Although he calmly accepted that he would stay in Beijing during the Spring Festival, he felt ashamed at the thought of making a promise to his family in the middle of the year that he would "go back this year": if he did not go home again, he might not recognize his hometown.
In memory, there was once a stamp shop called "Old Place" in the county town square, and unlike the ordinary post office, there were more types of stamps here and they were more popular with young people.
The owner said that the name of the store is because the stamp allows the same thing to reach different distant places. My older brothers and sisters who I adored when I was a kid loved to go there, and they said that if you put on this little piece of paper, the letter could go anywhere.
"Get anywhere" became my holiest wish as a child—I thought, wouldn't I be able to send myself anywhere, travel like a letter, and finally let myself go home?
The store closed probably before I graduated from elementary school, and the illusion of being able to travel on a stamp was also a figment. But in the end, in the days to come, I embarked on a journey and drifted away from my hometown.
It is only when the festival comes that I think about going home, who knows how resolutely I stayed in Beijing this year.
Taking the opportunity, I decided to accomplish two things I had never done before.
First, collecting photos from readers and seeing what they remember as "old places" — being in the memories and nostalgia of hundreds of people is also a long-lost impression for me. Such a large-scale solicitation can be said to be a long time away, and even borrowed the Weibo of @Wilderness Weather Observatory to ask readers: Where is the "old place" you have been missing for a long time?
Those gentle photos and rustic descriptions, full of energy, also always remind me not to underestimate people's honesty and appreciation of life.
What people share is the landscape that inadvertently heals themselves, the sunshine seen after saving lives and helping the injured, the homestay that is like home, the last parting in Jingshan before leaving Beijing...
Looking at the distance and the near, all over the world, whether traveling or staying at home, it seems that you can find common memory and emotional resonance in the lens and narrative of others.
Note: Space is limited, and I would like to thank readers who have not been revealed in the text.
📍 Beijing Jingshan Park
Autumn/Autumn Students
Jingshan witnessed the stupidity of crying and weeping after I lost love, and also understood the most difficult secret in my heart, which seemed to become more meaningful because I watched the sunset with someone I liked again. Whether it is the mountains and rivers in the distance or the lights of Wanjia, I am grateful and unforgettable. Perhaps the most unforgettable thing is the dream about Beijing that seems to be accessible with one's hand, but is actually out of reach.
📍 Temple of Earth Park
Ann photographer
Nearby where the predecessor worked. Later, several shooting projects were here, the only empty mirror remaining in the mobile phone, the oversized bushes, and the bright yellow lines like a door leading to the deep forest.
📍 Beijing candy livehouse
Every year the office moves brick people
Due to the epidemic, I haven't been to the live house for more than a year. Finally, on December 6th, an ordinary Sunday, my girlfriend suddenly magically pulled out two tickets for the Forgotten Club's performance in Candy and invited me to accompany her to "spend the night together". It's been a long time coming! Not only was it an audiovisual feast that awakened my sleeping ears, but it also made me understand how much I loved her. How do I live without her and music？
📍 Qingdao Zhanqiao
Outlier students
As a child growing up by the sea, since I can remember, my grandmother has often taken me to the pier to see the sea, feed the seagulls, and then go to my favorite pancake fruit shop to sell pancake fruit to eat, which is one of the deepest and happiest memories of my childhood. Later, when I grew up, I went to other places, and then I went abroad to study, and I almost never found time to go to the pier to see the sea feeding the seagulls. Until I returned to Qingdao some time ago, I happened to pass through the pier and went for a walk, hoping that the old place would always be the same.
📍 Shanghai Xujiahui
Helly freelancing
Taiyuan villa near home, when walking by on weekdays, I can't help but go in and around. The castle building in the late Renaissance style and the sparse French garden in front of it are golden in autumn when the ginkgo biloba turns yellow. It is common to meet newlyweds who have weddings here, and perhaps they will be happier to have this fairytale manor as a witness to their marriage. Coming out often takes advantage of the fact that there are fewer people to go to the opposite O.P.S to buy a cup of coffee and drink, which is also a completion of "the reverie of a lonely wanderer".
