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Zhouzhuang is about 1hr out of Shanghai, and it's described as China's Venice ('#1 Water Town') in some of the travel literature. That's a bit optimistic, since it seems to be about 3 canals long by about 5 canals wide. However it's certainly worth visiting as it's very pretty. The majority of the buildings are hundreds of years old, and in very good condition (primarily because they have been renovated for use as small restaurants and shops selling souvenirs).

Comments, Criticism and Improvement advice appreciated

A bit like morning peak hour on the M5?


Bit of a serene moment, in contrast


Go back to a time and era when door knockers were REAL door knockers and took up two-thirds of a door!


Gorgeous (.. except for that microphone...)


Bells on a stick


Gondola


I love overseas advertising:
(We put the 'S' in Action! Woo! (hey,wait a minute...)

(....and the backpack can apparently store your MP3 player, morning piece of fruit and somebody else's body organs!!)

Final bit: on the way to Zhouzhuang the tour bus was driving nearly 360 degrees around an elevated highway in Shanghai and I spied a park with a tall statue we were circumnavigating. I quickly grabbed my camera and had time to get out a few shots...




Not sure whether to go super-saturated as above, or black and white:

amazing gorgeous composition on the profile woman shot
most have a great feel to them love the atmospherics int he 1st

great pics. thanks for sharing. That advertising poster cracked me up.

Nice series of pics there BT*ist.

Some fantastic pictures there! The portrait of a woman is excellent - love it and the last B&W is very interesting.

Alex

Beautiful stuff, you have some awesome shot in that series. Really inspiring so thanks for sharing. It is a shame about that microphone, and it spoils a little of the intimacy in the photo.

Great shots.

Really liked the door knocker, the first canal photo and the girl and the mic (you could perhaps clone out the mic).

A really nice series. Love thenm all.

Some real treasures in this series BT. Well done on top captures.

Lovely series BT. #3 and #4 are terrific images and real standouts.
cheers
marco

fantastic BT

we spent 2000 in changchun and dalian...unfortunately in pre D70 days

we miss the uniques smells, noises and moods generated in such a frantic but unique country

thanks for sharing

R2

I like the gondola image best but feel it might be better with the RHS cropped. The rest are all good clean shots with a lovely colour cast.

You mention shooting from a bus (nice image BTW) this is a big issue for travellers especially in China and India (usually better in India as you dont have aircon so you can open windows) but can you comment on technique and preferred settings on the D70 when you are in that position. I feel that would be a valuable bit of info.

Dalian is a nice city (previous post) the mayor at the time I was there wore French suits and wanted his city to be the Singapore port of the North. The story goes he returned from Singapore impressed with the cleanliness of the place and noticing that the concrete gutters on the drive from the airport were all dirty had them rebuilt all the way into town.

Thanks everyone for the nice feedback! China rocked, photographically.

Dargan, I guess I have to 'fess up and admit to a significant element of luck in regard to the statue series. I was lucky to be on the right side of the bus (on the way back it was dark, on the other side it wouldn't have been possible), I was lucky that the bus was in the most fortuitous lane, I was lucky to have the right lens on the camera (well, I was lucky I didn't have the 100-300mm on anyway), and given it took me a little time to fumble the lens cap off and turn it on and manually focus I was lucky it was a long elevated circular walkway!

The only things I'll take credit for are choice of ISO (400) - it was bright enough, despite being overcast; and having the camera on manual focus since the bus windows were relatively, but not entirely, clean. Speaking of clean, I'll even come clean and confess that for some insane reason (probably related to haste, actually) I'd set the camera to landscape mode! Which was a good thing , since for most of the trip I'd been shooting at Manual as the camera seemed to have trouble on AV and TV modes due to pollution. Having only had the camera a little while at that stage, I was still in trial-and-error mode in shooting manually, not the thing you want to be guessing around with when you have only a very short time to respond to what's outside.

Ah, photography.

Next time I'm in Shanghai I'll pay a cab driver to circle the statue a couple of times. Cabs are remarkably cheap in China.

Nice shots - i should be heading down there sometime this year. Any places you recommend?