Bright Lights Big City

I've been very negligent... No post for months, and there was enough to post.

For one, I am now located (at least on weekdays) in Hong Kong. Which is a photogenic city. See above. Expect more in the coming weeks. (Or maybe not, given recent history on this blog:-)

This is a long exposure from the top of a parking garage in Kowloon, across Victoria Harbour towards Hong Kong Island. The tall tower is ifc2 (International Financial Centre 2).

How much is that lens?

The Vietnamese can be startlingly direct...

Being direct

This guy sat down next to me last Saturday while I was having a sugarcane juice on the street. He started talking to me, and skipped the usual questions (for VN) about my name, country of origin, age, and salary, and proceeded straight to the cost of my camera and lens.

He was quite OK with me taking his portrait, and was happy with the result, though he wondered why I did not use flash. In the shot above he was pointing at the button operating my pop-up flash.

Very direct

I can tell you that my wife is not typically that thrilled when a business contact remarks "you look old today".   Personally, I am not going to try that one. 

It works two ways

It's not just the questions they ask though. The same can apply to their answers. Take, for example, the following job interview question (which I heard from the interviewer).
Q: what would your friends say is a bad quality of yours?
A: I can be quite hot tempered. I really lose it sometimes.

Refreshingly direct, but maybe less advisable than the usual "I am a perfectionist".

Hà Giang Landscape

OK, time for some variety. Hà Giang not only has wonderful people, it also boasts a very impressive karst landscape. It's a rugged mountain landscape, characterised by conical mountain tops. The highland close to Dồng Văn is a good example, have a look at the Google Maps satellite image below.

Despite all that natural beauty, I did not take many landscape pictures, because it was permanently hazy throughout our trip. Leading to very boring even grey images. There were a few exceptions, where the haze actually lent a beautiful atmosphere itself. The shot above is an example.

It was taken at the green arrow in the satellite image below. It's taken in South East direction, so you'll need to move the map to see the mountains it depicts.

View Larger Map

On the map you can see the strange karst landscape in the highlands. Think Ha Long Bay without the water. Or, as far as I can judge from pictures, from the more famous karst in Yunnan, China. (The border to Yunnan is about 2mi away from this point.)

Picture Sharing 2

The camera is such a great prop. Especially someone else's.

We had lunch at this place in Dồng Văn in Hà Giang province in the far north of Vietnam. One of the cooks was very photogenic. With 4 photographers, someone is bound to ask and get a shot. And show it to her, on the back of the camera.

Which is the moment I captured. She's shy but flattered, looking at her fresh portrait.

Technical: The lighting is simple - all natural, from the open shop front on the left. Classic window lighting I guess, but in a fairly dark room.

Picture Sharing

I've been posting a lot of what could have been posted on this blog to Google+. I will catch up and repost and expand some of those posts here.

One of my favourite images from the Hà Giang trip.

It captures one of the best things about it - the joy of digital photography not just to the photographer but also to the subjects. Whenever we turned around the camera to show our (their) shots, the smiles just beamed. It turned the one-way click of the shutter to real contact. And that usually rubbed off on the rest of the shots.

I tried to capture this many many times, but only this one worked. I simply tried until luck struck, and all faces lined up just right.

I hope to go back one day, and give some of my subjects a print. (No, that is not entirely altruistic:-)

Like the next post, this also shows what a great prop a camera can be - especially the back of someone else's camera. More to come!