Photos from Penghu

You might not know it from looking at my blog or flickr page, but I have been continuing to take photographs regularly. I’ve even bought a new lense (Canon 1.8F 50mm) and the DXO software package, an amazing piece of software that takes the photos from your digital SLR camera and processes them using algorithms that correct for most of the optical defects introduced in the interaction between your camera body and particular lense that you were using. Later on I’ll post a couple of before and after images to show off how amazing this program really is.

In the meantime, I’ve just uploaded a new gallery of 26 images from my August trip to Penghu. Those 26 were chosen out of about 300, and here I’ll post just the best few out of the 26 I put on flickr. As usual, click the image for the fullsize version.


The harbor of one of the smaller inhabited islands, taken from the boat.


Penghu is located between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, a natural place to put a military base. Here are some soldiers eating breakfast in the town market area.


Just the side of a building.


This is the main intersection of one of the remote island villages. Quite a change of pace from Taipei.


The the only building on this tiny beach island. It was apparently the location of a lousy soap opera called “Dolphin Bay,” now used as a tourist site.


While the more heavily visited side of the abovementioned islet is a beautiful sandy beach, the opposite side is a rocky, desolate, alien landscape. I took a number of closeup photos like this one, in which the tiny sea creatures actually look like aliens.

11 thoughts on “Photos from Penghu”

  1. You mean the trip, or the photo equipment I mentioned?

    As for the trip: round trip airfaire from Taipei to Pengu was I believe under US$100, which for a flight that’s only 45 minutes or so seems perfectly reasonable. I spent almost no money while there, because we were staying for free in some girl’s house, who was a classmate of the people I went with.

    DXO software costs $150, and the lense I just bought goes for under $100. It’s the cheapest lense Canon makes, and the build quality is a little shabby, but the optics are excellent.

    All of THESE photos were taken with my EFS 17-85 Image Stabilizing lense, which costs something like $500.

  2. My Camera is a Canon EOS 300D, aka EOS Digital Rebel aka EOS Kiss, depending on the country. I bought it for $650 used, from a friend, when the retail price was about $1000. It has now been replaced by the 350, which is a bit smaller, higher resolution, and processes faster with a few additional features. I believe it retails for around $1000. Of course, being SLR cameras, you will inevitably be spending far more money on lenses and other accessories, as the cheap stock lense is nowhere near good enough to really exploit the power and quality of the camera.

  3. Mine is 6.3 megapixels, the newer one is I believe 8. Megapixels are seriously overrated though. A 4 megapixel camera takes photos large enough to print out at 8×10. When’s the last time you printed a poster size photograph? Sure it’s a nice option, but irrelevant to most people all of the time, and most of the time to the few that are left.

    Image quality is about way more than number of pixels, which is why a 6 megapixel SLR is always better than a tiny digital camera of any number of megapixels.

  4. The nice thing about super megapixels — I saw a camera last week with over 13 — is that you can take just one fraction of a photo, zoom in, and make that the photo fullscreen. This is especially good when taking complex photographs of multiple objects, and later decide that you want to focus on just one.

  5. Yes, it’s nice to be able to do that, but if you have a 13 megapixel sensor on a tiny lense, the image won’t be sharp enough to zoom in like that. Again, it’s something you’re going to do very rarely, and for 90+% of people isn’t actually worth the tradeoff of having files that are several times as large.

  6. I don’t think it’s alive, but I don’t think it’s old enough to be an actual fossil, just a shell.

  7. I’ve never been to Penghu, but I’ve been to the eastern isle of Lutao (Green Is.). But that fossil is mighty freaky.

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