1/640s, f/1.8, ISO 800, 50mm
I happened to walk past the wet market around Graham Street near Central in Hong Kong today. It was a rainy, damp day, and luckily I had my camera along. It was late in the afternoon, so the market was busy and the light great.
1/800s, f/1.6, ISO 800, 50mm
More shots below the fold.
Showing posts with label Hong Kong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hong Kong. Show all posts
At the Wet Market
Fall
1/500s (bracketed) f/4.0, ISO 800, 50mm
I don't like cold weather one bit. But spending another fall in Hong Kong, I've realised how much I miss the changing of the seasons. The weather in Hong Kong cools down this time of year but fall and winter temperatures are very mild. I like how refreshingly crisp fall weather can be--especially after a hot summer. It was therefor a welcome change when I travelled to Beijing this weekend. The sky (for the most part) seemed almost an impossibly clear blue and the fall foliage was stunning. I took a walk around the Beida campus but only had a 50mm lens with me. A wider lens would no doubt have been better suited to take in the full beauty of the landscape...
1/800s, f/1.6, ISO 100, 50mm
Continue below the fold for a few more shots
Poem for a Weekend Night
10s, f/5.6, ISO 800, 24mm
I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when i look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.
- Leonard Cohen
In a Crowded Place
1/500s, f/1.2, ISO 1600, 50mm
This month, I am back in Hong Kong for a few weeks. I've missed the city's grit, its narrow streets, its beat. Beijing is such a sprawling city, and I still haven't figured out what to make of it. As a result, I'm finding it more difficult to capture and portray Beijing adequately in my photos. But Hong Kong is different. Hopefully, I will be able to get in some shots this weekend. (As an aside, I've been meaning to do fewer close-ups and bring in more of the surroundings in my street shots--more on that some other time.)
Being back here, I thought it would be a good time to revisit a brief photo essay I wrote for the spectacular Danish photo magazine, Fotorama (and turn it into English). So without further ado...
I used to live in Hong Kong's Soho neigbohoord. I was one of thousands who each day commute to work on a series of escalators. Endless streams of lawyers, nannies, and tourists gather on a conveyer belt that leads to Hong Kong's financial center. Here, more commuters join as jam-packed busses and underground trains let out floods of people into the city' streets.
Hong Kong's claustrophobic geography has forced the city to expand vertically. With some 7,500 high-rise buildings, it's the world's tallest city. And the Mong Kok neighborhood is the most densely populated on the planet. It's a crowded place.
Despite the intense density, Hong Kong offers its citizens almost total anonymity. The physical closeness does not create any expectations among Hong Kongers that they relate to each other. In fact, it's as if the crowds and the tight physical spaces allow people to create their own personal space.
When I take pictures in Hong Kong, I am often drawn to the moments where people are able to create their own spaces among the crowds--in particular the times when it's not clear if someone wants to be alone or if its the environment that forces the loneliness. Are these people fighting loneliness or the crowds? And then I wonder how many might wonder the same thing about me.
More pictures below the fold.
Thoughts on Cats and Life
1/4000 secs, f/1.2, ISO 400, 50mm
When I saw this guy in Hong Kong last week, I was reminded of Piet Hein's grook:
Little cat, little cat,Hong Kong is full of cats. Unfazed by the crowds, they stroll around in the hustle and bustle of this mega city's busy streets. Somehow they find a way to go about their feline business in their usual carefree way--eating, napping, pondering life and the other important things cats do. No matter they are in the middle of one of the world's financial centers, they live like most other cats. City cats, country cats, it's all the same. Their two-legged neighbors could probably take some lessons from this way of life.
walking so alone;
tell me whose cat are you
– I’m damned well my own
Thoughts on Black and White
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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