Portraits for Muscular Powers

When China's famous revolutionary Mao Zedong at his young age, he criticized that China was weak as well as its people's physique. He proposed a very unconventional approach for a change - "Civilizing people's spirit and barbarizing their physique". After decades of China's huge effort to modernize, China's sports have reached a huge milestone in 2008 for successfully hosting the Olympics. Today I got a chance to watch Beijing's annual competition for body-building and took quite a few images of the bodybuilders. So, let's take a look of China's powerful musclemen through my camera. I wish some day more Chinese would be trained for competing the title of Mr Universe.

Photographing Actress Wang Xuanyi

I had a chance photographing a new model today - Wang Xuanyi (check out her blog here). She is currently a professional actress - has appeared in various roles in about a dozen of TV drama/series, such as "Great Emperor of Han", "Young Blue-Sky Bao", "Embracing Sunshine" etc. Obviously she is young and is still on the way to become a major star in the entertainment industry. She graduated from Class 2002 of another prestigious "Cradle of Performers" - China Central Academy of Theatrical Arts. Working with actress like her seems very easy, since my guess is that she is just so used to be in front of cameras. Actually, she was able to get into the mood very soon with her eyes sparkling and she played out her role automatically all at ease. A little different from her usual heavy make-up in the movies, our approach for photographing is a little casual in style. But she still did very well and my flash memory card was filled up quickly with lots of good shots. Here is just a small selection from today's shooting session.

However, don't be too impressed with my photos above. :-) I have found a few better photos of her over the net, apparently taken by professional studio photographers with better equipment and controlled studio lighting.

In the Shadow of the Imperial Dynasty

In the center of Beijing lies the Forbidden City of the imperial Ming Dynasty, built by the Yong Le Emperor in 1420 AD. It had been the main imperial court and royal residence for many emperors of both Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty. I have had a tour again in 2005 and taken quite a few photos with my previous camera Canon Powershot Pro1. I got a chance to review these pics again recently and decided to give them a different look. So, I re-touched and processed them with Adobe Lightroom and converted them into a set of Selenium-toned pitcures. Hopefully this would give you a glimps of the architectural grandieur and artistic marvels of this ancient "Central Kingdom".