orb

Now that the yancha journey has ended, it's time to begin on the pu er in anticipation of going to Yunnan. Though I doubt I'll feel very confident when buying tea locally though.

To kick off, Planet Jingmai:

A whooping 8g of tea tightly packed into an adorable orb. It makes for a pretty high leaf to water ratio since my gaiwan is about 110ml?

Takes it sometime, but it's positively filling my gaiwan to the brim.

This is probably the first young sheng pu er that I've had, and it taste typical of what I've read this category of tea tastes like. Some sweetness, this one lightly of dark honey and caramel, obvious astringency, and a...herbaceous (?) taste that I think is characteristic. My tasting vocabulary have barely improved since the beginning ugh. But I know that Dong Dings have a characteristic taste, and I'm fairly certain that this tea has the characteristic taste of young shengs.

Speaking of Dong Ding (man am I ever inconsistent with how I type the ping yin), I don't find myself very interested in even medium roasted oolongs anymore. It's high fire, or else I'm drinking red or black teas haha. Maybe it's just the winter...but Atlanta winters are quite mild. Not much of a loss here, three types of tea is still way too much to ever finish exploring, and black tea should really be three (probably more) categories of its own.

...

It's much easier taking tea photos with the 35mm, with aperture priority and auto-focus I can most likely get a good shot before the tea over steeps. Although the auto focus isn't as good as when I nail the manual focus (oh so slowly most of the time, once on the first try by pure luck), it's pretty indistinguishable once the photos are downsized to 800px. Speaking of which, I ought to tweak the layout so I can fit in 960px photos and eliminate the need to have two different sets for blog & facebook.
But the main advantage of the 35mm is no more distorted teacups!

Also managed to reduce my post down to crop / curves adjustment / resize / high pass. It's beautiful not having to do so much corrections, although I still do enjoy playing around with photos of other subjects. I seriously don't think I can use any other camera system because it'll never approach how nice Fuji colors look, even though reading this review of the Leica Q did tug at my heart. On the other hand, I am FOMO-ing on Acros, maybe I'll upgrade when X-Pro 3 comes out?