📍 Hong Kong ifc
cvvv enterprise employees
For a while, I worked on Hong Kong stocks, and when I was in Hong Kong, I occasionally came to the small rooftop garden on the third floor of Ifc in Central in a daze, along with white-collar workers who stole cigarettes, Filipinos chatting in groups, and tourists who arrived for the first time. To say the old place, the first to think of it. After passing through the ifc phase I forward passage and taking the escalator in the middle of the mountain, you can really see "It's Hong Kong Tomorrow".
📍 Foshan, Guangdong
SuIng interior design
Is the downstairs of the riverside road, before the work is not busy will run along this road at night, Congrongqi Bridge to desheng Bridge, about six or seven kilometers, will meet a lot of people, passing the bridge when the lights are blue, the return time the lights have changed several colors. Half a month apart, it is very late to return from work, and I can only step on the elliptical machine at home, although I can see the changing lights of the bridge through the balcony, but I can't meet the person and love at the moment.
📍 Shenjiamen Fishing Port in Zhoushan City
Markaluse freelancing
The junior high school teacher said that he liked the sea, so he came here from the north to work. At first I couldn't understand it, but for a long time, when I was bullied, wronged, lonely, and helpless, I would come to the bridge to see this sea. Sparkling, listening to the sound of the sea, many years later I suddenly understood the feelings of the junior high school teacher, if there is a sea, at least the hopeless or waiting days will not be so long, and a person's growth will be a little better.
📍 Altay Hemu Village, Xinjiang
Shepherd's Blue Consulting Engineer
Daily crowded subway commuting, watching movies alone, eating and sleeping, tired of the smog of the city that devours the enthusiasm of life every day. I was about to leave, and I took the green skin to a place more than three thousand six hundred kilometers away from me.
The place is called Altay and this photo was taken on the first day I went there. The local residents exude a natural sense of closeness and rustic enthusiasm, there is no sense of distance given by pedestrians in the subway, this is a pure land, someone named this land "God's own land", so I planned to stay here, found a new job in this place, and stayed for seven months.
Later, I left because of my parents' opinions.
📍 Banyan Tree Shangri-La Ren'an
Lei Marketing PR
I had the privilege of working and living in the highlands. Deep in the hinterland of Shangri-La there is an undeveloped Tibetan village called Ren'an gun, the Banyan Tree Group opened China's first Banyan Tree Resort here, because of the relationship between work I will come almost once a month, if you are worried, when you come here, looking at the Xiadugang River and the whole valley, you see herds of yaks will observe the sunrise and sunset and go out on time and "leave work" on time, you see Tibetans who will light a bonfire at night and beat around the stove, you see an old aunt from Bhutan who has worked here for thirteen years. There is also the unpredictable weather of the plateau, and no amount of trouble here is a small thing.
📍 Yangshuo, Guilin
SEVEN marketing
I thought I would be here but this life, but I didn't expect that two years later, I would still be there.
📍 On the banks of the Yalu River in Dandong, Liaoning
Fyodor Freelance
I have never been to the other side of the river, and at my feet is the homeland, and the opposite is far away.
📍 Taitung
Fion clerk
This place is called "Someone is at Home", it is a homestay in Taitung during the second trip to Taiwan in 2015, the owner of the mountain pig is a scholar who studies butterflies, I am super interesting and super storyteller, I live an environmentally friendly life, such as not buying new clothes in ten years, such as walking barefoot, and the affinity is first-class, only stayed for one night, but left a deep impression on me. Because I liked it so much, I went again in 2017 New Year's Eve, and then in 2019, I went to the third time, as if I was another home in Taitung, and I opened the door for me whenever I wanted to go.
📍 Notre Dame Cathedral
Hugh Acesec student
Hugo wrote in Notre Dame de Paris that "architecture solidifies symbolic, floating ideas into an eternity." And truly in our time, when we see the relics of eternity burning, sorrow comes from the depths of the soul. At the time of this photo, the fire had not yet arrived.
