1/4000 secs, f/1.2, ISO 400, 50mm
I often end up processing my street photography in black and white. Especially when the composition is centered around a person or is an outright portrait, I find that subjects are likely to be more intense and dramatic in black and white and that the lack of color can make expressions stand out. Besides, with Hong Kong's colorful streets, black and white processing can make other parts of the scene less distracting. And when shooting at high ISO values or when the focus is not spot on, black and white tones tend to be more forgiving. Of course, it's also a subjective call: sometimes a photo just looks better to me without colors.
I have collected a few more recent black and white shots from Hong Kong below the fold. For a fullscreen slideshow of my collection of black and white Hong Kong photos see this set on flickr.
Thoughts on Black and White
On the Streets of Mongkok
1/2000s, f/2.8, ISO 400, 50mm
I've been spending some time lately shooting street scenes using manual focus. I pre-focus the camera to somewhere around two meters and chose a relatively forgiving aperture (usually something like f/2.8, which still generates a fairly narrow focal plane). It's great for street photography since it's less obtrusive and allows you to compose the image without raising the camera.
2011 Highlights
1/80s, f/13.0, ISO 400, 27mm (HDR)
It's a little late for a year-in-review post, I know. But blogger threw away my draft a few weeks ago and since adding multiple flickr shots to blogger posts is a real pain, I kept pushing it off (maybe it's time for a better a CMS in 2012). You can view a fullscreen slideshow here (opens in a new window) or see the collection below the fold. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.
Bird Cage
1/640s, f/2.8, ISO 400, 50mm
Here's a shot from near the entrance the bird market in Mongkok. The cage was hanging by itself away from the center of the market, and none of the passersby seemed to give it much attention. I waited around a bit to get the right amount of people in the shot to balance the composition. I chose a somewhat narrow aperture of f/2.8, so that the background wouldn't be a complete blur.
'Tis the Season
1/80s, f/1.2, ISO 1600, 50mm
Happy new year to everyone! My brother managed to get hold of a Danish Christmas Tree in Hong Kong this year, and it is a real beauty. Above is a close-up of the tree. True to Danish Christmas traditions, the tree is lid with real candles. I used the 50mm f/1.2 lens wide-open with the ISO at 1600 and a shutter speed of 1/80s.
Roots
1/50s, f/1.2, ISO 3200, 50mm
Here's a night shot from the Soho neighborhood in Hong Kong. A few weeks ago, I noticed this tree growing out of a steep slope and became fascinated by how one of the roots had grabbed unto a a pipe running underneath its trunk. It was very dark, so I shot the photo at ISO 3200 with the lens wide open at f/1.2.
Hong Kong from the Peak
5s (bracketed), f/16.0, ISO 200, 28mm
I went up to the Peak yesterday to take some shots of Hong Kong's skyline. It's difficult to do anything terribly creative with a view like that. No doubt, on clear day the view from the Peak is stunning. But since everyone shares the same vantage point, there's a good chance that someone else has a shot that looks exactly like yours. It get's a little more interesting on some of the trails near the peak. The view is still amazing and you can sometimes use trees and bushes to frame photo (I did something like this on a hike a few months ago looking over the southern part of the island).
To make my photos stand out at least a little bit, I bracketed my exposures and processed my images with Photoshop's High Dynamic Range (HDR) function. The shot above was taken a few minutes after sunset. HDR works well here to bring out the green color in the hillside (which otherwise would have been difficult to expose correctly). I have included another shot below the fold taken about 30 minutes after the sunset. I processed that image with more muted colors to give it more of a "Gotham" feel.
Sparks (火花)
1/200s, f/2.0, ISO 200, 135 mm
Shooting with fast primes is a lot of fun. For this shot, I used Canon's 135mm f/2.0 lens with the lens wide open. The image quality is just superb and the auto-focus is fast and accurate. And it's great to have a medium telephoto lens that's fairly light-weight and inconspicuous for street photography. I used a fairly long shutter speed (1/200), so that the sparks would form light lines rather that just appear like tiny dots.
To Crop or Not to Crop
1/1250s, f/1.2, ISO 100, 50mm
To crop or not to crop: I took this picture a few weeks ago and initially decided to crop it and move the subject to the right of the frame. I try not crop my images excessively but in this case I felt that the surroundings didn't add much. And cropping seemed a way to bring the viewer closer to the woman in front. But when I came across the orignal image yesterday, I realized that I made a mistake. While there's not much going on around the woman, the surroundings provide more context and reveals more of the street's grit. The cropped image is below the fold. What do you think?
