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!
This was my first time to visit this radical area of Hong Kong. I think I had maybe been here ten years before, but that was in the middle of the daytime in the sweltering heat. You can only hang out in Chinese fish markets in blazing heat for a short time before you’ve had enough. I had never thought about how beautiful it would be at dusk with all the colorful lights spilling into the streets, though.
As you may note, each entry has a country and a city beside the date at the top… go ahead and click on it to see all the entries from these cities… there are a TON, since the blog now has over 4,000 posts! When you get to the bottom, you can also click to see more.
Daily Photo – Foggy and Moody Hong Kong
I took this on my last morning there before catching the ferry over to Macau. That turned out to be one of the longest days of the trip because it was nonstop action in Macau. We had dinner with the PR guy that works for the Ritz-Carlton there. He told us some of the CRAZIEST STORIES about what happens in Macau… my goodness… it makes Vegas look like a kindergarten playground.
Here’s a new shot that I recently processed from a rather exciting quad flight over some government housing in Hong Kong. I was standing in the sun, and it was pretty hard to see the screen to see what I was capturing. This is actually a common problem. I’ve been meaning to pick up a hood, the cool Smart Controller or maybe even one of those FPV headsets.
