A Trip to Uncover the Mystery of the Terracotta Worriors Part 2

Each warrior statue differs.

 The Terra Cotta Warriors define the essence of fine craftsmanship. Each is a sole entity, an emperor's guide to the afterlife who offers comfort and protection. 

Visitors enter a huge ultramodern indoor dome, which spreads over a pit the size of a football field. They encounter a sea of clay humanity, row after row of life-size warriors, each unique from top to bottom.  The realistic art  pieces stand tall--bodies of varying stoutness and attire. Realistic character-enhancing traits from the hair on the head to the pose that they assume create a sophisticated air of  order and discipline.

The image taken above shows how each warrior statue differs, antiquities that amaze and even stun the curious who come to see them.  A few have been picked up from Xian to travel around the United States in the exhibition China's Terracotta Warriors--The First Emperor's Legacy. As of this date, the traveling Warrior exhibition is in Minneapolis at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.

In 1974 archaeologists in China dug up over 7,000 warriors including horse-and-chariot sculptured objects, many of which visitors can view by taking an hour bus ride from Xian.

The complex housing the Warriors, massive and modern, requires that you spend a good part of the day strolling from pit to pit enclosed in what might appear to be a symphony hall, cold and formal. The walk from one pit to another is long, yet pleasant among grounds that resemble a college campus.

Photographs are permitted without flash. In order to photograph these stalwart sculpted men, I had to balance my camera in a number of precarious places, so I could get a steady show with the timer. Seeing and snapping images of these brave sculpted men is a must when traveling in China.

In the next article, Part 3 of A Trip to Uncover the Mystery of the Terracotta Warriors explores the history of the statues.

A Trip to Uncover the Mystery of the Terra Cotta Worriors Part 3

A row of Terra Cotta Worriers

Many millenniums ago, an emperor needed guides to move into the after life. This set into motion a mass sculpting project of 8000 clay soldiers, now called the Terra Cotta Worriors, each with a different role to accompany the emperor on his journey to another world. Upon his burial, the clay sculptures were laid around the emperor in a mass grave. Hundreds of years later in the 1970s a group of rural farmers discovered the statues, and quite a find it was.

Traveling to the site where the worriers stand in repetitive matrices is an adventure soaked with a mysterious history of the unification of China. This is the third in a series of articles that answers questions about the warriors from where they were found to why they were buried there in the first place.

Why did the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, had an army of workers sculpt and bury life-size replicas of a giant army around him instead of using real people? You'd think that the answer would be that it's inhumane for people to die just so that they accompany an emperor to the after life. That's true, but not the whole story.

Fact of the matter is a few hundred years earlier people sacrificed their own lives so they could be buried by the most respected person among them. Speculation is that these people poisoned themselves by sipping arsenic-laden wine so they could fall with the revered leader.

After a couple hundred years of war before a 13 year-old Qin came to power in China, many Chinese perished in the fierce fighting of the war years before, soliders and civilians of several of China's states that lie to the south of Qin's homeland. The citizen's desire to die on behalf of Qin had not changed. It's just that there weren't enough of them to do it after the savage war. This is when Qin decided to build the clay warriors to be with him under the ground after he died.

Traveling to Visit the Terra Cotta Warriors coming soon.
All About Xian, the Gateway to the Terra Cotta Warriors coming soon. 


Read a Smithsonian article about the Terra Cotta Worriers
Watch a PBS video about the Terra Cotta Worriers

Review of Photography Shooting Basics for Writers

Photograph of two women in China taken in aperture priority mode set at f/5.6. Shutter speed determined by camera was 1/500 seconds. The subtle lighting of a cloudy day along with a minimalist background creates a good exposure.

 

Just as with landscape, candid and portrait photography there are photography shooting basics to keep in mind when taking a photograph for a piece of writing.

Photography is all about light. To get the correct exposure for the photo you want, you need to know the adjustable settings on your camera and what what the settings do.
 
ISO
ISO settings have to do with light sensitivity. When you shoot at a low ISO (less sensitive) you get a clear, crisp image. When you shoot at a high ISO, you can capture fast-moving objects better as well as take pictures at night without a tripod.
 
f-stop
Think of the f-stop as how wide the aperture of your camera opens. The values can range from f /3.6 to f/32 on many cameras. Lower values mean that the aperture opens wider and higher values mean it opens narrowly (think of a narrow opening as a pin hole).
 
Aperture Priority   
A good camera has an aperture priority setting. This setting enables you to control the aperture (f-stop) while your camera determines the shutter speed.
 
Shutter Speed
Shutter speed is the time that your camera’s shutter stays open. Shutter speeds can be anything from 1/4000 second to 30 seconds and more.
 
Shutter Priority
If a camera has an aperture priority setting, it will have a shutter priority setting also. This setting enables you to control the shutter speed while the camera controls the aperture.
 
EV
Exposure compensation is kind of a meter with plus and minus values that lets you darken or lighten your image. It can be used to enhance color, say, by setting it in the negative zone on objects facing the sun to bring out color.

Can Google Change Its Google Plus Policy Regarding Authors and Writers?

Here's some important feedback I submitted to Google Plus about their new Authorship Program, a program that favors staff writers at large publications and corporations:

At a time when more freelancers are supplying the Internet with articles, blog posts, books and websites, Google has taken a major step in minimizing their clout, favoring the established writers of big corporate entities. 

While this might not sound like new news, a major setback has been delivered to writers and authors who are not associated with any single corporate interest.

