hand-righting

amazingly, left hand usage is still routinely frowned upon within chinese academic youth circles. this can lead to obvious frustrations for students especially when their parents tend to align with the faculty in this matter (along with the many other 'forbidden deeds' of high school pupils). i met one student who took it all in very well considering the challenges involved in perfecting the strokes of han yu* with your natural hand, let alone with the non-dexterous variant. sort of like playing your guitar upside down (think: jimi hendrix) or riding a bicycle with arms crisscrossed on the handlebars.. you get the idea.
this mini-clip is my name (马可, ma ke) translated simultaneously in stereo-vision. thanks, crystal :-)
*汉语, the chinese written language.  to watch in HD click HERE.

© MARC MONTEBELLO · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

learning to crawl

ok, so here's the deal - new baby, new camera (and a nerdy blog post). in this case it's a panasonic GF1, a clicker that won't put my nikons out of business but most certainly out of my travel/day bag. indeed, virtually all of ottavio's pix thus far have been captured with this machine as well as most of the recent entries on the mm blog (not the clementines though.. micro-nikkor material). shedded pounds of walking gear notwithstanding, it was just about time to move into the age of HD anyways and pretend to be a video-grapher, like so many other deluded stills guys. hehe, who's kidding who (though this is awesome fun).

this clip was shot in manual focus @iso 100 with the 'standard' pancake 20mm f1.7 lumix lens - what a sweet little gem of glass this thing is. straight outta camera, just converted to .mov from the GF1's kickass AVCHD and uploaded to vimeo - no grading, colouring, editing, etc. (like i would know the difference).
to watch in HD click HERE.

© MARC MONTEBELLO · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

the gift of gulp

some locals on a timeout for a lunch 'chi fan' in qingdao's old quarter. you'll notice the ubiquitous 'da qing pi' (large tsingtao beer) playing a prominent role at each table.

'the conversations' • qingdao, china

© MARC MONTEBELLO · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

 

watching the watchers

somewhere between photographer 2 and 3 (from right to left), you might spot a snippet of THIS PLACE (photographed from a different vantage, but of the same rice fields down below).
all of the shutterbugs you see here momentarily popped out of their black-tinted SRV's and, whilst donning more gore-tex and mega-pixels than you could shake a stick at, basically captured identical snapshots. kind of strips the sentimentality of a creative moment doesn't it? meanwhile, with our best romantic wandering intentions at heart, kitty and i had coughed our way up the mountainside in THIS LIMO along the 'scenic' route before squeezing into a chauffeured TRICYCLE for the final push to the top.

'firing squad' • yuanyang, yunnan

© MARC MONTEBELLO · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED