Color and activity

It's hard to find a single phrase to define Hong Kong. You can be horrified by the pollution or captivated by its industry. You can long for the days of British rule or you can wonder at its cultural contrasts - a snippet of UK and a bucket load of eastern magic.

These narrow streets along Hong Kong Island were my favourite places. The trams are so beautiful, decked out as they are in advertising, each of them so different from the next and the street signs, brilliant and light by night, duller by day, an eclectic mix of Chinese characters and signs so familiar such as Lee jeans.

This image didn't need much work. I just brought the colours out to lighten and brighten the signs then added a very subtle edge effect. This darkened vignette effect isn't noticeable unless you look for it but it edges the photo, subtly keeping your eye in the middle where the action is by creating a slightly darker border around it.

To create a vignette frame effect, finish editing the photo and then add a new empty layer to the top of the Layer stack. Make a selection using the Rectangular marquee tool around the inside edge of the image. Invert the selection so you have just the edge selected and fill with a dark gray or a dark brown. Then deselect the selection and apply a really big blur to it - the Gaussian blur filter is the best choice here - you don't want to see any edge left.

Now, adjust down the opacity of this top layer so that it blends with the image below. You want to be just able to see the effect darkening the edge of the photo when you look for it but not if you don't - if that makes sense!

Hong Kong Island tram

I'm not sure exactly what to say about this photo, it still takes my breath away every time I see it. It is so quintessentially Hong Kong.

Years ago they talked about taking out the trams, thankfully, reason prevailed and they didn't. They are so unique and, in this photo, the tall tram, tall buildings and narrow roadway all work to give a wonderful perspective on this beautiful place.

Interestingly, the image can be cropped across the middle to give an equally beautiful and powerful image but, when it came to the crunch, I chose not to crop it. It's this version that speaks to me, it's what I saw and how I captured the scene, so here it is. Enjoy!.

Streets of Hong Kong

Some of the best photo opportunities in Hong Kong happened around dusk as the lights began to cast their magic on the streets. The time frame is tight, you need to be there, camera in hand, and catch the mix of daylight and night light. But the rewards are definately there for the taking as shown here. This shot, to my recollection was taken in the Temple street night market area.

My new Pentax K10D digital SLR was my companion for this trip. It was its first outing so I was interested to see how it would perform. True to some reviews, as I captured mainly in JPEG format, the images lacked saturation. I did boost it in camera slightly uisng the saturation adjustment but I opted to stop short of boosting it too much in the camera and fix the images myself later on.

I did take advantage from time to time of the K10D's push button RAW mode which lets you press a button on the case and take one RAW image. I did this when I had time to take two shots and when I had something I thought would lend itself to working with in Camera RAW.

However, and this is a big thing, in Photoshop CS3 you can open any JPEG image in Camera RAW and work with a subset of the Camera Raw functions on the image. This is a very powerful new tool and makes it easy to apply some fixes that would take more time in Photoshop - and, because you're working in Camera RAW, the fixes aren't saved to the image so they can be undone any time.

Curious? Open Photoshop CS3 Bridge, find your JPEG image and right click it. Instead of choosing Open, choose Open in Camera RAW and go play!