Posts tagged Korea
Ponged 탁구 시간
05 months ago
by JR
in Korea and Culture
My father-in-law joined a ping-pong school and has been playing weekly. He plays large-ball ping-pong which means the ball is about the size of a golf ball, and even though it has been years since I played, it was just like riding a bike. When he heard that I enjoyed playing as well, he quickly invited me to to go play when we visited Korea again. JJ tagged along for our first visit, but we had so much fun that my FIL and I went again alone the next day. We never really played a game; we only rallied for an hour or so each time. I admit that I tried to take it easy on him the first time that we played, but he would get a smash in every few rallies so I began to really try to beat him, but really didn’t have that much luck. We had so much fun that we set up a rematch to played on our next visit to Korea. In fact, we both claimed that we were going to play every day next visit.
Yeah, I know. I am a beast!
Check Out His Form
JJ got in on the Ping-Pong Action
Compare My Form with the Photos in the Background. Oh Yeah!
FIL in Action
Who Won?
244.8
Prepping for Korea
3Our bags are in the process of getting packed. We opted to only bring carry-on luggage to allow us to quickly and comfortable get from Inchon to Gimpo once we arrive in Seoul. I have been doing most of the pre-trip activities since JJ is working on a monster problem for her final in Numerical Linear Algebra. The problem is four pages long and since I am not a Math person, I can’t really even describe it. She has to write some type of code that computes eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a given symmetric matrix. All I can do is help by cooking dinner and making drinks.
We fly out on Wednesday morning from New Orleans, and the plan is for JJ’s brother-in-law to pick us up at Inchon. We will have dinner with brother and his family, and then JJ and I will crash in Gimpo for the night. The next day we have a late afternoon flight to Jeju. I am getting more and more excited about the trip. My father-in-law has been planning outings for us and has already scoped out a couple of locations that he thinks I should photograph. We also have to make our way Seogwipo to visit with JJ’s great-uncle. We have never met before, and it should be an interesting trip out to the countryside of Jeju. He owns an orange farm, and I hope to be able to get out and take some photos.
After a four to five days in Jeju, we will head to Seoul for the remainder of our trip. We will spend our time in Seoul visiting with friends and family, shopping, eating good Korean food, and generally just not thinking about the upcoming semester.
Short Skirts, Horse Riders, and Foreign Students??
12 years ago
This is the third part of my photos from the Suwon Festival. We moved on to the parade and set up near an alley. There were a ton of colorful characters in the parade. This was actually my first parade to attend in Korea, besides the cultural part of the parade it was not too different from a parade back home.
I really missed a lot of shots because of a slow shutter speed. I really need to get out of AV mode. I think that I also bumped my focusing distance on the 70-200 and got a few too many out of focus shots. Here are few of the better ones.
These girls were fairly popular with the crowd. haha Reminded me of when a cheerleader at the high school ,where I taught a few years ago, would play in the band at halftime.
I really don’t know if these guys were students studying in Korea or not. I joked that they could have been enticed to come to a parade and were tricked into being part of the show.
I gotta learn to vary my aperture, so that I can get a different depth of field. I have the same shot on all 3 of these guys.
Suwon Festival 2009| Performance Near the Gate
42 years ago
Derek and I left the civil service exam and went to grab some lunch at a kimbap restaurant. After lunch we moved on to Holly’s coffee right in front of one of the gates. I really felt like I bugged the hell out of Derek, but he was a good sport and gave me some really good tips and recommendations for books on photography to read.
We noticed that they were beginning to have some type of performance in the middle of the street in front of the gate. We both started photographing it and I noticed that Derek had moved into the middle of street with a bunch of Korean photographers. I got up the nerve to join him and at one point was sitting on the ground with a bunch of other photographers having a blast. We stayed here until the police asked/told us to get out of the middle of the street. One of the many things that I learned with shooting with Derek was to be more brave. He was the one that first said we should shoot from the stage at the exam and he was the first to move into the street. I really need to stop worrying about what others think and just try to get in there and get the best shot. Saying all of that, there was one photographer that was pretty much set up behind the dancers. I have him in a ton of my shots. He had to know what he was doing. There was also a staff photographer that everyone had to shoot around. She had a press pass, so she had free reign.
I was going to clone the photographer that got into the background of a ton of my shots out, but decided to leave him there for posterity’s sake. We took a bunch of photos here and then moved back to the fortress to get ready for the parade.
Recent Comments