Urban Landscape Videos

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Two 30s videos were produced by using Animoto.com in order to include more pictures I like to show. Based on the theme of urban landscape, I chose the earth style and watercolor seeshore style combine with a song from Lupe Fiasco called Paris, Tokyo. It's a hip-hop song with relatively qucik tempo. I edited the start point to 11th second within the song. Then I add my album. However, it only allowed me to put 11 pictures for a 30 second video for free. I remember Phoebe said we can increase the speed to 2x so that more pictures can be added. I looked for help on Animoto.com and other instructional website, however, still couldn't figure it out how to customize the speed playing video. Finally, two videos including two video styles, two different music pieces from a song, and 22 photos of urban landscape, Toledo were finalized. It was easy to operate Animoto.com application for making videos. Nevertheless, I didn't enjoy the process dealing with it. Animoto performs slowly without many exciting/unique technologies. Perhaps it can be better experience for people who pay for this program. The interface is simply which I like it. But I had to start over several times when a big file failed to be uploaded. In addition, Animoto is unable to accept image files in my computer whose sizes exceed 10MB. Then I tried to retrieve photos from Flickr and Facebook. Neither one worked. Overall, I didn't feel comfortable with this video design application.

Play World- Las Vegas, Nevada

Have you ever seen a lightshow like this? Today, let us start to explore this play world at the most beautiful thing- light show on Fremont Stree, Las Vegas. As one of the most popular attractions, it's located in the very heart of the city with ten other lengendary/old casinos. The lightshow takes place on world's largest vision screen above the street like a covering roof. Even though I have been to Las Vegas for three times, it is always breath taking and impressive. Each show lasts about 10 minutes with massive light animations. It can be a little bit uncomfortable though due to thousands of people there. My parents in the pictures on the right corner had to strain through large crowds. What a Fremont Street experience! 

Night in Las Vegas is exciting with several other free entertaining visual shows outside the most luxurious hotels. For example, the music fountain show (left two and one at the right top) at the Bellagio Hotel and volcano show (two at the left bottom) at the Mirage Hotel. Behind the small lake, there is a miniature Eiffel tower and universial studio globe (barely see in the left bottom one). Using a dramatic combination of music, water and light, the Bellagio provides people spectacular performance with its fountain. The volcano explosion looks unbelievablely real with flame, fireballs and loud sound.   



Take a view of the street at night. The road is a traffic jam surrounded by bright buildings. It's so easy to come across a limo (I was standing in front of one in the left photo) and decent cars in Las Vegas.  

Besides visual shows outside, I am always faciniated by the delicate interior design of the hotels. They have a great number of famous statues, sculptures, paintings, antiques, glass art pieces, waterfalls, interesting decorations, even a boat running on an artifical lake, and the blue sky on the ceiling!!! Everything looks fantastic!!!!! It's virtually a world full of awesome visual arts.

Of course, you can't miss the daytime sceneries in Las Vegas. Every sight draws your eyes with fabulous things such as castles in children's fairy tales, miniature statue of liberty, sphinx and so on.

Come to join us in the tour if you have fell in love with this play world. Las Vegas is absolutely your choice!







Urban Landscape Edited Photos

There are so many pictures taken while I was traveling around. Last fall, I moved to Toledo and kept hanging around this city ever since. However, I never actually explored and appreciated this city. Through the photography assignment based on Urban Landscape theme, I start to realize how amazing its urban scenery is. Using iPhone 4s which has a camera with up to 8 megapixels resolution, I captured over 300 pictures in total last week. Then 64 photos were selected for the assignment. Here are some original pictures displaying the urban landscape of Toledo. If you are attracted by this unique city now, check out my Flickr Urban Landscape, Toledo.

I edited these photos by operating an application called Pixrl Express this week. They are posted on Flickr Urban Landscape Edited, Toledo if you are interested. I tried not to edit therm too much. The photo quality is indeed improved a lot when I was applying Pixrl tools to my photos. Pixrl Express is such a great program whose interface is clear and intuitive. It's free and easy to run in any computer system. As a novice user, I found Pixrl is neat and simple compared with photoshop. Now I want to describe the process of my photo editing.

