I didn't take very many pictures during Monday night's walk, but here's what I have:
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| Rose of Sharon (무궁화/mugunghwa, no-end-flower, "eternal blossom"), light-mauve version |
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Rose of Sharon, white version; the mugunghwa (無窮花) is South Korea's national flower.
(credit to Charles for identifying this in a previous post) |
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| tiger lily, so called despite its spots instead of stripes |
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| aliens among us |
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| This struck me because it's something I'm used to seeing on my long walks but not locally. |
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| a pic of the pylons for the hypothetical ramp |
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| a dirty-looking moon in the distance |
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| the confluence of the Tan and Han, looking to be about at the normal level |
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| the moon again, Tan-cheon to my left as I walk homeward |
I skipped taking any photos along the Han River, so this is all you get.
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| Digital zoom on the moon... I might need a filter for clearer photos. (Quora suggests the problem runs deeper.) |
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| the Final Footbridge |
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| Daemosan (L) and Guryongsan (R) in the distance, plus the moon |
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| a look along Gaepo Street in the direction of Daechi district; my apartment has the glowing blue letters |
It was a tiring, humid, miserable walk thanks to all the residual heat from the daytime. I have several more such summertime walks in my future if I'm to keep conditioning myself for the big walk in the fall. One thing, though: I'm going to lobby my boss about starting this year's walk in October and ending in November. That will mean missing much of the harvest (rice paddies will be mostly bare),* but the weather will be so much nicer. And Korean mountains have plenty of evergreens, so it's not as though the entire walk would be desolate or boring or whatever. And honestly, I wouldn't mind hitting Busan in November (just as I wouldn't mind hitting Jeju then, either). Busan won't be very cold then.
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*I usually start my big walks in late September and go until late October. My previous Four Rivers walks took 29 days if we include rest days, i.e., about a month. That period, from late September to late October, is really the perfect time to see the Korean harvest, which is absolutely gorgeous. So if my boss says I need to stick to my usual schedule, I won't mind at all because that time of year really is perfect when it comes to scenery. But starting in October would mean benefiting from cooler temperatures from the start of the walk, and because I'd be progressing southward, where average temps are warmer, by the time I reached Busan in November, the weather would be cool but not cold.
Glad to see you're learning your flowers!
ReplyDeleteAs for the moon pics, I think it might be an issue of exposure rather than filters. That is, your pics are exposed way too brightly for the moon to be anything but blown out. I don't know if your in-phone HDR settings would provide any relief; even the HDR on my DSLR camera can be a bit wonky at times. If you want to get just the moon, though, I would try exposing way down, or bumping up the shutter speed while keeping the f/stop as high as possible (if your phone allows for such adjustments).
The Quora responses were similar to what you say. Some of the Quora writers reminded us that, when you're taking a picture of the moon, you're essentially facing into sunlight since the moon's "glow" is reflected sunlight. Some writers put forth the idea that slapping filters over your cell camera's lens might actually make things worse, not better. I wouldn't know. All that stuff about f-stops and apertures is a bunch of gobbledygook to me. I do need to educate myself on how cameras work.
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