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Japan / Japan '08 / Japan'08 / People watching / Shibuya / Shinjuku / Street photography / Tokyo / essentialized / hong kong — 1 Comment
26
Mar 09

Tokyo essentialized.

This shot sums up Tokyo for me: Pachislot and vending machines. Sure, Tokyo is busy and crowded, but actually I wasn’t too impressed by that. Maybe because I live Hong Kong, a place that has a smaller but more concentrated population. I was expecting to be wowed by the crowd there, and even awed by it. But even the fabled light-change at Shibuya Station wasn’t as crazy as I thought it would be. I loved looking at it, like I outlined in this post, but that was more for what I could see in the crowd than how big it was. Drive down Nathan Road in Mongkok on a Sunday night, and watch the pedestrians cross the road when the traffic lights change: now that’s an awesome crowd scene. No, crowds of people aren’t what I think of when I think of Tokyo.

Tokyo for me means wandering around at night, down small lanes, grabbing beers and ramen in basement eateries, looking at interesting, happy people going by. Tokyo means street music like I’ve never heard before, performed by really talented artists who are listened to by the people around, not just dismissed with a glib ” Not my style of music”. Tokyo defininely has a lot going in the daytime, but like many great cities, Tokyo only properly wakes up at night.

Big Buddha / Buddha / D300 / Lantau / Monastery / Nikon / Po Lin / Shaolin / Tian Tan / bad weather / hong kong / lucky / rainy — No Comments
9
Mar 09

Bad weather at the Big Buddha

One of the first overtly tourist places that I went to after moving to Hong Kong was head up to the Big Buddha on Lantau Island. Mid-July, sunny and so typically-Hong-Kong hot and humid that I thought I may pass out on the stairway up to the buddha statue.

Po Lin is kind of out of the way for me, though, and since there’s not really too much going up there for locals, I haven’t been back in the four years since then. Enter the Year of The Goat, and the year has just been one damn thing after another. Bad luck, according to our more superstitious frineds and relatives: I’m a Horse and my wife is a Goat, and apparently, this isn’t the greatest year for either of these two Chinese zodiac characters. The advice from my grandmother-in-law was that the only way you can cure this is through a visit to a couple of specific temples in Hong Kong. You guessed it: Po Lin is one of them.

So this put the idea of a trip out there firmly into our consciousness, but it still wasn’t exactly a burning issue for us. But after finding ourselves at alittle bit of a loose loose end last weekend, we decided on Saturday that a trip back to Po Lin, more for a look around again and a ride on the Nong Ping cable car than anything about the luck changing, may not be a bad move. Even with the bad press surrounding Nong Ping, the tourist village up there, and especially the cable car, which has been plagued with some Very Bad Things since its opening, climaxing in the time that one of the gondolas came right off the cable and crashed to the mountain below. Luckily empty at the time.

Plus, Nong Ping had to a tourist trap, right?

So, we wake up on Sunday morning, look out the window (our bedroom has a view right across the channel to Tung Chung, and the cable cars going up the mountain) and we see grim weather. Coffee and discussion in bed follow, and we nearly stayed in bed and waited for more auspicious weather. But in the end, we decided to head out, no matter what the weather was like, so long as we left early to avoid the crowds.

Weather didn’t improve. We didn’t exactly have the best view from our gondola on the way up to the temple:

And this was the sunny face of Nong Ping, waiting to greet us:

Still, the Buddha statue in was much more moody in the mist than in the bright sunlight, like last time, and the atmosphere was pretty intense. Felt like we were headed off to learn one of the great secrets of the Universe, known only to a few and half-hidden through th ages by a band of select Shaolin monks (who apparently do daily shows for tourists at Nong Ping, so there you go).