Google +, the relatively new social networking platform, is now looking to increase the visibility of established writers and authors by connecting their work through their social networking platform to the Google search engine ranking results. The connection is sure to increase the profile authors and writers, and, as a result, one would speculate, also the pay that they receive for the number of visitors they get when someone access the webpage they have written, but hold on a minute.

The only winners in this seemingly writer-friendly set-up are the big corporate media networks who hire writers as part of their staff, a shrinking number, indeed, in a tight economy where obtaining (or wanting) a job as a staff writer at a big corporation is not much more likely than getting a job as a typesetter in a graphic arts department. 

Why aren't the freelance writers and authors included so that their writings, too, are upped in Google rankings? One simple Google + option tells the story: Check that you have a email address (for example, levy@wired.com) on the same domain as your content (wired.com).

Any other writers/authors must obtain a Google + HTML snippet to include in the source code of the website in which their articles appear. The problem: freelance writers are paid to write on corporate websites, their most viewed works, but have no corporate email domain like the staff writers do. What that means is freelancers have to contact the corporation to give them the code so it can be inserted into the article source, which is on the corporation's website. Fat chance of them doing that. Why should they? If they do the freelancer's other self-published works (like blog posts) are also upped in the search engine results, thus competing with the big corporate website's viewership (and ad revenue). 

The result of the new Google + new author-visibility policy favors corporations with Google's assistance. 

Go figure.

Matthew Bamberg
Two New Books Available Now--Beginning HDR Photography and Photography Applications for Cloud Computing
Blogs: Digital Traveler, 101 Quick and Easy Secrets, Retro Sign Blog and Palm Springs Daily Photo

MatthewBamberg.com

Cameras Out of the Manufacturers' Closets at CES

There's no dearth of new cameras at CES 2013

The cameras are coming out of the manufacturers' closets at CES, each manufacturer offering a new twist in gadgetry in order to outdo the other.

Let's start with Canon's PowerShot N, a free-form camera with wireless Internet for sharing photos.
Hmmm. My iPhone does that, but doesn't look as space-age as this device, not to mention it having a touch screen. This $300 camera comes out next month.

Samsung's WB250F is packed with a super-zoom 18x punch.

Next comes six new WB-series point-and-shoots from Samsung, cameras powered with more megapixels than you need and a zoom lens (the 800F of this series is 21x) that will have you shooting close-ups of the moon's craters. Either that or a shot of a celebrity walking the red carpet while your arms reach between the two people in front of you for a clear view of the glamor at hand.

Add caption

Fast focus Fujis with a retro look to CES (hey what's old is new again).  Plunk a lot of money down for this one--a whopping $7000 with a revamped Rangefinder overlay focus system for the 21st century that you can see in real time on the LED screen.

If you're lucky enough to get to CES, you're in good company--Bill Clinton was there.

Trick Shot of Mohave Desert Church

Trick shot of church in the Mohave Desert

Take a look at this trick shot of a Mohave Desert chruch. As soon as I saw this building across the street from the classic Roy's sign in Amboy, California I knew there was potential for my having a creative moment.

The church was just downright weird--the base and Christian cross on top was tilted over.  I went ahead and shot it as it was, then thought about making the cross straight-up-and-down by shooting the church at an angle.

Titling the camera I shot so that the cross was aligned with the vertical guide point in the camera's viewfinder.  I wanted viewers to look at the picture and think,  "What is that and how did he do it?"

Shots that have people asking questions about the photographer's technique are good, but only if the subjects and objects in the frame are identifiable.

It's common for some shutterbugs to shoot something up close so that the viewer can't understand what the entire subject or object was. While this can lead to compelling image, it's even better if, upon gazing at the frame, the subject/object can be identified.

desert prints

Faces of the Rose Bowl Parade 2013

Girl at Rose Bowl Parade

Boy at Rose Bowl Parade

Boy at Rose Bowl Parade

Boy at Rose Bowl Parade

Boy at Rose Bowl Parade

Man at Rose Bowl Parade

Boy at Rose Bowl Parade

Man at Rose Bowl Parade

Man at Rose Bowl Parade

Boy at Rose Bowl Parade

Boy at Rose Bowl Parade

Girl at Rose Bowl Parade

Woman at Rose Bowl Parade

Jane Goodall at Rose Bowl Parade

Man at Rose Bowl Parade

Man at Rose Bowl Parade

Man at Rose Bowl Parade

Man at Rose Bowl Parade

Woman at Rose Bowl Parade

Woman at Rose Bowl Parade

Woman at Rose Bowl Parade

Sumi Wrestler at Rose Bowl Parade

Here's a time-consuming project that's best done with computer software--finding the faces in shots at a specific event. In this case the event was the Rose Bowl Parade on Jan. 1, 2013. I didn't use face-finding software, but opted to do it manually in Photoshop. It took several hours.

Faces were cropped from shots taken with a somewhat fussy-acting Tamron 35-200 mm lens on a Canon 5D Mark II.  By fussy I mean the funky auto-focus that sometimes doesn't kick in when the shutter release is pressed half-way down.

In order to take the shots, I stood on a flower bed edge for two hours among many others standing nearby. These were some of the best seats in the house, although finding a place to shoot at this parade was not that big a deal. It was crowded, but not so crowded that you couldn't wedge yourself in-between block-long horizontal lines three-to five people deep.

As far as the crowd's cameras were concerned, the only telephoto lens I saw was my own. When people saw that big lens hanging around my neck, they knew I was serious and graciously moved aside so I could take a picture.