Month: September 2013

Fa Yuen Street Market

Posted on by eddietay in Monochrome

Night photography poses a challenge for any photographer.

Even with a digital camera, you’ll need a wide aperture, longer exposures, perhaps a tripod, or image stabilization if you’re doing it handheld, and you’ll need to have a high ISO setting.

Auto-focus might be a problem if it gets too dark, as a digital camera may not be able to find a focal point quickly enough.

So if you’re a street photographer with a film rangefinder loaded with Ilford XP2 at ISO 400, the odds are somewhat stacked against you at night. This is one of those times when you wish you’d caved in and bought that Fuji X100s.

A street market at night, as it happens, is one of those wonderful scenarios where everything comes together.

As the light bulbs are bright, you’ll have natural vignetting. The goods might have been arranged to form a perfect frame within a frame.

IMG_20130918_0010 A4 640

IMG_20130918_0013 A4 640

The stall hawkers, even when they spot you, would be too preoccupied with selling their wares to their customers, while the customers’ attention would be on those wares.

IMG_20130918_0012 A4 640

IMG_20130918_0011 A4 640

IMG_20130918_0005 A4 640

This person did spot me…

IMG_20130918_0003 A4 640

Oh well … and to challenge myself, this:

IMG_20130918_0015 A4 640

Thanks for reading.

Grids, lines and colours

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

I’m now convinced that Hong Kong is a street photographer’s paradise.

I’ve been paying attention to grids, lines and colours and it seems to me that all I have to do is wait a little bit and the composition would fall into place after a while.

Mongkok is rather good for that sort of thing.

For example, the rectangular green grids of this candy store window has a lomography edge to it, and all I had to do was to memorise where the framelines of my beloved Leica M6 would be and wait until someone walks into the frame. Check out the reflections and the Chinese characters – they’re there and yet not so overwhelming:

IMG_20130906_0003 A3 adjusted A4 640

The diagonal lines were calling out to me as I was on a bridge:

IMG_20130906_0002 A3 adjusted A4 640

And finally, I like the grungy and yet contemplative mood this evokes:

IMG_20130906_0002 640

And I’m keeping a close watch on my diminishing supply of Kodak Portra 400 film with which these were taken…

Thanks for coming by today.