A few first photos and a sad story of heritage lost

[dfoo]

that explains part of it too, in shanghai house prices are significantly higher then here in Chongqing so the compensation is skewed a bit between here and there. the going rate this year for a house in the main city areas being torn down is about 2700-2900 per square meter, and new house prices in the same areas are about 7000-9000 per square meter which I know is a lot cheaper then shanghai! That is the other thing too, for instance my gf's parents live in a central hub of the city, after their house is torn down they will have to move out to the outlying districts. Also keep in mind that Chongqing is decades behind shanghai in terms of development, my gf still spends nearly 3 hours going to and from work 6 days a week.

When I left last May, our apartment was very central and went for 2.4mio RMB for 94 sq meters. Other more upscale places were much much more expensive, the the prices were rising very quickly over the prior 6 months. I suspect since then due to the economic crisis the prices have dropped. I'll be back in April for a month, and will check it out 🙂

I have some photos somewhere of an area around xin tian di in Shanghai, which is right in the middle of the city and a very desirable area for development. A bunch of residential buildings were being torn down to make way for the latest very expensive and pricy high rise building. Around that area were all sorts of "peace and prosperity" propaganda signs showing off the great new development where the residents were being moved. That was the good news. The bad news is that this location was very far from the city center (like 2 hours bus ride from the current location)!

 

[George S.]

I think that is typical of governments. Many years ago the State and Federal government took a lot of land for a new highway extension in my home area. The road was useful enough, but what they offered for property, including some of ours, was woefully inadequate. I would say the only chance for getting decent compensation is if you have connections. It isn't supposed to be that way, but such is life, no matter the country.

I hope you appealed or sued over the land value..... At least in the USA you can sue the government if you feel you're not getting fair value for the land being taken. My mother was a member of a jury that heard these tyes of cases and in every case gave the plaintiff the amount they sued for. In one case the state gov't was putting in a new highway ramp which went right thru a farmer's field, splitting it in two and making the parcel on the other side of the highway ramp unusable. The gov't wanted to pay the farmer only for the actual area of the land being used for the ramp, and not for the part he's no longer be able to get to to farm! You'd think the government would learn after losing in court all the time, but I guess everyone doesn't sue, so they still come out ahead after making these lowball offers.

 

[Avotius]

When I left last May, our apartment was very central and went for 2.4mio RMB for 94 sq meters. Other more upscale places were much much more expensive, the the prices were rising very quickly over the prior 6 months. I suspect since then due to the economic crisis the prices have dropped. I'll be back in April for a month, and will check it out 🙂

I have some photos somewhere of an area around xin tian di in Shanghai, which is right in the middle of the city and a very desirable area for development. A bunch of residential buildings were being torn down to make way for the latest very expensive and pricy high rise building. Around that area were all sorts of "peace and prosperity" propaganda signs showing off the great new development where the residents were being moved. That was the good news. The bad news is that this location was very far from the city center (like 2 hours bus ride from the current location)!

my goodness, 2.4 million yuan here in chongqing can buy you a 3 story house house with small yard, not an apartment thing. My gf and I have been thinking about buying a house too but prices keep going up and up, right now a house in the 300,000 yuan range (46 square meter) is right across the street from the toll booth to get out of the city, which I thought was funny when we were looking at this one place, just there to remind me just how far out we were.

this place I took these photos had the same signs of peace and prosperity and how its for the benefit of the "ren ming" (people)

 

[oftheherd]

I hope you appealed or sued over the land value..... At least in the USA you can sue the government if you feel you're not getting fair value for the land being taken. My mother was a member of a jury that heard these tyes of cases and in every case gave the plaintiff the amount they sued for. In one case the state gov't was putting in a new highway ramp which went right thru a farmer's field, splitting it in two and making the parcel on the other side of the highway ramp unusable. The gov't wanted to pay the farmer only for the actual area of the land being used for the ramp, and not for the part he's no longer be able to get to to farm! You'd think the government would learn after losing in court all the time, but I guess everyone doesn't sue, so they still come out ahead after making these lowball offers.

In fact, our land was cut in two also. My mother may have appealed, but I don't think so. A businessman on another part of the project did appeal but didn't get anywhere. I don't think law at the time allowed for anything more than appeal, or perhaps legal fees were too much. Again, we didn't push (my mother had little stomach for butting against stone walls), but in our state at least, you cannot be cut off from your land. Someone has to allow a free right of way. However, that would only have hurt one of our neighbors. The State didn't care.

 

[Tuolumne]

You cant really see any in the small little pictures here, when you look at the originals a little closer you can see lots of evidence of noise reduction being applied even at iso 200 where fine details are all but gone. I am going to have to do a side by side test but I dare say it seems as if my Ricoh GRD sometimes did a better job with some details! Most of the artifacts take the form of digital processing "ghosts" where something was changed or computed. A while back I referred to the G1 as just another noisy panasonic camera, I am sticking to my guns on that one, this camera does display a lot of problems with chroma noise.

Interesting. To my eyes my shots do not look noisy even a high ISOs, although I've only looked at them on my big monitor, not printed any. When you say you see noise reduction artifacts, is that in the raw or jpg images?

