吉姆 JIM HOFMAN | Photography Faces & places in China
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?
Ancient Stone Village
I had to kill a day between meetings so a group of us went to a couple tourist spots near Ninghai. One of them was an “ancient stone village” that was about 700 years old. It was an actual living village and not a museum.
Chinese Japanese Bar
Talking about bad timing. A bar in China opens with a Japanese theme the same month the whole country starts protesting against Japan’s activities surrounding some off-shore islands. We stumbled on it in the same alley as the restaurant where we ate dinner.
The OTHER red meat…
I’m a pretty adventurous eater, but I have my boundaries. Last night I challenged my boundaries and tested one of China’s seasonal delicacies – dog.
Shanghai II
More photos from wandering around the Pudong area of Shanghai. While in Paris people photograph the Eiffel Tower. In Shanghai you photograph the TV Tower. I like to photograph architecture in black and white because it reminds me of the opening sequence of Woody Allen’s movie “Manhattan” – complete with Gershwin music.
