Nokia Week, Bank Sorted, Rain, Admin & the Minion(s)

July 20^th Nokia week? Yes, all photos taken this week will be with good old Nokia Lumia 1020, its sensor is bigger than the Fuji S1 we tried previously. I’ve hidden the X-T20 in the cupboard so that I don’t go out with the wrong one.

Huan had her usual Tuesday singing class today so I did the gentlemanly thing and walked her there. My walk was to be a shorter one today, I had a reason to be back early. First I tried a snap off the balcony, similar to the S1 shots we tried first. The Nokia takes two photos each time, today I used the jpeg 5MP and 34MP, where I am showing two the first will be the 5MP and the second a cropped version of the 34MP. You can see that the Nokia suffers from the lack of zoom compared to the S1 but the crop is not too bad.

Next up, just the normal 5MP view from the balcony, the crop on the high resolution photo was not so good, perhaps my hands weren’t steady enough.

Next we took us a selfie, not too impressed with this at all, the front camera definitely shows its age, we bought it in 2014.

I was pleased with these next two, or should I say four. I cropped the high resolution photos right down and gave them a black and white effect. I think that worked quite well.

Next up some floor tiles, although they look more like kitchen wall tiles. I think someone had some free tiles they didn’t know what to with so these two ended up in a footpath. In this case I have used both cropped versions, between 50% and 60% I think, because I like the detail that shows up in the resulting photos.

I did a fair few more comparisons between 5MP and 34MP but I won’t bore you with them here. Instead I’ll bore you with the straight from the camera panorama, which looks pretty awful. However, that is not the fault of the phone more the fault of the operator! The phone does take excellent panoramic shots but you have to choose your subjects area better than I did today!

My walk was shorter so that I could get home and prepare dinner before Huan came home. We weren’t having an early dinner but we were going to Sanya after lunch to see what the bank problems were. The new highway certainly takes the effort out of “just popping down to Sanya” and we arrived just as their lunch break was finishing. It seems that all they wanted to know was what “State Pension Payment” meant. They had tried translating it with their phones but if their phone is anything like mine it will only take one word at a time. Doing that “state” does not translate correctly, which is maybe why she wanted my ‘registration’. In fact entering the words on Google Translate when we got home, “State” brings up a Chinese word meaning “Status” but that changed when I added “Pension Payment” to be the correct Chinese. The lady concerned is a new member of staff which makes me wonder why she didn’t just look at last month’s incoming remittances and get the information from there. Perhaps to make sure they weren’t missing anything they also took a copy of the letter from the Government advising me that my pension claim had been approved and the amount to be paid. That letter is from 2015 when my pension began to be paid into the bank in Sanya and I am fairly sure they already have a cope somewhere. It’s amazing that in today’s modern world we still rely so much on old fashioned paper. Anyway, the problem is solved.

Back to Wuzhishan, finished cooking, or warming up, our dinner and then conned Huan into joining me for a walk. Not much conning required though as she wanted to visit her bank to see if the camera money had been deposited. It had so we returned home with smiles all round.

July 21^st Today I decided to try a different setting on the phone, it would take a normal jpeg, although the filename is raw_jpeg, less than 2MB in size and a RAW, filename raw_highres_dng, approximately 40MB in size. To say I was disappointed would be a gross understatement! It seems that dng files, whilst they can be opened by Picasa, would be far better off opened with something like Photoshop. As our photos are primarily for us I have no wish to buy and then learn Photoshop, Picasa does quite a lot, and very easily. Out of all the raw files I cropped I kept only two, one of them was this little butterfly. I think it was struggling to fly as by now the rain was on and off quite a lot.

Taking photos to try and show you the rain was also an abject failure. During a lull, I used the ‘smart’ feature on the phone which takes a load of photos and melds them into one. Supposedly this gives good results. Again I wasn’t impressed and neither was the boss, this one can’t even be cropped very well. Huan doesn’t like it at all!

Our walk took us along the riverside again so I tried another panorama, this time I was further away from the wall, but the results are still too ‘bendy’ for me.

In fact I prefer the one I made with the stitching software when I got home even though, if you look closely, you can see some dodgy stitching due to my camera movements.

Remember the rain? Well Huan had a hat on, she was slightly protected, I had nothing. The first photo is cropped from a normal jpeg, it’s the one Huan wanted me to show you, the second is the other one I cropped from a dng photo. This doesn’t look too bad, makes me wonder just what I was doing wrong earlier.

Needless to say, by the time we got home we were both soaked to the skin. Hot showers were needed before dinner!

July 22^nd After getting so wet yesterday afternoon we decided to try a morning walk today. SWMBO first had me taking photos of her plants on the balcony, she was especially proud of the one that had flowered so that got a close up. The phone was back to normal today, a normal jpeg and a high resolution jpeg, cropping was much easier.

The results were much better as well, take a look at this flower we spotted somewhere along the road. (We avoided the riverside today.)

That was the sum total of Nokia photos for today, miserable weather an no decent subjects. Huan took three or four me along with a little friend but she used her phone. Our phones are pretty awful at taking pictures but this crop turned out better than most of the crops I tried yesterday.

Our timing was perfect today, we’d been back in the house less than ten minutes before the heavens opened up again. Chef duties for me, after we both had a nap, mine much longer than Huan’s. I blame the mattress!