/T

 

[Tuolumne]

my goodness, 2.4 million yuan here in chongqing can buy you a 3 story house house with small yard, not an apartment thing. My gf and I have been thinking about buying a house too but prices keep going up and up, right now a house in the 300,000 yuan range (46 square meter) is right across the street from the toll booth to get out of the city, which I thought was funny when we were looking at this one place, just there to remind me just how far out we were.

this place I took these photos had the same signs of peace and prosperity and how its for the benefit of the "ren ming" (people)

Why not buy your house in the US then? Here the prices just keep going down and down. :\[

/T

 

[splitimageview]

I haven't seen any issues with noise on the G1, what is your workflow?

 

[Diane B]

I don't know how long this has been going on--or if its law, but where many of our farms may have been cut in 2, there are underpasses that allow tractors, farm animals, etc. to pass from one side to the other (NC/USA). I, myself, rode behind a tractor that used an underpass several years ago with beef cattle not minding using it either.

Diane

 

[dfoo]

my goodness, 2.4 million yuan here in chongqing can buy you a 3 story house house with small yard, not an apartment thing. My gf and I have been thinking about buying a house too but prices keep going up and up, right now a house in the 300,000 yuan range (46 square meter) is right across the street from the toll booth to get out of the city, which I thought was funny when we were looking at this one place, just there to remind me just how far out we were.

this place I took these photos had the same signs of peace and prosperity and how its for the benefit of the "ren ming" (people)

When I first got to Shanghai the prices were rising, then they dropped for about 1.5 years. Then they went absolutely nuts... My friend was trying to buy an apartment in Pu Dong in a new complex. The prices went up 5k RMB per square meter per month for 4 months straight. And these were for 300 sq meter apartments! Unbelievable. I think things are not the same now.

 

[JoeV]

Thanks for posting these images, and of your detailed description of the area and the culture. I'm impressed with a photography thread that discusses the cultural aspects of the subjects that we're making images of, not just the kit.

So, now I'm going to mess that all up with a post-processing note. I used SilkyPix this last weekend for the first time, with RAW files from my G1. I noticed that the images, imported into SP, appeared to be very noisey with digital artifacts. Then I noticed the "circular arrow" symbol in the lower right corner, meaning that the program was still calculating on the image. It appears that SP operates on the image in "live view" mode, meaning that whatever change you make will be rendered real-time. So you have to make a change, then wait for the symbol to go away, meaning it's done with that step. Once the live rendering is done, the image is cleaned up nicely, with little or no artifacts.

One tip I got from the PDF owner's manual is to zoom in as far as possible on your image while making adjustments; this will vastly speed up the real-time rendering process, since it only does the real-time rendering on whatever portion of the image window is visible. Once the image is tweaked to your satisfaction, you "develop" it to a TIFF or JPEG or whatever output you choose; this final rendering takes more waiting time.

I'm mentioning this for people who may have opened SilkyPix and thought the image appeared to be way too laden with digital artifacts and noise; once the real-time rendering is done the image cleans up nicely. I also wonder if people are opening an image in SP and not waiting for the symbol to disappear, and immediately trying to export it to another program. Even without further adjustment, just opening the RAW file in SP causes the circular arrow symbol to come on; you have to wait for it to go away before proceeding further, at which point the image is much cleaner.

~Joe

 

[amateriat]

Avotius: Thank you for those images. As you hint at in your post, it's not only what gets lost in these instances, but also what gets put in its place.

Here in New York City, most everything that's been thrown up (I use that term advisedly) to take its place along the skyline has been almost entirely about commerce: huge, generally indifferent (if not outright ugly) in architecture, variable in construction quality, and designed to go up quickly. Developers will slap the word "luxury" on just about anything, and charge appropriately, at least up until relatively lately. The quality of some of the places I've walked into is laughable, but the crazier thing is that somebody paid for it, perhaps because they wanted to live in a "cool" neighborhood...which now isn't quite as cool as it was before these behemoths were built.

Of course, these buildings will likely last longer than the fifteen years some of the buildings you mention there will last. Sort of a mixed blessing in my eyes.


- Barrett

 

[Praxis Unitas]

There's an outstanding photograph series by a man named Paul Duda entitled "The Vanishing Hutongs of Beijing" It was done about two years ago, just in time to catch the last glimpses of some of these beautiful places before they were destroyed for the summer olympics. The photos are some of the most amazing I've seen, too. I think he used a modified Rodenstock camera with extremely long (several hour) exposures to get enormously rich details and contrast. Don't ask me how he accomplished that.. it just looks beautiful.

 

[Schlapp]

Last time I was in Havana everything was falling down anyway... in fact, that was the case in most of Cuba. The old colonial buildings would have been very beautiful, but now, mostly just accidents waiting to happen.

Now what is really cool in Cuba are all the old 50's american cars!

What's really cool in Cuba is the lack of cars. Also the lovely welcoming people and the lack of consumerist affluenza

 

[FA Limited]

nice report colin, i enjoy your style of reviews very much

i was in chonqing 4 years ago on the yangtze river before it was flooded, but didn't really get to see the side that you've been talking about.