then zoom while your camera was in the process of taking the shot.

Well here are a couple shots that I took this way during a great course I took to learn more about my new camera. Special shout out to Ellie and to Kate for a great class.

Now the hard part is the tripod. It takes a nice one to get this right and the mini/pocket one that I've got isn't going to cut the mustard if I wan't to do more of this. In these shots I had to borrow a proper tripod, but boy was it worth it.

New Years Lanterns

Welcome to 2011

So I got this great new DSLR (actually DSLT) from Santa and thought what the heck, it's time to share with the world some images that I thought were interesting or cool.

Here's the first, I'm not sure what these lanterns are called, but in Thailand at least they use them to ring in the New Year. They are made out of rice paper and you write your hopes for the new year on them and then light them and then they eventually float away in to the sky. Suffice it to say, I think it's a great tradition and makes for, at least in my humble opinion, one heck of a photo.