Seems like we weren’t the only ones headed up there with a view to getting good things:

A new addition to the temple complex is the Garden of Knowledge, which is on the Path of Wisdom (10 minutes walk, which is the quickest way to get wise available) :

Not that it got me any wiser: can’t read Chinese, so I couldn’t read the inscriptions. Still, a very strange spot, and well worth the walk. Nice details, too:

Speaking of details, this is a floor detail of the main temple:

All told, it’s worth a visit. Just try not to get taken in by the prices up on the hill there, becauce they are very different to those down the bottom, and get in early to avoid the tour groups, which tend to go up there for lunch. You can read more about the place in this wikipeida entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tian_Tan_Buddha

hong kong / how to / lightning / night photography / photography — 1 Comment
8
Dec 08

How to photograph lightning

Photos of lightning rank among the most spectacular of any type of photo. This is the result of two factors working together in a photograph that are specific to the medium of photography:

The ability to arrest time (here still photos have the advantage over movies),

The ability to condense time onto a single image (so that multiple lightning strikes become overlayed into a single megaburst in the print)

Here’s an example that I shot from our of my window a couple of years ago. Feel free to click through to my flickr page to see it large (it looks way better that size anyway.)

Bearing this in mind, lets have a quick look at how to set up and shoot lightning without becoming a statistic. Just remember that lightning is VERY dangerous, and the rain that usually accompanies lightning does no good to you camera. For this reason I tend to do my lightning shoots indoors, usually from my apartment window. I don’t like to go wandering round hillsides and fields, just asking for a quick zap as I hold onto the steel of my tripod and put it into puddles of water.

In terms of camera settings, you need to use manual settings on you camera for this, and you definitely need to use a long exposure. It’s hard to guess the exact moment when lightning will strike, so what I usually do is set my camera on bulb or between 20 and 30 second exposure times (tripod essential), and shoot while hoping that the strike will hit during that time. This can be frustrating, and requires patience, but here again the advantage of being safely indoors makes itself clear. Rather than freezing in the rain on some blasted heath, I prefer to be warm, dry and having a coffee or a whiskey. You will find that lightning tends to strike between frames, no matter how short you keep your time between button presses.

For the F-stops, the key is to maximize your depth of field: it sucks to get a perfectly exposed, perfectly timed shot of lightning that has a great foreground and blurry lightning. So, minimize the bokeh, and shoot between f16 and whatever the minimum on your lens is.

I also usually shoot my lightning at night: I’m at home more (the day job does tend to get in the way of these kinds of experiments) and I can also be more sure that a long exposure won’t overexpose my shot. I still go for quite a low ISO rating, especially on my older Nikon D50, which tends to be very noisy.

Compositionally, I try to put some other things in the frame. A photo of black sky and a streak of lightning doesn’t look great, but a shot of a hillside or a house or some other feature gives balance, interest and scale to the shot.

And that’s how I shoot lightning. Feel free to check out the incredible lightning shots in the Flickr Top Twenty Lighning Shots pool, or look at National Geographic for more great photos. And you can always read the National Geographic Field guide to Landscape Photography for more on how to shoot this incredible natural phenomenon.

Cantonese Opera / China / Chinese / Festival / Ming Chee Sing / Tai Po / community / culture / hong kong / travel — No Comments
2
Dec 08

Cantonese Opera Again!

After running all my Cantonese opera shots through Lightroom ( which is a total Godsend, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get involved in it) I’ve found that I have quite a few that I really like. Stage lighting helps, but I think the thing that contributed most to the final look of the day was my new Nikon D300.

This camera rocks, seriously. Much better in low light than my old Nikon D50, which couldn’t go above ISO 800 in most situations, and which didn’t have the megapixel depth for much cropping and post-processing.

You can clearly see a differnence between these two cameras, if they are used side by side under the same conditions.

Here are more of the shots, and I have to point out that these were taken during a performance of a very famous opera company, with no flash allowed and very tight angles (I had to duck down at the fornt of the stage and not bother anyone who was trying to appreciate the show).

Enjoy!

Cantonese Opera / China / Chinese / Festival / Ming Chee Sing / culture / hong kong / hot / noisy — No Comments
27
Nov 08

Cantonese Opera at Tai Ping Festival in Hong Kong

I went up to Lam Tsuen in Tai Po (Hong Kong) over the weekend, to a once-in-ten-year festival that they were having up there. Crowded as all hell, but that’s part of deal here in Hong Kong. It’s even part of the criteria for judging whether an event is enjoyable: it needs to be “hot” and “noisy” to be good, or in Cantonese ” Yi-Lau”. It was both of those, and very good spirited and relaxed as well. I wish I could find more events like that here.