📍 Naples Piazza del Gesù Nuovo
Black Vitality teacher
I went to school at Napoli three years ago, and the three years I spent there now make me think back to it like getting a box of treasure. Recently in the Neapolitan quadrilogy, on IG also saw my genius girlfriend Third Season Reuters, familiar streets, Piazza del Gesù, who had to pass through school every day, all the memories poured out. This photo was taken by Piazza del gesu passing by for class, the sun was shining well that day, the flower stall in front of the church was in a good mood, the graffiti on the church wall read "La vita e troppo strana" (life is so strange) Yes! That's why it's colorful!
📍 A classroom on the 6th floor of a university building outside Tokyo
Tampopo students
Occasionally, when there is no class, I will go to the classroom of the research group to study, and once I sat here, remembering that I had watched TV before and saw the rest room of the Koyama Lakeside Cemetery designed by an architect named Takushi Nakamura, and felt that these two completely different places were actually similar.
At that time, Mr. Nakamura mentioned in the show that the protagonist of the building is a person, and in a space, people will make a certain action. We need to think carefully about what kind of feelings the subject of the person who makes a certain action will have. "It is precisely because the building is gentle and close to people that it inspires unique movements and sensibilities."
Probably because the research classroom also gives me this gentle feeling of being approached.
📍 Anning City, Kunming City, Yunnan Province
Amos students
The little maze downstairs of My grandmother's house was my favorite place to go with my friends when I was a child, and now the height of this maze is only half my height, but every time I come back from a holiday, I will go here to walk and watch the children play in it.
📍 Huanglian Village, Shunde District, Foshan City, Guangdong Province
Lin Lin student
Grandma's house is by the small river, Cantonese called "Yong", whenever we children play on the edge of the stone slab, the words of the adults will always come from the house, but we are all immersed in the fun of catching fish and touching shrimp, a pile of mud can play for a day. The noisy cicadas, the green babbling river, the cold bluestone slabs, the mung bean paste popsicles that can only be eaten when they perform well. The old place in summer, let the mind cool down.
📍 Huangyanghe Farm, Liangzhou District, Wuwei City, Gansu Province
Oak Tree Accounting
When I was a child, my grandmother grew up in my parents, and my favorite place to go was the railway next to the united team, waiting for every train, imagining that I would one day take the train to the vast world. Later, I really took a car and a boat and a plane all the way and went to a lot of places.
📍 Yunnan
Minor Students
As a girl in Jiangxi, she retained her student status in her freshman year, resolutely went to the border defense force in Yunnan, and retired from the army for two years to continue her studies.
📍 Suzhou
Yam thin noodles nurse
Whenever the day shift comes out of the hospital ICU, at sunset, the sun shines all over the hall, and everything looks very promising.
"Everything is very promising" may also be the energy that the old places really imply.
I decided to do the second thing in order to bring this energy and comfort my friends who could not return to Beijing. So what you're going to see is another of my plans — to photograph what I call "old places" for friends who can't get back to Beijing.
Some of them went to other cities to pursue careers, some went abroad to study, and some returned to their hometowns to live a different rhythm of life. I traveled to all corners of Beijing and photographed their memories of the city, the old place that once belonged to them, what is it like now?
It is also recommended that you read with this mood - the Spring Festival is an important emotional window, an emotional bond with "home", and when many people, including me, are stranded in the city, this "feeling of being out of town" will be more frustrating than ever.
Although it is to help friends find old places, for me there is a feeling of finding a home: empathizing into a unique story, and establishing an emotional bond with a strange corner, is a kind of "homecoming".
📍 Wangjing West Subway Station
Magpie New Media Editor
For a year and a half, I changed trains in Wangjing West, surrounded by people I didn't know, and I rarely commuted to work with my colleagues, forgetting the moment when I found that I didn't want such a life. Back to work in the south, you can walk leisurely to work, and when you walk alone, you will actually remember the year and a half of walking between the company and the rental house, although it is hard but there is a spark in your heart. I don't know if I will regret it when I pass by again.
