Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong

When I was in Hong Kong I went first to order chops at Man Wa Lane (Chop Alley) which is in the Sheung Wan area of Hong Kong. Chops are stamps with your name engraved on them in Chinese characters that you use to sign things. Because they are your name and your birth year symbol, they ideally are hand carved for you. I have wanted one for years and there's no better place to get it than Chop Alley.

With a few hours to spare until I had to pick up the chops, I headed by ferry to the wonderful Cheung Chau island. There are no cars here - everyone bikes or walks and it's just the most wonderful place. One side of the island is a fishing port and the other side is beach.

This photo is from the fishing port side. The atmosphere was horribly grey and polluted so the image was totally lacking in color as well as having a pretty ghastly color cast. First step is to remove the color cast. I use the "color by the numbers" approach of sampling white, neutral and black areas of the image and then adjusting curves until they are within the ball park of correct. Then, I took the image to LAB to boost the color using curves on the A and B channels. You can't do so easily unless you remove the color cast first. The result is wonderful and one of a series of boat images I'm working on.

Hong Kong Island tram

I'm not sure exactly what to say about this photo, it still takes my breath away every time I see it. It is so quintessentially Hong Kong.

Years ago they talked about taking out the trams, thankfully, reason prevailed and they didn't. They are so unique and, in this photo, the tall tram, tall buildings and narrow roadway all work to give a wonderful perspective on this beautiful place.

Interestingly, the image can be cropped across the middle to give an equally beautiful and powerful image but, when it came to the crunch, I chose not to crop it. It's this version that speaks to me, it's what I saw and how I captured the scene, so here it is. Enjoy!.

Streets of Hong Kong

Some of the best photo opportunities in Hong Kong happened around dusk as the lights began to cast their magic on the streets. The time frame is tight, you need to be there, camera in hand, and catch the mix of daylight and night light. But the rewards are definately there for the taking as shown here. This shot, to my recollection was taken in the Temple street night market area.

My new Pentax K10D digital SLR was my companion for this trip. It was its first outing so I was interested to see how it would perform. True to some reviews, as I captured mainly in JPEG format, the images lacked saturation. I did boost it in camera slightly uisng the saturation adjustment but I opted to stop short of boosting it too much in the camera and fix the images myself later on.

I did take advantage from time to time of the K10D's push button RAW mode which lets you press a button on the case and take one RAW image. I did this when I had time to take two shots and when I had something I thought would lend itself to working with in Camera RAW.

However, and this is a big thing, in Photoshop CS3 you can open any JPEG image in Camera RAW and work with a subset of the Camera Raw functions on the image. This is a very powerful new tool and makes it easy to apply some fixes that would take more time in Photoshop - and, because you're working in Camera RAW, the fixes aren't saved to the image so they can be undone any time.

Curious? Open Photoshop CS3 Bridge, find your JPEG image and right click it. Instead of choosing Open, choose Open in Camera RAW and go play!

Reflections in Hong Kong

One of the things I found myself photographing in Hong Kong and in Tokyo was reflections. The images I caught of buildings reflected in other buildings are mini worlds that exist only for those who choose to see them.

Rreflections are a different reality. While the building doing the reflecting might not be visually interesting per se and the building being reflected might not be so great, the combination of the two is so wonderful and temporary.

Photographing them is as if life is rewarding you for using your eyes to see, not just look.