Daily Photo – Exploring the Architecture of Hong Kong
Photography is a great sport because it’s solitary and gives you some amazing adventures to have at night. It also gives you a reason to walk around the city and discover new things. The muggles like to explore cities too, but they are usually on their way for an actual purpose: bar, restaurant, or shopping. It’s nice the photography has no real purpose other than wandering and finding things you did not expect.
I was chatting with my friend Milly the other day about architecture photos. She was asking if I get bored of it because I’ve made thousands of them. I told her, no, not really, because it’s a fun personal challenge either to get a cool angle or to process it differently. If I was the architect, I’d love to stumble upon one of my photos and think, hey that’s cool! Perhaps it a bit of an homage, even though it’s inherently a derivative work.
I haven’t been back since the protests, but I know Hong Kong was a very safe place to take photos at night. There are so many cool lights and the city really comes alive at night. I just sort of wander around randomly to find cool scenes like this. Often times, I’ve got my earphones on and listening to cool music to inspire me even more.
If you’re a Passport Member then you’ll know today is Sunday and it’s time for a new video! We have about 200 in here now and you can see all kinds of goodies in there. Enjoy!
More and more, I like to take photos of cities where you can’t quite tell exactly which city it is. If you’re a Passport Member, then you’ll get to unlock the making-of where you can see how I processed cropped it using Aurora HDR. Enjoy!
Going through my favorite photos of each location has been great fun! Here are some favorites from Hong Kong. Well, the first one is not really from Hong Kong… it’s from the Chicago airport during my first journey there.
When I was watching Devs (which I highly recommend, especially if you like films like Ex Machina from Alex Garland), I recognized the computer lab was in the shape of a cool mathematical fractal called a Menger Sponge. This is a fractal curve, a three-dimensional generalization of the one-dimensional Cantor set and two-dimensional Sierpinski carpet. It was formalized by Karl Menger in 1926. I’ve been working on lots of fractals lately at night in my lonely isolation and thought this was bizarrely mindbending. And, yes, I’m a math nerd.
The music is also from Devs, specifically the opening of Episode 4 of Season 1. The composers for the show at Geoff Barrow & Ben Salisbury, and, if you’ve seen the show, then you know what a unique soundscape it has. Well done guys! 🙂
It took about 48 hours to render at 1080p on a rather beefy Xeon and high-end GeForce based Origin PC… just to give you an idea of the complexity of the math.
Daily Photo – The Old Trams of Hong Kong
Here’s something most people don’t get to experience because it’s not really high on the touristy list of Hong Kong. If you head over to where the fish markets are, you can see these old-timey tram cars. They cost almost nothing to ride in, and you can just jump in and ride around all day! Those windows on the 2nd floor up top are particularly cool.
Here’s one of my favorite new techniques I’ve been employing quite a bit when I am working on these super-techy looking cities. It’s a fairly simple technique where I duplicate the layer and then give it a vertical blur. You have to use a pretty high number where the buildings are almost unrecognizable. Then, you can change the blending mode to overlay and then just mask out the bits you don’t like.
This is a view of Hong Kong from my room there at The Ritz-Carlton on my last morning there. It was absolutely surreal to watch the fog roll in and out of the buildings on the other side of the river. I was on the “Kowloon” side and across the water there is the Hong Kong side. It was pretty fun taking the photo because the fog was moving very fast, hiding and showing different buildings every few seconds. So, rather than “guess,” I just took about 100 photos and found the best one later in Lightroom. I’m lazy like that. 🙂
Some of you may know that one of my favorite shows is “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” – and here is a funny Youtube video I found that has some Dennis highlights.
Daily Photo – Hong Kong Forever
I’ve been taking more and more photos when I don’t show the horizon. So many cities are recognizable by their skyline… so sometimes I like to obscure that information. Hong Kong is also known for this particular shape of building. I think in the 70’s and 80’s that the Chinese government built about 100 buildings of this same design and crammed them all together like this.
One day my friend Simon started showing lots of cool secret spots all over Hong Kong. Some of these places were really hard to get into… especially because it was illegal. I don’t know why I keep engaging in illegal activities in China. It doesn’t really seem that smart, now that I think about it!