Sunday Afternoon
1/125s, f/6.3, ISO 800, 35mm
Here's a shot from a Sunday afternoon in Blake Garden in Sheung Wong, Hong Kong. I'm with happy with the shot: the lines, the color, and the strange combination of the two characters.
Catty Town
1/100s, f/4.0, ISO 1600, 14 mm
Hong Kong is home to a lot of cats. The smaller city streets are frequented by what looks like domesticated cats--or at least self-adopted cats (they seem well-fed and healthy). There are also a lot of cats on the hiking trails--they are also pretty friendly though generally seem hungrier than the city-dwellers.
Above is a wide-angle shot (with the Canon 14mm prime) from a store on Hollywood Road. Continue below the fold for another three.
Broken
1/1000s, f/1.4, ISO 800, 35mm
The 35mm f/1.4 is just a stellar performer in low light. Here's a shot on a 5d Mark II at 1/1000s, an ISO of 800 and the lens wide open. This being a well-lit street in Hong Kong, I could easily have gone with a lower ISO, but it just didn't occur to me (and besides the 5d Mark II does pretty well at ISO 800).
Overall, the lens still strikes me as a little too wide for my type of street photography. Still, it has an amazing ability to turn a lot of eyesores into objects of art.
Tram Ride to Kennedy Town with the Canon 35mm f/1.4
1/200s, f/1.4, ISO 800, 35mm
I have been trying out Canon's 35mm f/1.4 recently. It's an amazing lens and the wide apature opens up some interesting creative opportunities. With such a shallow depth of field, you can really make the foreground stand out, and, shooting wide-open, the lens produces photos with a cinematic feel. The 35mm focal length on a full frame camera makes the lens great for environmental portraits. You can fit a lot of the surroundings in the frame but still make the subject stand out. And compared to most wider lenses, it produces very limited distortion. Still, the lens is a little on the wide side for my general shooting style, especially for street photography. I feel that I'm too far from the action and that going closer would interfere with the scene I'm trying to capture. As a result, I sometimes end up cropping my shots more than I'd like to. On the other hand, it's a fun challenge to frame fairly wide angle street shots, and in that way I like the way the lens forces me to think about how to compose an image, rather than just find, say, an interesting person or object to focus on.
Today, I took the lens on a 5d Mark II for a tram tide to Kennedy Town on the west side of Hong Kong Island. Continue below the fold, for more shots.
1/160s, f/1.4, ISO 800, 35mm
Around Hollywood Road (荷李活道)
4s, f/13.0, ISO 400, 14 mm
In Hong Kong, I live in the neighborhood of Soho, short for south of Hollywood Street. The neighborhood is on a dramatic hillside and is home to some truly great streets. It's also an area frequented by expats. There are lots of western restaurants and bars around and a number of fancy condo buildings and serviced apartments. But unlike other parts of Hong Kong, it's also an incredibly diverse neighborhood. Just down from Hollywood Road, there is a vibrant meats and vegetable market. Locals live, work, and shop here and walking these colorful streets is a nice contrast to the sterile, mega malls in Central (Hong Kong Island's downtown, of sorts). I like the that fact that the neighborhood gives me a chance to interact with some people I would rarely encounter if I lived in a true expat enclave--even if that interaction is pretty limited (I'm embarrassed to say that I'm still struggling with the handful of Cantonese phrases I've try to teach myself).
Having such a colorful neighborhood at my doorstep is, of course, a treat for a photographer. And there is no shortage of great street scenes to photograph. Many of the vendors are not keen to be photographed, and I generally respect that or ask before I shoot if someone seems uncomfortable. On the other hand, street photography is about capturing the life on the street as it happens rather than a staged version of it. So unless someone affirmatively makes clear they don't want to get photographed, I simply take my presence and raised camera as sufficient notice.
Included in this post are some recent shots from around Hollywood Road. They are taken with a number of different lenses, including the Canon 14mm f/2.8 L lens. I few weeks ago, I rented this super wide angle lens, which provides more than 110 degree field of view. The extreme wide-angle made for a bit of a learning curve but once I got the hang of it, it was a very useful lens for pulling in a lot of street life.
Continue below the fold for more shots.
Legacy Lens on GF1 (Canon 50mm FD f/1.4)
I've been looking to experiment with legacy lenses for my GF1, micro four thirds (MFT) camera . The other day I came across a fairly cheap Canon FD 50mm f/1.4. It was about USD 100 and brand new (used copies are as low as 60 if you can find them). I picked up an FD to MFT converter and I was ready to go.
The lens is a lot of fun. The 50mm focal length on an MFT camera's cropped sensor is the equivalent of a 100mm lens on a full frame camera. And the wide f/1.4 aperture opens up some interesting opportunities, provides beautiful bokeh, and is very handy in low-light.
