What better way to show the light side of Hong Kong than by showing you the Symphony of Lights. It's a light show put on every Sunday by the buildings lining the waterfront. On certain spots on the waterfront promenade on the Kowloon side music plays in sync with the light show. It creates such a stunning sense of vibrancy.
I also really like this shot I got of the skyline from a harbour cruise. So often we see these up close shots that cut away the real context and give this ethereal vibe to what you see, but there's always context.
Sometimes the context makes the up close shot even more impressive.
But Hong Kong has a dark side to it as well. And it's not just dark alleys that sometimes make for cool photographs.
I want you to take a close look at these two photos
Zoom in on the building in the center. Look at how run down it looks. And then look at the big fancy skyscraper just down the street.
There are buildings in poor condition all over Hong Kong. But it gets worse than that. Despite a vast amount of apartment towers, there's not enough space for everyone, and some people live in "cage homes". I won't belabor the point, you've seen my other shots and videos of the splendor of Hong Kong, just know that there's quite a divide in this city.
One of the most unique things about Hong Kong are the Central-Mid-levels escalators. Central is an area on Hong Kong island where a lot of the skyscrapers are, and it's a very hilly area. And so they built these escalators to bring people up and down. In the morning the escalators go down and then they switch and go up for the rest of the day.
When you describe it in such a functional way, it seems like there's nothing special about them. Some escalators, big deal. But there's life in these escalators. Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle captured it so well in their classic movie Chungking Express. It inspired me to go and try to capture that life as best I could.
Yes, Hong Kong has these strange corners and fascinating stories and splendid lights, but it's still a real place. How do you capture that? On the one hand, it's obvious. Of course Hong Kong is a real place. It's on the map and there's history and Wikipedia pages, it's not like Hogwarts or Narnia. But when these stories precede it, it can seem detached from reality. But in most ways it's just like everywhere else. People go about their day, they wait for the bus, they talk to their friend, they glance at the sights, and look forward to dinner, and look forward to tomorrow....