📍 Sihui Bridge, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Bethel lawyer
There is a section under the interchange of Sihui Bridge that is pedestrian-friendly. I used to run under the bridge, and occasionally on rainy days, this corner became the best place to shelter from the rain. After leaving Beijing, I didn't run much.
📍 Hou hai
Tamago Student
I have a very good friend, every winter we go to the back sea, when the lake is frozen, someone is skating, and we also go down to join in the fun. I couldn't go back to China because of the pandemic, so she went on her own and went home and texted me to tell me that there was someone there who looked a lot like me.
📍 Wudaoying Hutong
Season ads
Wudaoying Hutong was a real playground in my student days, and I never found a similar place in other cities. “It used to be our playground.”
📍 Houhai Andingmen Inner Street
Little Fox Internet products
I remember the smell of all kinds of fried goods on this street, colleagues said that the taste was average, but every time they worked overtime, they used to go to my workstation to get it. Nowadays, working in Hangzhou also requires overtime until very late, and sometimes I habitually open my drawer and find that there are no peanuts in it, nor sugar fried chestnuts.
📍 Jianwai SOHO
Blue Real Estate Planning
In the past, when the weather was not cold, I would play ball with the basketball group for two hours every Friday, and then go to supper with everyone. Everyone is from a nearby company, and some companies soon go out of business, and the team members do not come.
📍 Lama Temple
Lanxi Lord Investment Management
In fact, I never entered the Lama Temple, and when I went to work in Beijing, I just got out of the subway and rushed to the unit. I remember the smell around me, and I realized that there were countless prayers and wishes in it, and until I left Beijing in 2017, the red buildings and walls were the most familiar and unfamiliar landscapes for me.
📍 Peony Residence Subway Station
Stefano Foreign language training
I remember getting off at the same stop as the ambiguous object for a while, and we said goodbye here every time. I liked him very much, and he liked me, but I knew what kind of life I wanted, so I never said to him, "Come to my house and sit down" or something like that, and finally one day, he never walked this road with me again, and I left Beijing for Shanghai. I don't regret it, but I miss Beijing too.
📍 Sanlitun Taikoo Li
Don't guess the train real estate
At that time, it wasn't called "Taikoo Li", and who knew I would never go there again.
📍 Sanlitun Taikoo Li Jetlag Books
Emma Graduate Student
Unbeknownst to The Dark Cloud, this bookstore has only recently opened during the pandemic and I go every week. This is the place I've been the most in 2020. Not only do I like the theme of "travel" in bookstores, but I also like that almost every book here can be flipped through freely. If there is a plastic seal outside, the clerk will also be very careful to help open it. At the beginning of the year, I had been hesitant to report to a school in Switzerland on time, but in the autumn, I finally flew to Europe despite the difficulties and dangers, because I saw a book in the bookstore that read "We do not know where we are going, but that's not a reason not to go"...
The photos that appear above are by no means cityscapes in the traditional sense, nor are they tourist advertisements, they are intimate, fragmentary, personal memories, but there is a huge amount of energy hidden in them.
You may be like me, from the small maze downstairs, see the childhood playmates who have lost contact; from the frozen river channel under the Sihui Bridge, see the ripples of the hometown creek that summer; from the sunlight of the hall outside the ICU, see the bits and pieces of what we have encountered in the past year...
These outdated emotions do not fade with time, but are reawakened in the form of images, and these seemingly casual photos become reasons for you to fall in love with a city.
In fact, for quite some time, "imagery" didn't belong to the average person, it was complex, expensive, and often the "privilege" of a tiny minority, and then from point-and-shoot cameras to card machines to today's smartphones and mobile networks — which you've personally experienced — photography democratized, simpler, more portable, easier to share and connect than ever before.
Imagine if this were the "pre-smartphone era", what would be the form of recording and sharing of old places? You might say that those special moments still exist in albums that can be opened!
However, smartphones make every moment special.
