吉姆 JIM HOFMAN | Photography Faces & places in China
Author Archive
Wholesale Food in Shenzhen
Ordinarily I wouldn’t write a post about wholesale food, but it was actually an interesting adventure. Some friends needed to stock-up on meat and invited me to go to a huge restaurant wholesale market in Shenzhen.
Night Light
Photography is all about capturing light. At night most modern cameras struggle because digital sensors don’t perform well in low light conditions. My current Nikon D7000 does a great job during the day and in the studio – where there’s light. Not so much at night.
China Tech
I’m amazed at how technology is taking over people’s lives in China, much in the same way it has in the US. The boys in China are glued to smart phones and computer screens just like in the US. Their faces are illuminated by the dim glow from games.
Shopping in Yangjiang
I arrived in Yangjiang a couple days ago and needed to do some grocery shopping. I decided to take some camera gear to the grocery store to document the local flavor. Some indoor street photography on a hot Sunday afternoon…
Yangjiang Street Photos
Everytime I come to Yangjiang I take a very long walk through the city. The same path each time. Each time I see totally different sites and people. It’s never the same twice.
Another Hong Kong Jet Lag Photo Walk
I’ll have to admit – I don’t remember taking these photos. I landed at HKG at 10PM. Got to my hotel in Kowloon at midnight. Slept for about 4 hours, then woke up and walked down to the harbor to take some early morning photos.
Made in China
I take a lot of factory tours in China. That’s my job. I do it for many reasons, including learning about how things are manufactured so I can become a better designer. I also take photos…
Creep Photography?
There’s probably a very fine line between street photography and creep photography.
Shanghai at Night
I’m at the tail end of another trip and have an extra day to kill in Shanghai. Last night I wandered the neighborhood in Pudong taking a few night shots with the P7700. It takes a little processing to get the noise out, but after a while I started liking the grainy quality. A retro Tri-X Pan black & white vibe.
Street Photos – Qingxi
Photographers are notorious for being poor judges of their own work. Selecting good from bad can be torture. What constitutes a good image is different for different people.
Hong Kong at 5AM
Jet lag can be a wonderful thing if your plan is to get some VERY early pre-sunrise street photos. It was a steamy morning wandering around the edge of the harbor observing and photographing the world waking up (and sleeping).
Stop – Thief!
I’ve decided that being a street photographer is like being a thief. Most of my subjects don’t realize I’m taking their photograph, and before they know it – I’ve stolen a moment of their life. Approximately 1/200th of a second of their life is captured on a sensor about the size of my thumb.
HKIA II
Another evening killing time taking photos in the airport before I fly home. The combination of epic architecture, interesting people and “golden hour” lighting produced some interesting images.
Hazy Hong Kong
Holy crap, there was a ton of smog on this trip. There was a dense cloud hanging over my stops in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. While I was in China the pollution in Beijing was off the charts.
Black & White
People often wonder why a photographer would eliminate color from a photograph. I make the decision to go monochrome if I feel the composition would be improved because the colors in a photo were no longer diverting the viewer’s eye around the photograph. When the image loses the dimension of color it simplifies the composition to a more graphic form.
Making Stuff in China
During the last few years I’ve begun documenting factory tours with photographs. Most of the shots are “technical” images meant to capture the factory’s capabilities, but every once in a while I see an “art quality” photo opportunity – which usually leaves my Chinese tour guide looking very puzzled. Why did he take a picture of THAT?
HKIA Airport
Just killing some time at the Hong Kong airport before I leave. There are always some interesting shots at my favorite airport in the world.
Yangjiang Kite Festival – Kites
This was my first kite festival so I wasn’t sure what to expect. My only assumption was there were going to be lots of kites. I was right about that.
Yangjiang Kite Festival – People
I estimate there were probably 5,000 people at the annual Yangjiang Kite Festival and after walking around the place for three hours I concluded I was the only non-Chinese person there. This made me a bit of a freak that earned me a 10 minute photo session with half of the Chinese school girls attending.
Umbrellas in Trees
I don’t know why there are red umbrellas hanging in the trees, but it certainly looks cool.
Kite Hippodrome
I stumbled on Yangjiang’s “Kite Hippodrome” while roaming the city on a Sunday morning. It’s actually a field flanked by inlets of a small lake. That makes it a great place to fly kites, but then I noticed that someone decided to plant trees in the field. It won’t be such a good place to fly kites pretty soon.
Temple Parade
Sometimes you have to go out and find great shots and sometimes the great shots find you. We were driving back to a factory after lunch and a few blocks from our destination we got jammed-up by a parade on the way to the village temple.
Art in the Chaos
Street photography is like a scavenger hunt. Sometimes you’re rewarded with the gift of an amazing image. A small slice of the temporal continuum is captured by a few million pixels. Someone’s ordinary life frozen in time for others to see. They may not consider that particular moment precious, but when removed from the context of their everyday existence it can become special. Perhaps art?