It was really my first time to see a full Cantonese Opera show live, and it was a spectacle. I was lucky enough to be able to go backstage to see the preparations, and to do this with a very famous opera company: Ming Chee Sing Chinese Opera.

Here are some of the shots that I got from Sunday, and there are a lot more on my Flickr stream:

Dragon Boat / Tuen Mun / hong kong / race / reshoot / sports photo — No Comments
17
Jun 08

Tuen Mun Dragonboat Races 2008

So, a very successful day’s shooting, I shot around 650 frames out there in the hot sun. Been processing like mad since then, and have a few shots ready for display here.

It was tough as ever to get the shots, more so this year than last ‘cos I was being hounded by security guards to move along from the quayside. There were more shooters there this year, too.

Exposure-wise, I was shooting with my Nikon SB-600 almost all the time, and was amazed at how well it took care of all the details, and how far it could shoot and recieve information to adjust the exposure. The cycle time was crazy, as well, even shooting 3 frames per second it could keep up.

Different day, different conditions, though: last year was bright sun, this year was overcast and threatening to rain in the morning. Which meant that the water was often a junk-coloured grey, and since it had been raining non-stop for the entire week before the races, the water was full of debris and mud. There was even a dead and bloated duck floating round. Yummy.

These offerings were made and released onto the waters early in the morning of the dragon boat races. Obviously meant to create good luck for the teams, they staged an impromptu race of their own before anyone got out onto the water.
you can also see how dirty the water was here in Hong Kong, after the heavy rains we have been having. The day before boat races saw the heaviest floods in 126 years on Hong Kong Island and the Lantau Expressway.
2 of the middle-size boats in action. I was quite happy with the symmetry of this shot, but for some reason blogspot is cropping it. Just click through to my Flickr page, which is hosting this photo.

This is another reason I like to hang out in Tuen Mun for the boat races: we have the biggest boats. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, size does count. And, for these boats, speed counts, too: because of the extra manpower, these boats really took off out of the water at the start line, and shot across the course. It was very difficult to get a shot of them, because they were absolutely flying. I managed to get some nice pics of the big boys, though – but it was more a case of shotgun than scalpel with the camera .

IFC / Symphony of light / Tsim Sha Tsui / Victoria Harbour / cityscape / gear guide / hong kong / how to / landscape / long exposure / night photography / night shot / photo tips — No Comments
6
Jun 08

Hong Kong Cityscapes

New York – or Liberty City, as it’s currently known – may be the city that never sleeps, but Hong Kong has a fair claim to being a late-night town as well. Most of the shops here close at 10:00pm, and you’re only getting ready to go out at 11:00 pm.

Hong Kong has a lot to offer in terms of cityscapes, and a view across Victoria Harbour on a sunny summer day is quite something- but the city leaves it’s best take-my-breath-away beautiful for that time between sunset and sunrise, when the lights are on. And it really can take you breath away: a trip down to Tsim Sha Tsui always impresses, no matter how often I’ve been there over the course of the last three years.

Here’s what I mean:

This is a shot I got a couple of weeks ago, and which I’ve been meaning to go and get for ages. It’s taken during the Symphony of Light, which is a tourist-board initiative over which uses a host of buildings on both sides of the harbour as a giant light-and-sound production. It’ s really something to see, as huge lasers flick out into the night sky, and whole buildings flash and pop their lights. Less something to hear, though, as the soundtrack is willfully appaling. BUt hey, you can’t have it all.

Unfortunately, I took my travel-light tripod along with me on this shoot, rather than the big boy, as I was confident I could use some concrete blocks to lift the camera over the railings in the parkinglot I was using as a shooting location. I use this parking lot all the time, and was sure that the blocks would be perfect. Turns out I was wrong: using the blocks would have been downright dangerous, as they would leave me balancing my camera very pecariously 8 stories over a very busy walkway. Dropping objects from height in Hong Kong even by accident, is a criminal offence, to say nothing of the damage to my camera.

