Cold and miserable, I went to sleep very early. As a consequence, I woke up very early also. The sun wasn’t quite up, but the sky had lightened and everyone else was asleep. While not cloudless, it was clear and pleasant, so I got out for a walk before the others awoke.
Recently, I upgraded to Photoshop CS3, which has a dramatically improved photomerge capability. Most of the time it produces excellent panoramas, and today I planned to give it a real workout. One of the problems with Taiwan’s mountains is that everything is so dense and the hills so steep that everything is “in your face.†With the widest lens I’ve got, I can’t take pictures of most of the “sights.â€
This time, I’ve burned through a massive number of photos designed to be stitched together, which I’ll do before I post them to flickr. I’ve put together a flickr set of my panoramas. I’ve put this together partially because Flickr’s thumbnails are cropped to fit, so it’s not always possible to tell the photo is a panorama unless you look at it.
Not all of the “panoramas†are really left-right widescreen affairs, either. They’re technically “photomerges.†Sometimes I used to capture vertical scale, such as towering trees, and others just to compose a fairly ordinary photograph that I couldn’t capture with a single shot.
After my walk, I returned for the all-you-can eat breakfast which is included with the price of the room. At the hotel’s coffee shop, a cup of hot black tea costs NT$ 100 (over US$ 3), but at breakfast, it’s included free. I made sure I got US$ 20 of tea with my breakfast.
Our checkout was at 11:00, but the train to our next destination wasn’t until after 1:00PM. We walked around the hills in the morning, checked out and went into town to have lunch and caught the train to our next stop, Fenchihu.
This was a very short trip to Alishan, cut even shorter by the rain when we arrived. It’s such a pleasant place, but there’s not a lot to do once you’ve seen the sights, which are just in a very small area. I’m actually more jazzed to explore Fenchihu more completely. Our first trip there was very short and confusing, so I’m hoping to get a better chance to explore.