Hong Kong: Looking back and Forward
Introduction
As of the time that I’m writing this, I’m due to go back to Hong Kong for the first time in around three years. Moreover, this is my first “long” trip back since enlisting in 2018 - my previous trips were only a few days long, and I didn’t get to shoot much. This has been by far the longest I’ve been away from Hong Kong in my life, and I must say it’s jarring to think about how much has changed. The world is obviously a very different place to what it was in 2019 (I heard there was a pandemic?) and I’ve definitely changed a lot too, both as a person and as a photographer.
For a long time, I thought that my move to Singapore (and the weekly shoots during my off days in the army) was what allowed me to take my photography to the next level, and that my cityscapes and later hawker work were significantly better than anything from Hong Kong. In fact, during my recent print sale earlier this year, I was asked why I didn’t want to sell any of my Hong Kong photos, or why there are so few of my Hong Kong photos on my website in general. My response to that was that “my website (and my store) is ultimately for me to put my best foot forward and to show off my best work, and that I think my more recent work by far exceeds the majority of my photos from Hong Kong.” And to be fair, I do think there is truth to that. I have definitely shot a lot more in Singapore than in Hong Kong, and I think that this consistency allowed me to improve fairly significantly. Moreover, I’ve been a lot more in touch with the art/photography scene in Singapore, with programmes like 2021 Objectifs SHYA allowing me to think about and interact with the medium in ways that I had never done before. When I was still in Hong Kong, I used to chart my “progress” by the photos I took during our family holidays - using that metric, if I were to compare my recent work from Tasmania or Indonesia with holidays of the past, I would admit that I think I’ve improved a lot.
One of the few images I took during my trip back in April 2019. It’s funny that even back then I felt like my photography had changed and developed in the six months I was in Singapore.
As this trip comes closer though, I realised that I wasn’t being fair on my past self. I may be a better photographer than I was back then, but I’m older and more experienced than I was, and so I was always going to improve as long as I kept working on honing my craft. Perhaps more significantly though, when I looked through my photos of Hong Kong, I do believe there is a lot of good work in there, and work that I should still be proud of today. While it may not match up to my best current work, but to undermine all my work pre-my time in Singapore would be unfair. I was already taking photography a lot more seriously before I had left Hong Kong, and my time in Hong Kong lay the foundations of this passion and hobby that I now devote so much time and energy (and money) to. I am only the photographer that I am today because of my time in Hong Kong where I could freely explore, and the community of close friends that I made as part of this exploration.
With this trip coming up, I’ve thus chosen ten photos from Hong Kong which I think best map out the start of my photography journey. These may not necessarily be my best or even favourite ten Hong Kong photos, but they are highly symbolic of where I was with my photography. I don’t know how much I will be able to shoot this trip, but I’m excited to walk down both new and familiar streets, but with a fresh pair of eyes. It’s funny - I used to judge my photography process from the summer holiday photo haul. Now I think it’s the reverse, and that my Hong Kong photography will always be my benchmark.
The day I decided I wanted to “take photography seriously” was the first day of a family holiday to Sri Lanka. I had received a Samsung point-and-shoot from my dad for my 12th birthday, and like how many people get into photography, I wanted to take photos during my holiday. I was bitten by the photography bug that trip (on top of many other insects), and so photography became an intrinsic part of travel for me. Every trip or holiday I’d make, I would be sure to bring my camera along, to test myself and see how much better I had gotten.
Back at home though, I admittedly did not shoot all that much. After the excitement of each holiday, my camera would often find itself locked up for weeks or months at end, waiting to be picked up and used. While I did sometimes pick up the camera to take photos of friends or to shoot for certain competitions, I never felt like shooting in Hong Kong captured my imagination in nearly the same way as shooting abroad. Life and school would get in the way, and for most of the year, I was not overly keen to shoot. One significant development during this time was that in 2016, I found a group of fellow photographer friends, forming what would later be known as “Canon Squad”.
This photo was from the first time that I wandered around Hong Kong for the sole purpose of photography. The decrepit signs really stood out to me, and so I was really disappointed when I walked past one day and found out they had repainted everything.