So I was forced to keep the camera on it’s neck strap, hand-hold, balance and hope. I put the zoom all the way in, to 28mm, and pointed in roughly the right direction. Then, I took a deep breath, pushed the shutter-release, and waited the 30 seconds I was looking for. After two shots, I realised that I wouldn’t be able to hold my breath for long enough. CO2 was filling up my lungs, making them feel like a balloon which was about to burst, and I started shaking.

So I then moved on to a series of slow, steady breaths out while taking the shots. I was balancing the camera on those offending concrete blocks, which was ok for just the camera (safely wrapped up on my neckstrap and resting on my pointer and middle finger for an approximation of the correct angle for the photo). I got two frames that kind of worked – they’re nice and sharp, but I have had to crop them down from a 6 MP shot to about a 4 MP – which is less than ideal.

I also failed to check my settings before shooting, and shot JPEG, which hamstrings you a little when you get home and fire up photoshop. So I’m planning on a reshoot of the day, with the big daddy tripod and full zoom available to me.

Here’s the other decent pic from the night’s shooting:

which I think worked out really well. A little work on levels, a little sharpening and some removal of unwanted lens flare, and it brightened up well.

Shooting landscapes (or cityscapes, really) in Hong Kong is one of the best things to do while you’re here, and because of it’s nighttime photogenic properties, you’ll generally be out there sometime lateish. This is what I’ve found to be my favourite locations, gear and settings (in no particular order):

20 – 30 seconds, at ISO 200. I like to go with the lowest ISO rating I can- saves time on the noise, which I really detest about digital photography. Give me good old film grain any day, especially for black and white.
Water, somewhere, and often in the foreground. Reflected light gives some awesome colour effects here, and there are usually a lot of lights to reflect from. See the above two pics for what I mean, as well as this one:

Weird colours in the sky, and on the water, because of these reflections. These usually work for you, but the sky colour can often come out very bright at long exposures because of all the flight around. It can give you a nice fringed effect from the other side of a hill, or it can go luminous orange, which may or may not work out well. IN the shot above, the sea goes a nice colour, but the sky is all weird.
Tripod with stabilizing hook for you to put your camera bag on to hold the tripod steady. Hong Kong doesn’t often have heavy winds (outside of a typhoon) but it does have a lot of poeple walking by your gear, which can cause a slight shake in your shots.
Shutter release cord or IR shutter release – it often happens that you bump your camera while you set off the shutter. Before I got the IR release for Nikon, I used the time release, which works fine for camera shake, but you can’t time your shot to perfection.

So, Tsing Lung Tau, Victoria peak and TST beckon again, and I’ll be shooting all at night again. Anyone else got any tips to add to this, or other night shot locations? I went up Tai Mo Shan a couple of weekends back, well before dawn, to get a sunrise over the city shot, but it turned out to be a complete bust: very hazy, and I couldn’t see through some thick summer foliage. How about Jardine’s Lookout, Kowloon side? I’ve never been up there. Any good?

Boat / Dragon / Dragon Boat / Tuen Mun / community / hong kong / how to / photo awards / photo tips / sport / sports photo — No Comments
6
Jun 08

Re-enter the Dragon- in a boat.

It’s that time of year again for anyone who lives in a Chinese community: Dragon Boat Festival is again upon us. You have to love the fact that we’re getting a free holiday on Monday ‘cos the festival is on Sunday, but you have to love even more the opportunities for photos that go with the boat races.

Last year in Hong Kong was exceptionally hot, and very bright and sunny, on boat racing day. This led to a few problems for me shooting the event, and although I got some nice shots, they’re not perfect. The difference between the highlights and shadows was huge, because I only really got into my stride after 10:30 (and they only started racing the big boats around then, too) and this meant that there was a lot of really strong light being reflected off the water, the boats and the oars. The shadows were pretty heavy, too, and while I was pulling the details of the shadows out in photoshop I ended up with slightly overexposed shots.

