During the summer of 2013 I spent an extraordinary week in Hong Kong visiting friends and making lots of new friends. Aside from taking pictures, my friend Arne (who is a filmmaker as well) and I decided that while I was there, we needed to shoot some video. So in a matter of hours he’d drummed up actors, make-up artists, runners. Amazing! I had so much fun and I miss my friends. The video we shot was for one of my tracks. We’re planning to release the video in summer of ’14. But I digress, let’s get back to Kong…
The heat
Hong Kong in June is hot. If you can imagine walking out of your nicely airconditioned hotel, into a hot steambath. Like a clammy, soaky, hot towel slapped around you. You walk around the first couple of days, wondering if you’ll ever catch your breath again. Hell, you’re wondering whether or not you will survive your stay. After a couple of days, your body no longer goes into fight or flight mode as soon as you step outside and you’re able to take in some of your surroundings.
Architecture
The thing that immediately makes being in Hong Kong such an unforgettable sensory experience is the amazing architecture all around. This city is unbelievably enchanting, as your gaze is soon drawn upwards. Everywhere you look you see high buildings. Really high buildings, but they’re slender, narrow, which makes for a very peculiar look. The city is quite clean, it seems Hong Kong denizens take pride in their city being tidy. It’s a nice experience. Also the people are really friendly.
Something happened
While I spent my days, but to be honest, mostly nights, wandering the city by myself after I had fun with my Hong Kong friends, I started to notice something in my photographs. I was no longer photographing horizontally, but nearly exclusively vertically. Still, however strange this might seem, this was not what caught my eye. I am a sci-fi nut and what I was starting to see in my photos were spaceships. Convoys of them. So I started editing more aggressively, like a sculptor releasing from the images the thing I saw in my mind’s eye. Aside from the incredible Blade Runner-like quality of the city, I was walking through a sci-fi metropolitan dream, looking up at fleets of starships on thousand year voyages.
Tech
The images below were shot on a Canon 5D mkII with an array of different lenses, but mostly with my SIGMA 15mm F2.8 EX DG Diagonal Fisheye Lens. All photographs were shot at night with long exposures. I edited in Adobe’s Creative Suite 6 with a few plugins for color correction and effects. If you are interested in purchasing a print of these images, please contact me for pricing and shipping information.