The rest of the day I spent looking at cameras again, down Youtube wormholes, getting lost on Taobao, even on Amazon. Sometimes I yearn for the days of real shops!

July 23^rd “Listen to the pouring rain, listen to it pour.” Can you name the artist? It’s someone I saw live in Hong Kong many years ago. Last night I was doing just that, listening to the rain and by golly it was pouring. We had to go out this morning and lucky for us, the rain eased off for long enough. We had enough time to walk to the phone shop and the supermarket, about a three kilometre round trip, not enough! On our way home we spotted this car, and I would normally create a collage for you. However, with having fewer photos this week I thought I would show you some individual ones. You can share them with your children, or your grandchildren if you’re an old fogey like me. I had to do some Google searching, I had no idea who Stuart, Kevin and Bob were. Mind you, I’ve always known I was a minion!

Right outside our house we saw something we haven’t seen before, four horses in a truck. There weren’t four horsemen riding them so I guess we’re still safe for a little while longer. Because of the bars on the truck I couldn’t really get any decent pictures. I did try, honest!

We timed our little walk well and beat the rain again today. It did start again, not long after came home, and persisted for the rest of the day. At least we live in the mountains and are not likely to face the problems other parts of China are having.

And that’s it, all the photos for today. Well, I did take a photo of the Chinese on the side of my breakfast milk bottle, I could use WeChat to translate the image text. It seems it’s not as healthy as I thought, it contains sugar and other strange chemicals. I guess I’ll have to go back to semi-skimmed milk. I wonder if I could hide full fat milk in the fridge somewhere and convince Huan that I’m still trying to stay healthy.

After lunch, and in the middle of my internet surfing looking at cameras, Huan found a repair shop on Taobao. ¥200.00 was the minimum price quoted before inspection and quotation. She thinks we’ll pay no more than ¥1,000.00 for the repair and service, I think it will be twice that. In a few days we’ll find out who’s right.

July 24^th Market day today and a nice surprise for me, Huan didn’t have her usual singing class so I had the pleasure of her company. If you’re a regular post reader you will know that I have taken some pretty good photos of little crawling creatures with the X-T20. I tried today with the Nolia, the worm is not so good but the caterpillar came out well. We thought it had been battered a bit by the rain although we have no idea how it lost one of its feelers.

Next we passed another of those advisory notices, for ourselves I cropped the high resolution photo into six individual ones. You will have to make do with your Chinese friends, the local Chinese restaurant or some other kind of translation. Sorry!

Huan was quite surprised to see how busy the market was today.

We stopped to take photos of chicks, ducklings, goslings and poults, of varying types. There were also some Jakes and Jennys I think. Are you confused now? Check here, I had to. https://environment.arlingtonva.us/2015/11/turkey-tidbits/ We were ambushed by the stall holder who said he had his photo taken with me last year and he wondered if this year it could be his wife’s turn. I chose two of many to show you, the second showing him taking photos with his phone. My phone is in my hand, these two photos were taken with the commander’s phone.

“Where are the pictures of all those avian creatures then?” Sad to say, I failed, not a single photo was clear enough to use. Maybe there was just far too much movement in the crates and the phone couldn’t find focus.

Our last photos from the market are loofahs. Remember them? I thought you might like to see them in their natural state. The ones I cooked were ‘babies’, like the ones in the first picture. In the second picture they have begun to expand, eventually the inside will look like the ones you use in your bathrooms.

I wonder if any of you remember ‘modifying’ your cars in your younger days, perhaps changing the wheel sizes, adding go-faster stripes or such like. Maybe one or two of you even splashed out and installed dams and spoilers. This driver did the latter although I don’t think he will see much downward force as a result!

We didn’t beat the rain home today but as it came whilst we were in the market we were able to keep dry until it eased off again. Once we were safe and dry in the house, the rain came back and just like yesterday, stayed all day, although not quite so much. Were we bored? Not really, Huan practiced almost everything; I think she missed the taodi, and I cooked this weekend’s stew. Huan chose again, chicken stew made with drumsticks. I cooked and de-boned them yesterday. There was an omission in my ingredients though, for some reason I forgot to buy potatoes, sweet potatoes or yams. Rice was substituted so we had a very lumpy rice soup, very yummy too.

July 25^th Rain stopped play so we played ‘characters’ instead. I was Onslow sans vest and Huan was Hyacinth but playing instruments as well as singing. That was our day apart from doing some admin, using Folder Match to synchronise Huan’s PC with mine and then making sure her Windows updates were up to date. I did get worried and started searching the internet for “update stops at 20%” but I needn’t have, it all updated successfully.

July 26^th Rain stopped play again today, no problem as today was shopping day. Luckily for Huan the rain stopped long enough for her to go from the car to the fish market and back. We could have gone for an afternoon walk but we were both too lazy.

I did some more admin though, this time sorting out my desk and bringing all the filing up to date. Here are the before and after photos. How long will it stay neat and tidy this time?

So that is the end of “Nokia Week”, what did you think of it? I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the Fuji pictures are much better. An update on that is that the repair company have received the camera. In fact they phoned Huan this evening to ask her if the screen was broken before we sent it? Efficiency at its best, there was a note with it explaining all the problems. It’s now been sent off for testing before they tell us how much it will cost. Wish us luck!

As always, we’ll be back in a week, in the meantime stay safe y’all, and take care!