Jack’s Point in Queenstown

I went out with Eden Brackstone the other night to take some photos. After he decided to wade callously into this crystal clear water and ruin the placid reflection, I had about five minutes to contemplate life while the ripples settled down. And then I took this one! Man, I do love this Sony NEX-7. And no, Sony didn’t pay me to say that or give me my camera… I’m working hard on that full analysis… I hope to have it done, by, well, let’s say, FRIDAY!

The Future of StuckInCustoms in China

We have a pretty interesting operation there… and we are kind of slowly unveiling it with one thing at a time. For now, here’s the Weibo page — all perfectly translated, and no, not by Google-Translate ! We have a lot more stuff coming soon!

The Towering Night Temple

I was walking through this street with my new friends Uday Phalgun and Priscilla Dorresteijn one evening. We stopped every few buildings to take photos. The street was fairly well lit and there was quite a bit of commotion. I did my best to get long exposures that stayed quite dark so that the people were blurred out and I could keep the dark essence of the scene. I went into manual mode to accomplish this on the NEX — setting a very high aperture and a long shutter speed.

Going through the Portal

Watch the next live hangout here on StuckInCustoms.com and you can ask questions live. There is a new function on Hangouts that lets you come in and join live and ask questions. I see them when they roll in, and I’m happy to try my best to answer them all! Believe it or not, this woman was my waitress! She brought Tom and I some richly decorated food, most of which we were not allowed to eat. It was a very strange day, actually. They invited us here for a very formal Chinese lunch, but they actually wanted me to take photos of the food, but I found her more interesting! She did end up bringing us some food we could finally eat. Actually, she brought us some ground beef inside some bread and told us the history of the DragonLady. She went through this rich history about The DragonLady and how she got bored and decided to invent sliders. This is the short version of the story, of course!

The Mysterious UFO Device

What do you think this structure is? There are almost an infinite number of possibilities. I was being driven around by a very nice driver with Tom and he took me through this technology park. Most of it was rather banal, but this one structure was so unusual, I had to get out and examine it. I walked around and underneath the structure to try to figure it out. I never did, so I just set up to take a photo.

The Trees Peak Through The Fog

I was waiting in Tekapo with my son for my wife to arrive. We had just finished spending the day shooting the Loon Balloons from Google X, and we were going to meet Tina and the girls in Tekapo. Since they were arriving after sunset, I wanted to find a good place to watch the sun go down. I could not decide between Lake Tekapo and Lake Pukaki, which are very close together. So, in between the two, I saw this fog rolling in and decided to stop and take this photo.

The Corner Store in Old China, 7-7-71 – Lucky Chinese Birthday – 中文名就叫特雷，特好记。

中文名就叫特雷，特好记。我真的真的很喜欢中国。它是这样一个令人难以置信的美丽的地方，当我有时间的时候我都会持续来中国，它每次总给我不一样的灵感。 I’m told that 7 is a super-lucky number there, so maybe my birthday of 7-7-71 is super-duper lucky! Pop on over there to check out the new contest we are running for the day. Note, you’ll only be able to see what’s happening if you have a Weibo account, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if you spend a lot of time doing Chinese-related stuff!

When I walk down some of these streets and see these places that sell exotic foods when you walk up to the window — it is hard to pass them all buy. When I do go up there, I tend to just pick totally random things… I give them a random amount of money, and then there is a random adventure in my mouth. It’s quite the opposite of going up to a European bakery where you know what you are gonna get. I like both, even though I sometimes get burned in these Chinese places when I get something that is a little too crazy for my palette.