 This might be my top favorite pair. The left is original snap at Toledo downtown street, and the right side one is edited. The raw image measure 7990272 pixels (2448 X 3264) pretty close to the highest resolution the camera is capable of. After resolution check, I did some adjustments firstly by increasing its brightness and contrast degree, and apply certain amount of vibrance. In order to optimize the photo, I changed its overlay into Tie Dye (specifically Bluberry) style and effect as Soft Mary style. In fact, these steps were arranged back and forth until I got the proposed result.

The one with two dolls is my second favorite. They are a part of my car decoration. Resolution of the raw image is 7990272 pixels (3264 X 2448). I only did a few changes. For example, the whole image was blurred to some degree. Then I applied Olga Adam style overlay and adjusted its vibrance to negative value.
I tried to practice varied editing ways based on content of each photo. For example, some adjustments such as focal bluring, rotating, resizing the photo or on its sharpness, staturation of color were performed. Other changes were made to their overlay and effect. Here come two more comparison groups between before being edited and after.

Hope you enjoy this article talking about photography and photo editing. To a traveler, grasping such skill is very necessary and important.

Toronto- the largest city in Canada

Located in the southern Ontario province and by the Ontario lake, Toronto is the largest city as well as commercial capital in Canada. Its history can date back to the 18 century. The impression of this city on me is always old and chaotic especially in the center part. Last Christmas was my first time traveling to Toronto. You may see snow by the street and gloomy day in the freezing weather in pictures. The two pictures on the bottom right are from this spring break. I drove cross the Buffalo border between Canada and U.S. The rest of time I chose the Detroit route. The bridge on the top left is called the Ambassador connecting Canada and U.S. It is shorter distance to go this way than Buffalo direction and there are multiple border offices(entrances) in Detroit.

Toronto is a metropolis in Canada. It brings you a lot of different senceries. The center part of Toronto is composed of commercial, college, Olympic park, centre railway station and Chinatown areas. Two spots that may possibly represent this city as remarkable signs are CN tower and Chinatown. Canadian National (shortly CN) tower was built in 1976 and it is located in Olympic park area. It used to be the tallest tower (1815 ft) in the world until 2010. People can observe Toronto from differnt levels of the CN tower (since it has several observation platforms with varied heights). Here there is a video taken while we were riding the "extremely high-speed" elevator which is surprisingly made of glass. You can see the marvelous landscape of Toronto through the transparent glass.  

Through the picture group following you may have better idea about what the CN tower looks like and the sceneries from different angles at its observation spot.  

The other representative of Toronto should be Chinatown. Here you find relatively authentic Chinese food. For example, hot pot (right bottom), Dim-Sum (the one above right bottom), Chinese bakery, espresso coffee bar (two on the right top) and some other Asian food. Transportation in Toronto is really awful, as you can see from the main street of Chinatown. There are electrical bus tracks on the road with power supply cords hanging everywhere. Cars are running and parking by the street with no traffic rules. Canadian drivers are rude seriously by honking nonstop.  One reminder: Be careful when you drive in Toronto. 

However, I have to mention about the convenient side of transportation tools in Totonto. I tried to explore the city by city bus, subway with handy map. You also see the Canadian bills and pennies in the picture. Can't believe that its currency is worth more than American one.

While, I had a crush on Centre Railway Station even though I didn't ride a train. In these photos, you can see the skylink connected the streets with railway station and outside of the station hall. I love the modern design of skyline as well as the interior old-fasioned style of rainway station.

Let's look at other places of interests. The group of pictures guide you to Victory University (two on the upper left), shopping center (third one one the left column), ice-skating by the street (bottom left corner), interesting building with a car rushing out and a rocket launching (second one on the bottom), street sight from the skylink, and Olympic park area (the big one and the bottom right corner).

 Among these tourism places, Art Museum of Ontario (two on the left bottom) must be my favorite. It's near by Art College of Ontario. The awesome architecture shown in the pictures with white box supported by colorful rods is actually education building of the school. I was so lucky browsing inside by chance.



 Besides this creative one, there are many other classical architectures around the city. These are some which drew my eyes. They are most likely used as church or city hall.