The view down the alley

Walking down a lane in the Tian Dze Fan artists area of Shanghai. Saw this scene, and something struck me about it. Didn't last for a long time, but since I was surgically bonded to my NIkon D300 on this trip, it didn't take a moment for me to get set and roll.

Not sure what caught my eye here, but I think it was the fact that each house in the little lane here had a washing bar stuck out over the lane, and that gives a nice set of lines at the top of the picture which disappear into the distance, and contrast to the two sets of parralels which run down the corners of the shot. Whatever it is, I came back from a trip with at least one pic that both looks and feels like you're there.

On the back of the Bund

Spent a lot of time walking round the streets of Shanghai. Since I resisted the urge to pack all the gear I thought I could use, and restricted myself to my Nikon D300 and a 50mm 1.4 slung over my shoulder, and an Sb-800 flash (which I strapped to my belt, embarrassingly) I was travelling light and had everything ready all the time.

Using this rig, I also got to know the variations of that Nikkor 50mm pretty damn well in all the F-stops: where the sharpness was a little lacking, where it was so damn sharp you could cut yourself, how it reacted to bright light at midday, and when it struggled to focus in the dark. No changing to a lens that would be more suited to the conditions: if I wanted the shot I had to work to make it happen. Realised that sometimes limitations are really liberations. Plus it's really small and light, and although it's a little tight on a crop sensor, it's great for people and for isolating parts of the image. I stuck a circular polarizer

on the front of it to enhance in the usual way, but also to act as a neutral density filter and give me 2-3 stops of grace in the midday sun, and it worked like a charm.

One thing that struck me about Shanghai was the juxtapositions: drab grey concrete pavements with the colour explosion of a Tai Chi class going through their movesin front of it. Young beggars on the old glory of the Bund. It's often all mixed up there, and I'd find myself decoding a completely different story to the one my wife was looking at, although we were looking at the same scene. And amid the feeling of new prosperity, there was the constant reminder that life is still really tough for many people there, and for many their next meal is in no way guaranteed.

Just behind the post office on the Bund, in an area filled with monuments to money - the old money of the original Bund buildings, all granite marble and brass, and the new buildings that call out to them from Pudong, across the Yellow River - I stumbled on a lean-to with a tiny kitchen, a bed, and some clothes. Nobody was around, but someone calls that place home. I didn't intrude, just grabbed some shots from the pavement, and went on my way.

Took out the trash yesterday. The communal bin and the recycle bins are out on the landing of the fire escape. I've lived in this building for nearly two years, all told, and taken the trash out plenty of times. I've never looked out of the window in there.

Not sure I did, yesterday. Glad I did, though, 'cos there is something about the view out ther that grabbed me. Went inside, grabbed my Nikon D300 and the Nikkor 50mm 1.4 that'always on it these days, and took a few frames.

Liked the result.

Busy, and busy planning for Shanghai!

Madness right now. I'm just trying to finish my first chapter of my M. Phil. thesis on Joseph Conrad. So my desk looks something like this again, although this is an older photo from when I was doing a proposal for a different academic project (and, surprisingly, it's my second most popular photo on flickr. Messy desks seem to resonate with people...). But work like this really eats into the photo time, you know? I've got to get it done this week, though, especially because I've decided that next week, during Easter, I deserve a break, and I'm heading off to Shanghai.

Never been there before, although I've been living in Asia for ages, and in China for between 5 and 8 years (depending on your definition of China: I lived in Taiwan for three years before moving to Hongkers). So I'm totally excited at the prospect.

This means I get to play my favourite Flickr game: plan-your-trip-by-using-our-search! (I outlined it in yesterday's post). And there are some crazy photogs in Shanghai. I've stumbled across these folks already: lifemage, theshanghaieye and tommyOshima.

Still working out the details, obviously want to take in the Bund and the view of Pudong, but not 100% sure about what's available in Shanghai, so I'll be doing more research on this during breaks from my other research. If you have any ideas or recommendations of what to do in Shanghai, give me a shout out in the comments section.

Gear wise, I'll have to travel quite light, and I'm toying with the idea of just hooking up my Nikon D300, a 50mm 1.4 and a 20mm. Only. No zoom, no macro. Not even a flash, maybe. Just want to unencumber and focus on getting great people and street shots with these to tack-sharp, creamy-buttery-bokeh nikkor lenses.

Harajuku style

That's what I really love about Tokyo. You never know what you're going to see around the next corner. It really surprised me, with all you hear about how conformist Asian cultures are, and how there is no space for the individual , it's all about society and the good of the many.

I grew up in a small mining town in South Africa, and it was a lot less individualist than Tokyo. And certainly a lot less than Harajuku. I once went to our local pub back home with a friend of mine who had dreadlocks - nearly got the shit fun kicked out of us. Yet here we are, in a small but busy shopping street called, appropriately enough, Takeshita Street, just off Omote-Sando in Harajuku, and people dressed like this wander around without causing so much as a raised eyebrow or a second glance.

Wicked place to walk around, with people like this popping up - you feel like you're in the world of Akira or Ghost in the Shell. I think I created more of an impact than he did as he went by me, switching from my nikkor to my sigma, backing up to grab the shot, getting the Lowepro Slingshot in the way, out the way. He belonged. Obviously, I didn't.

Shibuya Starbucks

Did a lot of walking round Tokyo in the hot summer sunshine when I was there last. There's just so many places to go to, and so much to see, that you really can't keep in one place for too long. Well, I couldn't, but then I do have that problem when travelling. Just can't be satisfied with where I am, I need to see what's round the next corner - same as when I watch TV, channel-flipping every thirty seconds, totally obsessive-compulsive. The great thing in Tokyo: whatever's round that next corner is always going to be interesting.

