Wedding 04

The father of the bride took personal interest in the selection of candies for the big day...

Wedding 03

...to back.

Wedding 02

From front...

Wedding 01

Moving on to the next thematic set of pictures, the series to be posted now is from a wedding shoot done this past year. We were invited anyway, and a friend asked if I would take some pictures while there. Sure...

Weddings are easy, with virtually everything set up for good pictures - from the location to the decorations to the dozens of photo ops created specifically for the photographer. Since I wasn't officially a photographer, I was happily left to roam and do peripheral shots of the scenery, plus some candids that most would not expect. Almost all of these postings are of the former category, every one taken with the 7000.

The setting was a mansion rented here in Houston for weddings and other occasions year-round. Really a good place to play...

Taiwan 61

We were driving along a city street in Taipei, looked out the window, and noticed that we happened to be alongside my sister-in-law with my son straddling the back. As stated in earlier postings, Andrew intensely dislikes having his picture taken, so I thought, "Well, may as well get a candid while he's not looking."

What I didn't realize at the time was that it was not my son, but rather the expression on my sister-in-law's face that made the shot.
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Driving the streets in Taiwan is an incredible experience; I've never seen such chaos and impudent disregard for traffic laws, even in Mexico. But I looked around and had to ask myself, "Where are the accidents?" In Houston a person can't go a day without seeing at least a fender-bender, or worse. Yet in the span of four visits during 20 years of marriage I never saw a single accident. So what gives?

In time I concluded that in Taiwan absolutely nobody expects anybody to follow the rules. Thus, everyone drives super-defensively. Conversely, in the U.S. people are largely expected to obey traffic laws, and when someone pulls a bonehead stunt it's a surprise that often leads to accidents...

This concludes the Taiwan series of postings.

Taiwan 60

This looks like a typical shot - one in which the subject is taken through something else, with a fair amount of depth of field applied to the background.

The reality is that this represents the "one that got away" (to use a fishing term). We were walking up on some trail when I spotted movement on the bridge. It was a lady wearing typical Chinese garb, carrying one of those colorful umbrellas as a shield from the sun. She was more than halfway across before I snapped to what was there, and by the time the camera was in place she was gone. This was the next best thing...

Taiwan 59

Taiwan 58

This is from the top of the hill; the city is at my back. The picture from the previous posting was taken from that little building on the upper-right, zoomed all the way in (in the 7000 that's 6x optical), then cropped to composition.

My brother-in-law is the one you see walking down the steps. One of the greatest things about this day was that I had to rely almost entirely on my Chinese to get by...English was not an option, as my wife did not accompany us on this particular jaunt.

Taiwan 57

Amazingly, within the city limits of Taipei there is a beautiful national park - a wilderness with hills to climb and hikeways to trod. No one would know it from here, but from the crest of this hill, looking down, all you see is miles of miles of cityscape through a dense cloud of smog.

The next three postings will be more scenes from this park...

Taiwan 56

I'm not sure exactly where in Taipei it is, but there's some fancy mall that has a ferris wheel. This was taken on top of that ride.