Here is the whole collection of photos we took of the pandas at the Chongqing zoo when we were there in May…

In May we spent 5 nights in Chongqing, China at the Empark Grand Hotel in the Jieng Bei District. I believe the main street in this video is called Guanyinqiao. We had already taken a number of these time-lapse videos from our perch there on the 16th floor, at different times and angles. One night (May 7th, 2008) we were getting ready for bed and the camera had already been recording for a while when we noticed a rope suddenly appear in our view. We watched it for a while and talked about it, wondering what the deal was… A while later I heard Kim exclaim, "I just saw the top of a man’s head!" I didn’t stop the camera to see if the man had been recorded but when I reviewed it in the morning, sure enough I noticed the man cruising down the rope. You’ll see him in the last few seconds of the video. I chopped out that section of the video and slowed it down from 15fps to 3fps so you have a longer look at him. I also boosted up the brightness and contrast a tad to try to make him more visible, but all it really seemed to do was make the video a little noisier…

I already posted these photos in our gallery, but they were hastily edited using Picasa while we were still in China. These edits below are hosted at flickr.com, and were a little more carefully edited using Ufraw and Gimp, and in most cases I prefer the results I get with gimp over picasa.

These photos were taken during our tour of Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Emperor’s Garden.