Monthly Archives: May 2010


Chinese air

Among the great things about moving from engineering to automotive journalism has been the opportunity for me travel to parts of the world I might never gotten to. Among those places is China which I visited a week ago for the Beijing Motor Show. The trip was hosted by Buick and included writers for a number of different publications. While we were there we had some time to head northwest of Beijing to Badaling to see the Great Wall of China.

The air quality problems that now plague Chinese cities like Beijing, spread well beyond the municipal boundaries. As we saw heading out of the city, the air was thick with haze. I took plenty of photos during our visit and our hosts asked all of the participants to share some of our images for a slide show on the last evening. Given the low quality of the originals due to the haze I did some enhancements so that we could actually see more of what our eyes could not. After some adjustments of levels, contrast, saturation, highlights and shadows, the images went from what you see on the left to the final product on the right. You can check out more of the images on Facebook.