Here are a few which should show you what I mean. The photos are best viewed large, of course, click through (by clicking the image itself)to my Flickr page and check them out there:

This vies for my best shot of the day, and even with the exposure issues, was picked up for the website of the Peninsula Hotel, where it will be published soon. But I still want to get a better shot of the races this year.

This shot is one of my personal favourites. It’s quite dynamic, and gets the frenetic pace and mood of the day. With flash from my side of the photo, hopefully this shot will work better.

Here’s one of the tighter close-ups that I discuss a little further down on this blogpost, but it really shows the exposure flaws, and I hope that I’ll be able to balance exposure here with grad filters and flash this year.

The real problem is in the venue itself: I live in Tuen Mun, in Hong Kong, and I prefer to be a part of the community here than to trek all the way out to Hong Kong Island, where I don’t really feel a part of anything. The boat races in Tuen Mun happen as the mouth of the river, which empties out into the sea at a typhoon shelter. The bank of the river where the races are held faces directly east, and in the early morning shots from that river bank will silhouette, leaving no colour detail. Fine for artistic shots (with a heap of luck) but after a while it gets tedious. Later on, the sunlight becomes very contrasty, and causes major exposure headaches: I was metering an 8-stop difference at 10:30.

I was using my Nikon D50 with a set of 17- 80 and 70-300 zooms, but no flash as I didn’t have a fast and powerful unit back then. I also didn’t use any filters, which would have helped me out a lot: balancing that harsh, light-grey sky and making it a little more interesting to look at. This year, I’m hoping to get on top of these aspects: I’ve got a set of 2-stop Cokin Grads for this, and I’m going to take my Cokin warming filter, to deal with the colouring of the midday sun, and give the pictures a warmer tone. I’ve also got a speedlite which should allow me to fill in some of the closer boats, and balance for the strong back sunlight which was a problem during the earlier part of the day. I’ve also got a polarizer, which should help later in the day only- you need to be 90 degrees to the angle of the sunlight for it to have an effect, and we face east for the shooting, so the sun will have to be quite high up for the filter to work.

I learned a lot from my composition from last year: try to leave as much of the sky out as possible. But I maintain that photography has much more to do with exposure than composition. You can crop and so on to improve composition, but a badly exposed shot will never really be satisfying.

I’ve also learned form last year that the best races to shoot are the heats rather than the finals. Maybe I was more committed than other shooters last year (but I think more because I had no idea what the line-up of the day was like, not being able to read Chinese) ‘cos I was down at the riverside at 07:00 am. Most shooters got there around 11:00 am. Which meant that I had a lot of space to run round in, and could choose my spot easily. The light was also closer to balanced, and I got more useable frames at this time than any other.

The events to go for are the big boat races- and the speed at which they shot past me was incredible. I tended to get a lot of motion blur, which worked really well in some shots, and not at all well in others. I’m going to the blur shots again this year, blut I’m also going to try and hit freeze-frame as well. What I noticed last year was that the freeze-frames needed to be quite tight close ups, which worked much better on the boat’s drummer than on the paddlers, and that these tight shots were much easier to get when I was at quite an angle to the boats, which meant they needed to be far away. Bigger lenses aren’t going be good, I doubt, because you’ll have trouble tracking the boats, and the shots will be too focused on one or two people in the boats. This is definitively a team sport, and shots of the whole team are better than shots of the individual most of the time.

When they got 90 degrees to me, I was able to get much better motion blur, as the speed was much more noticeable. But these shots needed to have a whole boat in them at least to be interesting, and the best ones comprised one boat that was in sharp focus in the foreground, and the others blurry in the background. It looked much better when that foreground boat was winning, too, which isn’t something that you can organize.

The last bit of experience that I got from last year was that the finish line is NOT the thing to shoot. Stay close to it, but shoot the boats coming toward you, otherwise you lose the excitement of the race. Faces and Eyes are important, even for these shots of people. The celebrations are good, though, if the winning boat is close to you.

But hey, it’s a sport, and sports shooting is often the most challenging because you can’t plan for it. It’s also some of the most fun, because of this.