There was this annual competition hosted by Wheelock properties in Hong Kong, and it was the one time a year I would be interested in shooting in Hong Kong. This photo was my entry into the inaugural edition of the competition, which specified that the photo must be taken on the Peak. Looking back, I don’t know if I could have chosen a more cliche shot/location.
This was from my first outing with Canon Squad in August 2016. It was a couple of days before starting the new school year, and a couple of friends and I decided to go and shoot together. We hiked and climbed through gutters (I remember thinking how unsafe it was) to reach this vantage point of Tsing Ma Bridge. While the photo was nothing to write home about, it was my first time trying light trail photography (something which would become a feature of a lot of my later cityscape work). Perhaps more importantly though, photography started to become a social thing for me - Canon Squad became the backbone of my social life for much of my final years in school.
The summer of 2017 was arguably the most important period for my photography in my life (at least thus far). A break-up meant that I needed something to distract myself, and photography became that thing. I spent hours upon hours trying to keep myself occupied, and I ended up reading and watching endless guides about photography. It was during this period that I discovered many of the photography youtube channels that I watch today, and the foundation of my theoretical understanding of the technical side of photography was laid during that time. Towards the end of the summer, I made a trip to Nepal with some friends, and I could feel that my photography had improved. I think what is telling is that if you go through my travel and street portfolios on my website, the oldest images are from Nepal.
The events of that summer lit a fire in me, and really sparked a borderline obsession with consuming photographic knowledge and content. At the end of that undeniably challenging summer, I knew that I came back both a stronger person and a photographer. For the rest of the year, I would go out to shoot with increasing frequency, roaming the streets of Hong Kong. I don’t think I quite knew what I was looking for, but the desire to shoot was there. Having many of my friends also being apart of Canon Squad really helped - I didn’t have to choose between socialising and photography. Having a group of photographer friends meant that I could always do both.
Choi Hung estate is a world renowned photography location, and I remember walking in and seeing hundreds of people shooting on their phones for Instagram. I knew that I was not going to be able to get photos of empty courts that I had seen on the internet, but I think this shot does capture the essence of the place fairly well, without being one of the clíche shots of the area.
I remember dragging Canon squad out of bed at like 6am to walk around Shum Shui Po and Mongkok to do some street photography. For those who are not familiar with Hong Kong, the number of these pushcarts in Hong Kong is fairly remarkable. The combination of the pushcart and the signs make this one of the most quintessentially Hong Kong photos I’ve ever taken.
This is a photo that I’ve really grown to love since leaving Hong Kong. I guess there is something about craftsmanship which really appeals to me photographically, and has driven a lot of my photography pursuits while in Singapore. Really hoping to get more of this type of thing when I’m back.
As 2018 rolled around, I don’t think I changed my photography process very much, but I think more regular shooting meant that I was starting to find a visual style and voice (still something I am very much working on). One notable moment which gave me a lot of confidence was photographer Jaren Polin critiquing my work on his youtube channel (the video is titled “THESE PHOTOS DON’T SUCK!!!”, which is always reassuring). In my own life, I knew that 2018 was going to be a very stressful year with exams and later graduating and moving back to Singapore on the cards, and so photography increasingly became my respite from all the stressors.
2018 was the year I learnt to edit, which while very much an ongoing process, elevated my photography significantly. I ended up buying my first piece of photo editing software, and moved away from the limited features of the Apple Photos app. Like many, I would argue that that learning how to edit and post-process your images is one of the most important skills in photography, and something that not enough people pay attention to. While I was never quite a “purist”, learning to post-process meant that I was able to be a lot more intentional with what I was doing.
I ended up spending most of that final summer travelling or spending time with friends who were off to university, and so I didn’t quite shoot in Hong Kong as much as I would have liked. As I left Hong Kong, I was grateful for the opportunities that the city had provided me to learn and develop my photography, but was also ready to see what Singapore would bring. It’s funny - at this point in time, I had never shot in Singapore, and so it presented a new mysterious world for me to explore, and I could not wait.
I took this shot right after walking out of a restaurant, and it remains one of my luckiest captures ever. The light framed him perfectly, and I only had a few seconds before a cloud came over and the light was gone.
This was my last shot in Hong Kong, a couple of weeks before I headed over to Singapore to begin my new life. While I know this locations is one of the most overshot vantage points in the world, I felt it would be a shame if I didn’t have this shot in my portfolio.
