Rambling Thoughts

Hong Kong Island View From Kowloon, originally uploaded by CeeKay’s Pix.

I’ve revisited Hong Kong recently when Cheryl was there for work. The island state-within-a-state was how I remembered it: vibrant and loud. This time around, I had more time to visit the place on my own, armed with a camera, visiting and snapping up photos of sights and places in and around Kowloon.

We stayed in Mong Kok, a former seedy enclave of prostitute dens and gambling joints which has been transformed recently with urban renewal projects like the Langham Place (which we stayed in). The gleaming towers of Langham Place pierced through the skyline of crowded apartments and equally crowded street markets like a beacon of 21st century urbanity in an area that hasn’t seen much new development due to its proximity to the old airport. City zoning laws then didn’t permit the building of gleaming skyscrapers until recently and the Langham Place took that new liberalization with great stride.

The Hotel was a homely luxury, filled with a smell that is more European than Asian, perhaps projecting the uniqueness of this city island state in its embrace of Western modernity in the rise of Asian, particularly the Chinese ascent, in the new global equilibrium of trade and military power. Perhaps it is a foreboding of how China will transform itself in this century as it becomes more integrated into the world economy. As China embraces economic liberalization, so too will its cities. And like Hong Kong, its buildings, people and way of life will be infused with an intoxicating mix of Westernisation while retaining its unique Asian roots. Sort of like drinking French wine with Sprite or mixing expensive XO Cognac with ice and green tea.

I enjoy this paradoxical mix. I find it refreshing perhaps of my Chinese roots. Growing up, I grapple with how my Chinese heritage would co-exist with my seemingly Western outlook and thinking. While I embraced values like individual freedom, I am often reminded by my peers about the way how Chinese empires were build to last thousands of years on draconian and often repressive means.

Maybe, this is the way forward for Asian countries.

Asian countries will just have to build modernity upon the foundations of the old. Perhaps then, can a new Asian renaissance be dawned. In what form that takes remains to be seen. But if it is anything like Langham Place, I think that we are in for a pretty good ride.

Sensoji, originally uploaded by CeeKay’s Pix.

I’ve finally uploaded photos from the final couple of days from our recent trip to Tokyo. It took a while because my PowerMac went kaput and I had to change to, urgh, a PC running Windows Vista.

It has been a while since I had used a PC for my hobby (I use a Windows notebook everyday for work, but that’s different). However, the applications that I used heavily for photo workflow management are the same across platforms (Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop). But I do miss the iLife suite of applications, especially iPhoto. In place, I had installed the free Google Picasa.

As much as Microsoft is positioning Vista as the advance leap for Windows, I’m really disappointed with the overall compatibility of the OS. Until today, I am still facing intermittent wireless networking problems caused by device drivers. My Belkin PCI Wireless G card had never worked properly since the first day it was installed. Ironically, to get the drivers for the card to work, one has to install the new driver and then (this is sooo funny) roll back the driver. This will work as long as you do not switch off your PC. If you do, you have to repeat the whole thing over again.

Anyway, back to the photos.

For this batch, I’ve decided to try a different look and to play up the mood and emotions of the photos. I’ve experimented with sepia and color isolation and I’m pretty happy with the results. Some of them were taken from the inside of the bus so the color is not really great in the first place.

A lot of work went in to prepare this photo introducing this post, Sensoji. I had to digitally remove some hanging power cables and tweak the clouds to be darker so that they complement the umbrella carrying people of the photos.