The problem with my channel-flipping style, though, is that you literally can't go on forever. There's going to be a time in your day when your energy levels bottom out, and you need somewhere to regroup and refuel.

My favourite spot for this, in the middle of the day, was Starbucks. Boringly. But not just any Starbucks. The Starbucks in Shibuya, overlooking one of the busiest intersections in the world, where 1500 pedestrians cross the road each time the traffic lights change.

The thing about people in Tokyo is that they're just interesting. There are a load of different styles and cultural subgroups, and how you dress is a very important way of identifying which group you're in. Gothic, cosplay, kimono, punk, post-punk, arthouse, modern, 1920's, salaryman, pretty much any style you can think of you'll see walking round, and all pulled off really well. Here in Hong Kong, people don't have the same sense of style, and most of the street culture here is pretty monolithic - folks aren't creative about how they dress. There is some punk and very rarely some cosplay/dress-up, but you can tell the people are doing dress-by-numbers from a magazine. In Tokyo, you can tell people really live their subgroup. They don't look out of place at all.

The best place to see this, of course, is Harajuku, not Shibuya. But in Shibuya I could sit on the second floor of the Starbucks, armed with a 70-300mm, and drink my coffee while waiting for interesting things to happen. When they do, you just need to lift and shoot, and then go back to your coffee. With the crop sensor on the Nikon D50, I was able to get even closer to the action.

And when I got tired of people watching, there was a great Tsutaya to go and rifle through, looking for all the music that's hard to find in Hong Kong Records: Booka Shade, Justin Robertson, whatever I looked for, I could find. Pity there was only so much I could buy.

New must have book: The Hot Shoe Diaries

I don't often plug for gear, but there are some things that really are essential.



I bought Joe McNally's last book, "The Moment it Clicks", last year, and since getting it I've read it constantly every time I need inspiration and advice. It's more than a standard camera book, and the how-to's are peppered with stories that Joe has about his tremendously varied and amazingly high-standard photographic career. Take some time and head on over to Joe's blog, for some of his kind of behind the scenes advice, great images and the classic Joe McNally style of writing, that really seems to jump right out at you and make you want to get out and raise your own photographic bar.



Good to see that his new book, "The Hot Shoe Diaries" is out, and I'll be getting it as soon as I possibly can. From the looks of it, it is equally packed with great advice about how to use flash and camera in the field, with real-world examples. There's a link to a PDF preview of the book on Dave Hobby's Strobist site, so head on over and have a look at it. Just be ready to grab you camera and shoot straight after you take a look, because there is no way you'll be happy to just around.

Here's that link again:

Bad weather at the Big Buddha

One of the first overtly tourist places that I went to after moving to Hong Kong was head up to the Big Buddha on Lantau Island. Mid-July, sunny and so typically-Hong-Kong hot and humid that I thought I may pass out on the stairway up to the buddha statue.

Po Lin is kind of out of the way for me, though, and since there's not really too much going up there for locals, I haven't been back in the four years since then. Enter the Year of The Goat, and the year has just been one damn thing after another. Bad luck, according to our more superstitious frineds and relatives: I'm a Horse and my wife is a Goat, and apparently, this isn't the greatest year for either of these two Chinese zodiac characters. The advice from my grandmother-in-law was that the only way you can cure this is through a visit to a couple of specific temples in Hong Kong. You guessed it: Po Lin is one of them.

So this put the idea of a trip out there firmly into our consciousness, but it still wasn't exactly a burning issue for us. But after finding ourselves at alittle bit of a loose loose end last weekend, we decided on Saturday that a trip back to Po Lin, more for a look around again and a ride on the Nong Ping cable car than anything about the luck changing, may not be a bad move. Even with the bad press surrounding Nong Ping, the tourist village up there, and especially the cable car, which has been plagued with some Very Bad Things since its opening, climaxing in the time that one of the gondolas came right off the cable and crashed to the mountain below. Luckily empty at the time.

Plus, Nong Ping had to a tourist trap, right?

So, we wake up on Sunday morning, look out the window (our bedroom has a view right across the channel to Tung Chung, and the cable cars going up the mountain) and we see grim weather. Coffee and discussion in bed follow, and we nearly stayed in bed and waited for more auspicious weather. But in the end, we decided to head out, no matter what the weather was like, so long as we left early to avoid the crowds.

Weather didn't improve. We didn't exactly have the best view from our gondola on the way up to the temple:

And this was the sunny face of Nong Ping, waiting to greet us:

Still, the Buddha statue in was much more moody in the mist than in the bright sunlight, like last time, and the atmosphere was pretty intense. Felt like we were headed off to learn one of the great secrets of the Universe, known only to a few and half-hidden through th ages by a band of select Shaolin monks (who apparently do daily shows for tourists at Nong Ping, so there you go).

Seems like we weren't the only ones headed up there with a view to getting good things:

A new addition to the temple complex is the Garden of Knowledge, which is on the Path of Wisdom (10 minutes walk, which is the quickest way to get wise available) :

Not that it got me any wiser: can't read Chinese, so I couldn't read the inscriptions. Still, a very strange spot, and well worth the walk. Nice details, too:

Speaking of details, this is a floor detail of the main temple:

All told, it's worth a visit. Just try not to get taken in by the prices up on the hill there, becauce they are very different to those down the bottom, and get in early to avoid the tour groups, which tend to go up there for lunch. You can read more about the place in this wikipeida entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tian_Tan_Buddha