Nightlife

'Young Nightlife' was the photography brief this week. Me and Helen went to a gig at the Fringe Club where there were three bands playing as part of the HK Live series of gigs. One of the features as always at the Fringe is the number of people taking photographs and videoing. It really seems that every little event is so recorded and documented nowadays. There were half a dozen photographers and two or three people with video cameras, plus people taking photos with their mobile phones etc. At the start there were more people documenting the gig than there were in the audience and at one point a kind of mini queue of people waiting to take close-up shots even developed.

We went to HK Live a few months ago and it was pretty good, especially a local band Innisfallen who were excellent, but overall this wasn't a great gig. The first artist was ST, a Hong Kong electronic artist who was by far the strongest of the three in the sense that he at least had his own sound and style and a bit of 'edge'. The second band, Marfa & Ne-af from LA, was visually the most interesting and most of the shots are of them but musically they were pretty dire. They were a 'we're crap but in a knowing, ironic kind of way so that makes it OK' kind of band. Unfortunately being knowing and ironic doesn't change the fact that they were still crap. The last performers were Snoblind - two accountants showing us their photo albums over a generic, wishy-washy electronic soundtrack does not an engaging multimedia experience make in my book, so we left.

Maybe I'm just getting too old for 'young nightlife'.

Foreigners

The topic this time was 'Foreigners' with the particular proviso that we could only use a mobile phone camera. In my job I take pictures of fellow foreigners very often so I wanted to try something different. I also wanted to subvert the camera-phone limitations.

I went to the harbour and decided to shoot some harbour landscapes, for which a camera-phone is about the worst tool. It's obviously very common for tourists to take photos of themselves at the harbour with their phones and I wanted to play with this idea. I decided to take many shots in different light and stitch them together in Photoshop to give a feeling of the multitude of images that tourists shoot of Hong Kong harbour but out of these very common shots produce something visually interesting. I used transparency to keep the feeling of multiple images and to give the composition a rhythm.

Old Streets and Beggars

The next two topics were 'beggars' and 'old streets'. I didn't have time to shoot so much for these two weeks. The beggars topic in particular needs some investment in time to do well. I feel that shooting beggars out of context isn't so meaningful, to do it well you need to get to know them and their stories. The beggar shot here is of the guy who hangs out across the road from our office. I see him most days when I get off the bus and it would be nice to get to know him and maybe do a photojournalism project on his daily life someday.

The old streets are Canal Street in Wan Chai and an old area near San Po Kong.

MTR

'People on the MTR' was the next topic.

I felt I got a mix of shots, some when the MTR is stereotypically busy and some when it was almost deserted (the Tseung Kwan O line on a Saturday morning). I also experimented with taking a series, see the last photo, which I want to explore more later.

Shopping, part 2

After Times Square I wandered over to the Beverley Mall near Sogo where there are a lot of small fashion shops. The photographer shooting the sales girls wasn't quite sure how he felt about me photographing him.

Shopping, part 1

The next topic was 'People Shopping in Shopping Malls'. It's always more tempting to shoot somewhere old and a bit run-down as it tends to be visually more interesting and people are generally more relaxed and open but I wanted to try shooting in a more sterile, middle-class environment and see if I could make some interesting images there so I shot in Times Square in Causeway Bay.

Unofficial Spaces

This set of photos was not part of an assignment but was taken the same week as the shopping photos. I took my camera on my hike up the mountain up the road from our house and luckily the old people had constructed their unofficial swimming pool in the stormwater drainage channel. They make it by putting boards covered with sheeting against the fence across the channel.

I had seen them before but had never had my camera with me. When I first got there there were several old ladies swimming and they were understandably reticent about a strange gweilo photographing them in their swimming costumes. Luckily a local guy turned up later and I got in the 'pool' and and everyone relaxed and were fine with me taking some shots. They told me that they usually swam early in the morning because otherwise the government busybodies would come and stop them swimming.

I really like these small acts of creativity and disobedience that you find everywhere.

In the style of Walker Evans

Our first assignment was to shoot in the style of Walker Evans. I had to go to West Kowloon for my Environmental Studies project so I did some shooting whilst I was over there.

We chatted to some old ladies who lived in Tai Kok Tsui in the little square of streets that jut out into the construction area for what will be the new West Kowloon Cultural District. This is the area where the Johnnie To film 'Breaking News' was shot. The ladies told us that where they were sitting used to be next to the ferry pier before the reclamation work. At that time the area was lively with many people coming and going, many hawkers and dai pai dongs selling fresh seafood etc. but now the area has died. They missed the life of the district and missed the sea view, which has been replaced by a construction site and new developments but didn't want to move because this was where they had always lived and where their friends were.

They feel that the government just does what it wants and doesn't take their views into account. They just hope that there will be somewhere for them to sit and talk in the new development.

The Blog

This is my blog for the digital photography course I'm taking at the moment.