Picking Back Up

Well, I've been wanting to get out and take some specific pictures for a long time now, and today I was finally able to do it. I put the camera in shutter-priority mode, and went to visit a fountain at one of our parks with my tripod. I've decided that I like the S-priority & A-priority modes better than the full manual, because the interface for adjusting them is a bit awkward, and it's very time consuming to do full manual. It'll be a feature to pay attention to when I'm buying my next camera.



It's a gorgeous day today, perfect early fall weather. That was part of why I wanted to go out today. That, and I knew they will be turning off the fountains sometime soon, and I wanted to get this project done. The very fast shutter speed froze the water; you can see droplets in a couple of places. The rainbow is a lovely bonus!



Here you can see better the droplets, with the very quick (1/1000) shutter.


1/800 of a second. Not a lot of difference, but you can see some in the center spray and the feet splashes to the far left, when compared to 1/1000.


1/640 of a second.


1/500 of a second. It's starting to be noticeably more like sheets of water at this point.


1/400 of a second.


1/320 of a second.


1/250 of a second.


1/200 of a second.


1/160 of a second. At this point, my batteries died. I still had just a couple of f-stops that I could have used, but the camera was done, and my "fresh" batteries were also dead. Bummer. In addition to not really finishing this, I also didn't get any pictures of the kids playing at the playground or in the fountain!

One thing that's interesting is that the little "icicles" of water running off the orangy part of the fountain get longer and longer the slower the shutter goes. I'm actually having a hard time deciding what I like best: 1/800 is very nice, but so are the last couple on the slowest shutter speeds. It's hard to say. I think I may do this again, but point the camera at some running kids and see what I can come up with there.

Henry the Navigator

He's an interesting character in our story, although Mr. Menzies doesn't go into a great deal of detail about him until the end of the book, he does mention him in the introduction, which I am still laboring through. I, of course, wanted to know a little more.

But you know what I found out? There seems to be a lot of disagreement online about what is actually factual in this guy's life. But at least I found a nice picture.

Ming China

So, learning history is much much easier when you have a story to hang it all on, and reading this has made me much more interested in the stuff that my Asian history class tried to teach me in college. Back then I couldn't remember names or places or keep the one separate from the other in my mind. It was just a big mish-mash. But now that I've got some story to hang the various parts and pieces on, I find that the history makes a lot more sense. Here's a bit from my old text book, A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations.

The very early Ming was a period of vigorous Chinese military resurgence after the period of Mongol domination. The founder of the dynasty, Zhu Yuanshang ... (Mentioned on page 45 of 1421 - he's Zhu Di's rags-to-riches father.) For his era name he chose Hongwu, which means "grand military achievement," and his military accomplishments were certainly impressive. By the end of his reign, the Ming had won control of all China and dominated th frontier region from Hami, in Zinjang, north through Inner Mongolia and into northern Manchuria. (Here's a map of Ming China.) Beyond that, the Ming had won the subjugation of Korea as well as various Central and Southeastern Asian states which sent tribute. Chengzu, the third Ming emperor, often referred to by his reigh name, Yongle, continued his father's expansionist policy, leading five expeditions against teh Mongols, intervening in Annam and then incorporating it into the empire, and sending out great maritime expeditions, which established China as a naval power. (According to our Mr. Menzie, Zhu Di was 3rd Ming emporer, let me see if I can find any information about these 2 people. Ah, yes. Wikipedia and this other site will be happy to tell you about it.) The early Ming was thus a period of vigorous Chinese military resurgence coming after the period of Mongol domination.

Taizu (The father; no wonder I had such a hard time... in addition to each ruler having a fistful of names, the book is very equal-opportunity in using them all!) was a harsh and autocratic ruler. The position of Chancellor was abolished, and ministers now had to kneel in front of the emperor whereas in the Song (a previous dynasty) they had stood and in the Tang they had sat in the imperial presence. Taizu insisted on deciding personally even matters of secondary importance. A very hard worker, he went through stacks of memorials: in one period of ten days he is reported to have perused 1,660 memorials dealing with 3,391 separate matters. ... Merciless in exterminating those who stood in the way or were suspected of doing so, he obtained information through a secret service provided with its own prison and torturing apparatus. Officials who displease the emperor were subjected to beating in open court. Always painful and terribly humiliating, the beating was sometimes so severe that the victim died. ...

Chengzu (our Zhu Di) was as politically and militarily vigorous as his father but did not follow the first emperor's example in all respects. After defeating his nephew, the second emperor, in a massive civil war, Chengzu moved the capitol from Nanjing to Beijing, which he largely rebuilt. To assure supplies for the capitol, he also reconstructed the Grand Canal. Just as severe as his father when it came to purging real or suspected opponents, he was better educated than Taizu and more generous in his patronage of Confucianism. ... He also sponsored major scholarly projects. The most grandiose of these was the compilation of a huge literary treasury, which employed more than 2000 scholars and when complete in 1408 resulted in a compendium of 22,877 rolls, or chapters. Under Chengzu the complete, unexpurgated Mencius (an influential book of Confucian philosophy.) was also once more available.

Looks like for this section, the textbook has some very similar although less detailed things to say about the Early Ming period of history. The next section goes on to talk about the Maritime Expeditions, mentioning the enormous fleet and the foreign envoys that are brought back to pay tribute to China. Apparently the King of Borneo was buried in China, outside of Nanjing, and you can still see his grave there today. But the text only lists destinations of "not only various areas of Southeast Asia but also the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and the east coast of Africa.(page 241)" It's not terribly surprising that it doesn't list all of the destinations that Mr. Menzies gives, as his reading of the history and the evidence for his conclusions in some cases, is new and controversial. At least it is in the West, and this is an English language textbook, published in the USA. Huge portions of our history will need to be re-written if Mr. Menzie is correct about many of his assertions at all!