kowloon, hong kong (photography thread)

[xxThe_Lebowskixx]

ive been to hong kong five times, each time for a few days. its an OK place to visit, but if you dont live in Asia, I would recommend going to Thailand or Korea. Here are some photos I took with a D80 Nikon and a cheap $100 20-80 zoom lens that I am learning how to use. I just took these photos on Auto-mode, but if you can comment on what would have made them better, that would be helpful.


Hong Kong Island


Mongkok is one of the most crowded places on earth (the SARS virus must have been scary). The people live in small public housing rooms and there are tons of hourly motels available for those who want to get away from their other family members.


Chungking Mansions, made famous in Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express... Its a shady building with many African and Indian residents. Signs advertise rooms available for rent on various floors.


cool movie poster



pork and chickens


dim sum on a stick


squid street snack


fruit


fried vegetables, meat and tofu.


bakery



chinese doughnuts served with a thick rice soup

[Banditgberg]

thanks for sharing!

[onthebutton]

Nice photos. "Auto Mode" on the Nikon dSLRs is generally pretty good, as you can see here. If you want to get a book to better understand how to "take the training wheels" off of your camera and go Manual, this is the book I've read, and it's really pretty outstanding. Also, after you read it, go back and read your camera's manual---it will make a LOT more sense.

Link to Amazon

And, better glass always helps. The three Nikon lenses I'd recommend to start with are the Nikon 18-55mm , the Nikon 55-200mm , and the Nikon 50mm normal. This is a relatively inexpensive set of lenses that should cover everything you'd need as a beginner. Alternatively, you could buy the Nikon 18-200mm to replace the first two mentioned lenses, but it's expensive ($800+), and nearly impossible to find.

[imitation]

I highly recommend getting your visa processed in ChungKing House, my friend got his done on a Sunday (impossible because HK visa offices don't process on a Sunday) when it came back we were sure his passport had been replaced with a fake and the Visa claimed to have been done in a province bordering on Vietnam. I tried to ask the guy about all this and two scary looking guys came into to check out what was going on and we decided better of it and left. He's still using the passport to this day so it's either a really good fake or they just roughed it up in the process.

KKF I'm maybe 20% chance to be visiting Thailand late July are you back there now?

[Blarg]

On the pic of the lady with the fruit, it looks extra orange because it looks like you white-balanced for the outside light, which is naturally much more blue and makes incandescents look yellowish. If you have varying color temperatures in the same view, you might want to position yourself or to zoom in so that one color temperature of your light source completely dominates the scene. This will lead to more natural colors. When you get to doing movies, you often deal with this by putting gels on the windows to bring everything to the same color temp so scenes don't look strangely blue or yellowish. But on the street, you just have to be careful where the lens is pointing and how much it covers.

I like the one showing all the signs. It gives a feeling for how congested the place is. I also kind of dug one huge building having signs for a different hotel every few floors. I've never seen multiple hotels in the same building, just divided up by floors before.

Also, there's one where there's a bunch of items in a cart, and the focus was a little hard to find with the eye. The food items in the foreground were blurred, and so was a lot of stuff all around what looked like the focus point, the green peppers. Your shallow depth of field suggests maybe you could have used more light or adjusted that depth of field elsewise, as you probably wanted more of the items in that cart in focus.

[emon87]

This is kinda a cool thread because my girlfriend is in Hong Kong right now.

However, as for the pictures - they are just snapshots - they aren't really art photos at all. Most of them look like you just picked up the camera and shot it without any thought about what you were trying to capture. ie, no real subject or focus, the apparent subject is not framed well, too much "noise" that distracts from the subject, no use of focus on the subject, etc.

[dknightx]

here's a couple of pics from my last trip to HK:

Wang Lee Hom playing the violin (got free tickets to the concert ... actually suprisingly good)


fishing village


IFC Tower


Inside Times Square


Favorite Pic from the Peak Lookout


The Wynn Macau

[WhoIam]

Wait, HK has a Wynn hotel identical to the Vegas one?

[dknightx]

its in macau, which isn't actually in HK, but there is a direct ferry from HK to Macau

[entertainme]

Nice peak shot! Those aren't easy to get.

Unfortunately my first trips were long ago so my pictures are not digital, and not in my computer. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] (I will be there in Aug. in tourist mode which is pretty unusual. Will have to take some then.)

No Star Ferry guys? It's got to be one of my favorite things about Hong Kong.