Christian Photography

Today I went to pick up a lens from the camera rental shop by Clarke Quay. Not being a professional, it's hard for me to justify spending thousands on a piece of equipment that will be used for less time than it spends idle. But it is nice to play with expensive toys from time to time, and $40 for a day with a pricey lens feels more acceptable.

Sitting in the shop waiting for my turn, I looked around and saw on the wall an advert for Photography With Purpose. That seemed a good idea. Far better than Purposeless Photography, where you just wave your arms and hit the shutter release button, and hope something pleasing materialises. I looked closer.

A shot in the dark

This evening I went back to Tung Chung, along with a tripod, a camera with a rather heavy lens, and a cheese sandwich for my wife.

Wetlands again

With an old friend in town, and recovering from the glory of yesterday's birthday dinner (crowned with an enormous apple pie with my name on it) I planned to revisit the Wetlands Park today.

Large Nick

Before dinner this evening, we went to play pool at a bar down the street from the hotel; unlike England, where proficiency at pool indicates not just a mispent youth, but a tendency to hang out in dodgy joints where men get beaten to death with cues, Canadian pool halls are bright, clean places where you go to smack balls together. Although there's still a buzzer on the door to let you in, which makes the whole thing feel a bit like Prohibition.

Roasting again

I woke up at 7 this morning, which would have been annoying if I was suffering from air conditioning, but much worse as I'd stayed up until 2am last night watching Max Payne.

Sham Shui Po

After work I hopped on a train and headed up to Sham Shui Po. Barely fifteen minutes from all the expense and glitz of Central is a street selling vast amounts of intellectual-property-infringing gadgets, and stuff for photography.

Buying cameras in Wan Chai

Today I went with my sister-in-law-to-be to buy a camera at the Wan Chai Computer Centre. This is a two floor maze crammed with tiny shops selling electronic devices. It's a strange array of shops as they all seem to sell almost exactly the same things, with very slight variations in price.

Something new, something old

Today, I'm finally going to upload the Automatic Comedian that I've been working on since the middle of last year. I would have done it sooner, but I've had problems with understanding simple things like DNS and FTP and JFDS*. Then I'm going to send it to its inspiration, and hope that he likes it and doesn't tell me to obliterate it from the internet forever. Fingers crossed now...

Secondly, I'm starting a new project. Every day I'm going to photograph a different cliche, and try to publish them on Flickr. As I've a few days coming up where I'm going to be out of the country and in hotel rooms barren of wi-fi, or at weddings (where I understand it's de rigeur not to spend the event shouting obscenities at a wilfully unhelpful image processing program), I might not actually get to upload something every day, but I'm hoping that over the course of the next 49 days, I'll average one cliche per day.

Here's the first one:

If you want more, follow this link (as at today it's only got one photograph, but every day that should swell).

If you want even more, I suggest you read the Dictionary of Cliches, which is where I'm selecting my delicious, fresh cliches from.

* Just flipping well do something!

Tripods

This weekend I purchased a new tripod, which was a joyful event for me.  I already have a lot of tripods:

1. One with a missing mounting plate because the plate was attached to the bottom of my old Canon that I 'lost' in France in 2002 after drinking ten pints of Exceedingly Strong Lager
2. One spindly legged and very wobbly tripod that it's mandatory to be given for free when you spend lots of money on new cameras in the Wan Chai computer store
3. A Benro tripod that's slightly less spindly than the free tripod, with a ball head, which is jolly nice, but with a rather awkward quick release plate that seems to require you to push much too hard on the body of your camera when you're trying to mount it
4. A minature tripod for a very small camera, that falls over when I put even my compact camera on it.

Christmas is getting earlier and earlier

Christmas arrived two months and two days early this year: my girlfriend bought me a new camera. This is rather exciting, because although I've been saving up for one, the route to affording a high-end SLR is long and torturous when you're putting away just a little bit of money every month. Now I have my shiny new photograph-making machine, much earlier than expected.

What do you buy the photographer who has everything?

A mug shaped like a camera lens, apparently.

Buy one here.

I have two qualms about this. If it really is as realistic a facimile as the photographs make it out to be, will you risk pouring hot coffee over your precious Canon lens by mistake, and if it's manufactured out of rubber and plastic, is there anything bad that could happen if you start drinking hot liquids out of it?

Otherwise, jolly good show, Photojojo...

Becoming a pro photographer

Today I had my first assignment as a photographer. That's right, I've turned pro. If being paid with a glass of ginger and some potatoes constitutes being a pro, that is.

Early morning timelapse photography

I got up at five this morning and took a taxi down to the waterfront, where we spent a few fractious minutes looking for shelter from the incoming rain, and then set up my camera and laptop with a view of the harbour. Then there were two less-than-exciting hours of listening to the camera taking a photograph every five seconds, before the laptop battery died and we decamped to the Flying Pan for breakfast.

Peng Chau

Today we took a ferry to Peng Chau, a small island near Lantau. On the way there, the ferry passed Disneyland, that Hong Kong money pit that I keep meaning to go to, but haven't quite get round to.

Chang Tsai, Fine Art Museum of Taiwan

We started the day with a visit to Taipei's Museum of Fine Art. Unlike when we visited at Christmas, Cai Guo and his exploding car extravaganza was not in situ; not was the hot tub full of strangers. Given the weather was chilly and damp, perhaps the second absence was a good thing.

Tai O, at last

At long last, after at least a year of meaning to get round to it, we went to Tai O.

Another sunny day

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and so I scuttled like an overgrown cockroach betwixt the comedy club and my apartment.

I was going to say a well-dressed cockroach, but I didn't realise until 5pm that I had neglected to do up my flies. Say what you like about cockroaches, you don't see them risk inadvertently exposing themselves.

Unexpected pain

My beard needs a trim. I know this because every time I take a swig from this can of tepid Carlsberg, a few of the hairs from my moustache get trapped in the top of the can and are torn out.

It's aversion therapy for hairy alcoholics.

Finding things out

For the last two weeks I've been searching in vain for my ipod.  I looked in all my many bags, under all the rubbish on my desk at work, under every pile of post and books and DVDs on the table in my flat.  No luck.  I've been troubled by this loss, deprived of my best means of ignoring the world while on public transport.  Luckily nobody has tried to talk to me in the last two weeks, but without the sonic screen of NWA on constant repeat, it was only a matter of time before I'd have to interact with something other than myself.

Sometimes size matters

Last week I went to see Nouvelle Vague play at the Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong. Despite the signs saying photography was prohibited in the venue, nobody seemed to have any problem getting a camera out - I was a little worried about bringing my SLR with me, but once I'd seen several other people using theirs, I threw caution to the wind.
Possibly this was because the security staff were more concerned with trying to get drunk Frenchmen to sit down (all the way through High Tone's set a bunch of Gallic yahoos kept standing up / drinking / smoking much to the upset of the security staff, who ... stared at them and didn't really do anything. Lacksadaisical? Or pragmatic, given that the French were twice the size of them. Ah well, apart from the occasional yell of 'Allez le securite' there wasn't much interaction between them.
Anyway, I got to get my camera out. With it's seldom used 300mm telephoto. Which actually gave some pretty nice shots (when my hands weren't wobbling too much to blur everything up - oh, for an image-stabilised lens. Oh, for some cash to spend on fripperies like that...)
Got this: happy with the triangle of light behind Nadeah

and also this, which I'm rather pleased with (although it evokes the atmosphere of a smoky jazz bar, rather than a stadium full of drunks and French people pastiching 80s New Wave...)