The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the city’s image as a global metropolis. In Shanghai Nightscapes, sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures—the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century. The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghai’s foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Today’s Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed. Shanghai Nightscapes highlights the continuities in the city’s nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in China’s greatest global city. To listen to an audio diary of a night out in Shanghai with Farrer and Field, click here: http://n.pr/1VsIKAw.

Explores how urban nightlife is experiencing a 'McDonaldisation', where big branded names are taking over large parts of downtown areas, leaving consumers with an increasingly standardised experience.

Creative Nightscapes and Time-Lapses is your all-in-one guide to making spectacular, multi-image nightscapes and time-lapses. Covering everything from conceptualization and planning to post-processing, this book features innovative cookbook-style "recipes" for each composite nightscape and time-lapse project. Beginning with a review of the key fundamentals of astronomy and photography, author Mike Shaw covers the latest methods for planning your night shooting sessions and how to set up your gear to get the best constituent images. The book precisely details how to combine images into 12 different varieties of state-of-the-art nightscape trophies, each impossible to capture in a single image, before demonstrating how to create stunning level and ramp time-lapses that transition fluidly from day to night. Each nightscape and time-lapse project category includes specific tips for (i) acquiring the constituent images; (ii) assembling them into the composite image or time-lapse; (iii) overcoming common obstacles and (iv) finding the best subjects. Providing examples of how to apply these techniques in the field through four detailed case studies, including one, three-night immersive retreat, this book is the comprehensive guide to creating creative nightscapes and time-lapses.

The book describes — How to shoot and process still image “nightscapes” – images of landscapes taken at night by the light of the Moon or stars … and … How to shoot and assemble time-lapse movies of the stars and Milky Way turning above Earthly scenes, all using DSLR cameras. The 400-page multi-touch book includes — 50 embedded HD videos (no internet connection required) demonstrating time-lapse techniques. 60 multi-page tutorials with step-by-step instructions of how to use software: Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop, Lightroom, LRTimelapse, Advanced Stacker Actions, StarStaX, Panolapse, Sequence, GBTimelapse, and more. Numerous Photo 101 sections explaining the basic concepts of photography and video production (f-stops, ISOs, file types, aspect ratios, frame rates, compression, etc.). Numerous Astronomy 101 sections explaining the basics of how the sky works (how the sky moves, where the Moon can be found, when the Milky Way can be seen, when and where to see auroras). Reviews of gear – I don’t just mention that specialized gear exists, I illustrate in detail how to use popular units such as the Time-Lapse+, Michron, and TriggerTrap intervalometers, and the All-View mount, Radian, Mindarin Astro, eMotimo, and Dynamic Perception motion-control units, with comments on what’s good – and not so good – to use. You’ll learn — What are the best cameras and lenses to buy (cropped vs. full-frame, Canon vs. Nikon, manual vs. automatic lenses, zooms vs. primes). How to set your cameras and lenses for maximum detail and minimum noise (following the mantra of “exposing to the right” and using dark frames). How to shoot auroras, conjunctions, satellites, comets, and meteor showers. How to shoot nightscapes lit only by moonlit, and how to determine where the Moon will be to plan a shoot. How to shoot & stitch panoramas of the night sky and Milky Way, using Photoshop and PTGui software. How to shoot tracked long exposures of the Milky Way using camera trackers such as the iOptron Star Tracker and Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer. How to develop Raw files, the essential first step to great images and movies. How to process nightscape stills using techniques such as compositing multiple exposures, masking ground and sky, and using non-destructive adjustment layers and smart filters. How to shoot and stack star trail images made of hundreds of frames. How to assemble time-lapse movies from those same hundreds of frames. How to plan a time-lapse shoot and calculate the best balance of exposure time vs. frame count vs. length of shoot, and recommended apps to use. How to process hundreds of frames using Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge, Photoshop, and Lightroom. How to shoot and process advanced “Holy Grail” time-lapse transitions from day to night. How to shoot motion-control sequences using specialized dolly and pan/tilt devices. How to use time-lapse processing tools such as LRTimelapse, Panolapse, Sequence, and Advanced Stacker Actions. What can go wrong and how best to avoid problems in the field.

This volume brings together eleven case studies that address how the night became visible in the long and global eighteenth century through different mediums and in different geographical contexts. Situated on the eve of the introduction of artificial lighting, the long eighteenth century has much to say about night’s darkness and brilliance. The eighteenth century has been bound up epistemologically with images of light, reason, and order. Night and day, light and darkness, reason and mystery, however, are not necessarily at odds in the eighteenth century. In their analysis of narratives, poetry, urban spaces, music, the visual arts, and geological phenomena, the essays provide various frameworks to examine the representation, treatment, and meaning of the enlightened night. The transnational and multidisciplinary nature of the volume presents a survey of the research currently being done in the field of the long eighteenth-century night. This collection contributes to an ongoing exercise that questions the accepted definitions of the Enlightenment, and by bringing Eighteenth-Century Studies into dialogue with Night Studies, it enriches the critical conversation between these lines of research.

"In Cecily Parks' beautiful poems, the natural world teeters between being and seeming—the seeming a simulacrum projected onto the world by a mind's yearning, taxonomy and dread. Deeply metaphysical, and deeply attentive to our spiritual as well as physical uses and abuses of nature, O'Nights implicates language's —indeed, lyric poetry's—sad role in this endeavor."—Susan Wheeler In O'Nights, Cecily Parks constructs stunning manifestations of a modern Thoreauvian wilderness, investigating how the natural world gives shape to the self, body, and emotions. These lyrical, transcendental poems study the duality of nature's feminine and masculine identities, and in its simplicity, offers a space where humankind truly belongs. From "Bell": This progress, as in the wind-scalloped snowmeadow pretending to be moon. This love that sets us scrambling over the map's last ridge, our red hoods bright in shrunken sky. This metallic weather in which we are the ore. This alder. These crimson-tipped willows reverberating next to a river of turquoise ice. This following the deep tracks of one coyote stepping where another has stepped. This wilderness that we trespass, burning like berries in the juniper and becoming the air in the belfry. Cecily Parks is the author of the chapbook Cold Work (Poetry Society of America, 2005) and the collection Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Orion, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Creative Nightscapes and Time-Lapses is your all-in-one guide to making spectacular, multi-image nightscapes and time-lapses. Covering everything from conceptualization and planning to post-processing, this book features innovative cookbook-style "recipes" for each composite nightscape and time-lapse project. Beginning with a review of the key fundamentals of astronomy and photography, author Mike Shaw covers the latest methods for planning your night shooting sessions and how to set up your gear to get the best constituent images. The book precisely details how to combine images into 12 different varieties of state-of-the-art nightscape trophies, each impossible to capture in a single image, before demonstrating how to create stunning level and ramp time-lapses that transition fluidly from day to night. Each nightscape and time-lapse project category includes specific tips for (i) acquiring the constituent images; (ii) assembling them into the composite image or time-lapse; (iii) overcoming common obstacles and (iv) finding the best subjects. Providing examples of how to apply these techniques in the field through four detailed case studies, including one, three-night immersive retreat, this book is the comprehensive guide to creating creative nightscapes and time-lapses.