Beijing photo walk

I love my DSLR. I wish I could use it better and own a wide-angle lens for touristy photography, but still, I absolutely love my camera.

And luckily I found a photo-walk group in Beijing. It is just a group of cool people who like taking pictures, and get together to walk around and take some pictures. And the Beijing group is pretty awesome. I only went on one of the events due to time/travel issues but that day I met people from France, Canada, UK, US, China and a couple of other countries that I am forgetting. They were expats, people with short-term projects in China, students etc. It was a fun group of budding (and some pro) photographers.

I skipped going to one of the temples but was able to go to the mosque - Niu Jie and Fayuan Si (Temple of the Origin of the Dharma), which is the oldest Buddhist temple in Beijing. I was prepared for another Chinese mosque after being to the one at Xi'an. It looked pretty similar in Chinese architecture as with other temples.

And it being China, every tourist attraction has to be accompanied with a silly, confusing but completely amusing sign. This one was green !

However, this being a photo-walk, goal was to get some out of the ordinary pictures. I think I did well with the grill behind a grill (reminds me of dream within a dream from Inception)

And I happened to like the lines created by the construction material lying in one of the mosque corners.

The temple was more colorful and had an air of liveliness to it. There was a giant fish, fake flowers put in plants and super sharp talons on the momma lion.

In China, it is common to see two lions at the entrance. One of them is the momma lion playing with its cub and the other is a male lion with a ball. However, at Fayuan Si, both the lions had sharp claws. No one knew the answer as to why, but the cracked ball looked ominous compared to the other versions I have seen.

Lion on left looks much less menacing...

Hopefully I can find a photo-walk group in Atlanta but I doubt it would be as diverse as the one from Beijing !

Kubuqi desert aka Warren photoshoot

As I had said earlier, I decided to break down the Inner Mongolia post into two parts.
This being the second. Rather than being focused on the Kubuqi desert it is more of Warren's photoshoot result.

On our 2nd day in Inner Mongolia, we went to the Kubuqi desert. Late October seemed to be the perfect time. It was a little cold, but in the bright desert sun, it wasn't too bad and it wasn't crowded. After renting out our awesome desert shoes, of which one of mine had a hole and defeated the purpose, we went on to explore the desert. Warren, fearing the health of his camera being invaded by sand particles, left it in the car and thus, by default because the photo subject.

We had a fun camel ride, and Warren lurved his camel. I was glad to be sitting at the very front, so as to not smell too much camel, but that did end up bringing the rear camels head way too near to my foot for comfort. However, it was a calm ride ( at least the camel did not spit).



Then it was decided that the desert was a perfect place for jumping pictures.

Warren did some awesome jumps, as captured here. Our tour guide was impressed by Warren's skillz. He said he watched Warren jump from the other side of the camp, which was slightly creepy but understandable. 

I did not do so well, when I had to jump. It seems that I was trying to do a really bad impression of the Karate kid crane stance mid air.

VS

After we got tired of jumping, by which I mean inhaled too much sand, Warren posed for "awesome white person in desert" shots. A few from the collection are shown here:











The day ended with a sand slide. It was a bad decision in retrospect. Sand ended up entering my ears, nose, eyes, hair, permeated through my clothes and needless to say, it did not make the over-night train ride to Beijing easy. As if the snoring and Chinese radio shows weren't bad enough, the feeling of sand on your body that scratched every time you moved, made that train ride unforgettable to say the least.