Some other information about

Hong Kong Dragon Boats:

Biggest event: Stanley
This year, there is a competition for photos which are shot in the Aberdeen area of Hong Kong, because this area was the first place to start Dragon Boat racing in Hong Kong.

hong kong / how to / photo tips / photography / travel — No Comments
30
May 08

First Post!

Well, here’s my Hello World moment. Been putting this off, because although I’ve felt that I should run a blog for a while, it just seems that there’s never anything to write about when I sit down in front of the screen – and especially hard to kick it all off.

So I’m just biting the bullet here and rambling away. I intended this blog to be a vehicle for the rambling thoughts (photographic and otherwise) I am having at any given time, so I could come back and view them and maybe be able to act on them later when I had an answer or a new idea to try out.

Whether this happens remains to be seen, but if you don’t start, you don’t finish. So I’m starting.

First up, a little about me

Turning thirty this year, and been taking photos for just over half of that time. Things have gotten much easier since I got a job (photography is many things, but it is not cheap, and tough for a teenager or student, as the choice between film and beer is hard to make) and since digitial came round – no film costs. That said, I miss the darkroom time you used to have to put in, and the feeling of rinsing out a canister of films after the chemical wash, and unrolling them to see if you got anything, and whether any of it was any good, just can’t be replicated in the digital world.

I really don’t grudge my new kit, though: a Nikon D50 kit, to which I’ve added a 70-300 Sigma and an SB-600 flash. The D50 was an Xmas present a couple of years ago from my lovely wife, now starting to feel a little tired and in need of a new body ( and I’m talking about the D50, people, not the lovely wife). I find the camera and lens configuration perfect for 98% of photographic scenarios and assignments, and I love the Nikon CLS system. The camera also manages very well under some fairly intense exposure problems, and I can’t say that I’ve ever been anything less than impressed with it’s preformance. And yes, I have tried Canon, and think it’s on a par. I used an EOS system for film. Now, though, I doubt I would go back, because of the significant investment in Nikon equipment. So don’t start an equipment flame war, guys. Funny how it’s always the guys, I’ve never had an argument like this with a woman photographer. Some inadequacy issues, maybe? Anyway, it’s not the camera, it’s the eye. I’ve seen some incredible images taken on plastic toy cameras like Diana and Holga, and seen some very impressive rigs out here being used to much less effect.

I’ve also become a fairly heavy user of Cokin Filters – a Polarizer, a light yellow and a couple of graduated ND’s, which I think are essential for interesting skies out here in Asia (I’m looking at you, yellow filter) and for getting good sky exposure balance anywhere during the day.

The photographic potential of my new home – Hong Kong- is unlimited, and the biggest problem I have in getting my own projects done here is keeping focused on what it was I came out to shoot in the first place. And remembering what it was I saw last week and thought “Hey, you’ve got to come back and get a shot of that at dusk / dawn / dragon boat festival / Chinese New Year.” Which is another reason for this blog – to record those thoughts and run with them. Plus, it’s to motivate me to get out and pursue my own identified projects, which can be a tough ask after a hard week’s grind.

What this blog is about

Well, hard to say at this stage. The aims are hazy, but I would like to see projects proposed, researched, shot and discussed here. I’m always ready for a new challenge, and I am always looking for new places and events to shoot here in Hong Kong and elsewhere. I’m very open to discussion and other viewpoints, and I find that it’s something I don’t really get enough of in HK, so I’m hoping that there will be a comment or two posted telling me what solutions there are to my problems, or what your experience is of similar issues and ideas.

Going through the next few weeks, I’m going to go over a few highly inspirational blogs and photographers, and start work on my project for this week: night shots in Tsing Lung Tau. So watch this space, and if I get a break in the weather (which has been very bleak here over the last bit, wall-to-wall rain) I’ll be posting my shots. This is what I got last time I went out there:

Which was pretty promising, but a lot more can be done out there. Plus, it’s close to home for me, so I can get down there quite easily. You can look at my flickr photostream to view it large, and see some other shots from around that area:

http://flickr.com/photos/daveb_za/

Have a look, and watch this space for more!

David Brown PhotographyImages of Asia, Africa and Anywhere Else I Go