It changed the way people behave: in those beautiful moments, people tended to record it more than just simply watching it; it redefined memory: today's memory is not vague and fragmented, but clear and comprehensive, "what you forget, it also remembers"; and most importantly, it also reinvents creation: the image system is more powerful than ever, allowing high-level creation to be realized here.
That's why I chose vivo X60 Pro+ professional imaging flagship to complete this plan.
Vivo this time joined hands with ZEISS to create an exclusive joint imaging system, you may not be familiar with this veteran optical company from Germany, but if you talk about the camera used by the Apollo 11 moon landing, it is equipped with a ZEISS lens, and its accumulation in the lens coating process is definitely "king" level.
As you can see, the vivo X60 Pro+ in my hand has four rear-facing lenses, each of which has a very good shooting effect, and some also enhance the shooting experience through special technology, which can meet all my creative needs when I travel through the city and face different environments.
For example, I found that in many scenes where dark light and even the naked eye are difficult to distinguish, the main camera of the vivo X60 Pro+ can still shoot very bright pictures, and there is no lack of detail when zoomed in.
Sample from vivo X60 Pro+
For example, the ultra-wide-angle lens at the top of it comes with a "micro-gimbal" - gently shake the phone, and you will find that the lens inside is almost relatively static. On the one hand, this allows me to shoot smooth videos while walking, and on the other hand, the night scenes I shoot do not mush.
Those specific parameters, details are not repeated here, if you are interested, you can click "Read the original article" at the end of the article to get relevant information.
Here I just want to explain in particular, why is vivo X60 Pro+ particularly suitable for shooting night scenes?
As you can see from the Beijing I photographed for my friend, even after the sky is completely dark, you can still take clear and clear pictures.
Far more than enough for recording everyday life, as can be seen from the official sample, it can even clearly capture a large night sky scene without external lenses:
Another common problem with mobile night shooting is that it appears "dirty" - the light at night is complex, and if the lens quality is poor, it is easy to produce glare and ghosting. Vivo's photographic language has always been characterized by "clarity and purity", and the latest vivo X60 Pro+ has made extra efforts in this regard:
For the first time, ZEISS's exclusive T* coating improves the effects of glare and ghosting in a variety of complex light conditions, increasing the light transmittance of the lens and creating a purer picture at night.
During the actual shooting, I also noticed one thing:
The photos taken by vivo X60 Pro+ have a very special color orientation, neither too dull nor too distinct, but can faithfully present a certain mood.
This is thanks to Vivo's "memory color" imaging style.
In fact, every scene we see is processed by the brain and is slightly different from reality. In simple terms, you can divide mobile imaging into two styles: "more faithful to the objective restoration of the colors of the physical world" and "more faithful to the colors with subjective emotions in the brain", while vivo chose the latter:
According to a large number of consumer research and scientific analysis, through the adjustment of visual relationships such as light and shadow and color of the picture, the "real" images in people's memory are restored, and a distinct and textured "memory color" style is realized.
That's why the vivo X60 Pro+ looks more alive. It does not only pursue hardware stacking, but outside all powerful hardware, while paying attention to the meaning of the image in personal expression, and tuning out a more harmonious expression of light and shadow and color.
Restore the world in the brain, and retain the emotions in the images - these images with memories, and finally break through the age and distance, allowing us to "get anywhere".
As a festival project, this shooting allowed my friends and me to share common memories in various places, and also let me discover another secret: like those readers who shared the "old place", we used images and words to confirm, record the details of the past, and become emotions and memories that do not fade... Just by looking back, you can move forward more firmly.
I believe that every photo with temperature is a stamp that leads to the past. Even the loneliest Spring Festival, even if we leave the trip for a while, even if it is the longest day, we will be full of expectations in the future, the day when we receive a reply. ☁️
Disclaimer: 1. The UGC content of this article is jointly initiated by the Wilderness Meteorological Observatory and vivo X60 Pro+, and during the solicitation period, the inductees will be promised to provide remuneration, and the inductees will be contacted within this month to complete the remuneration payment; 2. The UGC content of this article contains vivo and non-vivo mobile phone shooting works, and commercial reasons are not specifically marked.