There are some drawbacks. Focusing is a challenge. Any legacy lens will not be able to auto-focus on an MFT camera body and focusing on the LCD screen can be cumbersome and is likely to be inaccurate (especially if the subject is moving). Most MFT cameras offer a magnified focus assist mode (on the GF1 you press the click wheel to enable it), but it doesn't exactly allow for very snappy focusing. An electronic viewfinder would probably be helpful (and save some battery power too), so maybe I will try to get my hands on one.
The photo above was shot at f/1.4 at 1/800 with an ISO of 800 (a bit high but I had forgotten to change it after walking outside). The lens does appear to be a bit soft wide open and there's definitely some chromatic aberration.
Continue below the fold for a another shot.
Messages Under the Moon
I went back to Victoria Park tonight with a friend. It was the last day to experience the full display of lanterns in various forms and shapes along with the make-shift carnival the city had put on in the park. Earlier this week, I had been fascinated with the time and care people put into writing messages on public "wish boards". Tonight, the sponsor of the Carnival (and the giant lantern fish), Lee Kum Kee Soy Sauce, handed out small paper "wish tags", and I went around and snapped some more shots of people writing down their wishes.
Again, the light was tricky. Not feeling that color added much to the shots, I decided to process the photos in black and white. I shot most of the photos with the aperture wide open at f/1.4 or f/1.6 with the 50mm 1.4. The auto focus is downright horrible, and I manually focused about half the shots. Space constraints and the number of people made it difficult to create interesting compositions. Still, the appeal here was more in capturing the concentrated looks on the faces of writers. And in the end, I think that was enough to make the results at least somewhat interesting.
Read on below the fold to see more shots. And please feel free to leave your thoughts.
Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節)
It's Mid-Autumn Festival and the parks and streets of Hong Kong are decked with paper lanterns. In Victoria Park in Causeway Park, the city celebrated by putting up a lantern so big it made it into the The Guinness Book of World Records. I went by to take some shots with my 5d and a few different lenses. The light was a bit tricky and I ended up shooting most of with the photos at ISO 1600 and above. My favorite shot is the one above. There was a public message board in the middle of the park, and I spotted this girl writing a message while her mother was watching. I was struck by the girl's concentrated look, and the picture shows well just how focused she was on leaving her message.
I had hoped to get some more portraits of the crowds but the rain got in the way.
I've included a few more shots below the fold (including the big lantern processed with some subtle HDR).
A Few More Thoughts on HDR Processing
I have been experimenting a bit more with High Dynamic Range (HDR) processing. Although I feel like it can easily be overused, the technique definitely has its merits. In the shot, above, the strong lights inside the store would have made it difficult to get the exposure right. I also tried to adjust the detail levels and tones to add some feeling of grit to the image.
Below is another shot. This time from a small beach near Sui Kung Peninsula. I didn't bring a tripod, so the shot is a little rough around the edges. Still, I like how I was able to even out the exposure across the composition.
And Another Skyline Shot
This time it's a high dynamic range (HDR) image of the Wan Chai (湾仔) skyline of Hong Kong. For the first time in a while, I experimented with HDR processing today. I'm not a huge fan of HDR but sometimes it can be pretty useful. For example, when shooting outdoors during the day time, the light can be very harsh and it's difficult to get the exposure right (you're either going to end up with a blown out sky or foreground that's too dark). The major drawback is that it can be a bit of a hassle to shoot images for HDR processing. You must bracket the exposure using at least three shots (normal, over, and under exposed images), and a tripod is therefor required. On top of that, the additional processing work can be time consuming. The latest OS for the iPhone let's you shoot HDR images in one go with pretty amazing results--especially for shooting during the day (see this shot for an example).
In the shot above, the HDR processing helps balance the exposure while at the same time exaggerating the edges of the details somewhat. Not too bad, I think. I also like the point of view, although the composition is a little tight at the bottom of the frame (another building did not leave much room, unfortunately).
Below is another shot a little east of the one above. For that image, I only applied some very mild HDR processing.
Another Take on the Hong Kong Skyline
Here's a more exciting view of the Hong Kong skyline. This time from Kam Shan Country Park (near Monkey Mountain) on the outskirts of Kowloon. The contrasts make this photo much more interesting than the one below: new vs. old, nature vs. city, and so on.
I cheated a bit in trying to get the exposure right in this shot. I took the photo in the late afternoon when the sky was still very bright. Ideally, I would have used a tripod, bracketed my exposures and then created a high dynamic range (HDR) image. Instead, I simply selected the green foreground in Photoshop and made it brighter--worked ok, I think.
