吉姆 JIM HOFMAN | Photography Faces & places in China
Posts Tagged ‘Eats’
Photo Dim Sum
Dim sum refers to a style of Cantonese food prepared as small bite-sized or individual portions of food traditionally served in small steamer baskets or on small plates. This is photo dim sum. The menu today is a handful of semi-unrelated bite-sized portions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Market Sights
Sights from a couple market places in China (Qingxi + Yangjiang). I love to photograph these places. Lots of interesting sensory inputs: sights, sounds, smells, people, activities.
Qingxi Night BBQ & Market
One of my favorite places on the planet. Lots of amazing street food + beer + fun people (often random new friends). The smells are incredible (good).
Behind the Kitchen Door
I was curious about how a restaurant kitchen looks and operates in China. I tested 3 restaurants that I frequent and was able to get access to the kitchen in all of them.
Night BBQ
This is another place in China I love, the night BBQ. It’s just down the street from our factory and next to my favorite alfresco restaurant. It’s a smorgasbord of inexpensive treats-on-a-stick that are barbecued right in front of you. The smoke and smells are part of the experience, but unfortunately they aren’t captured in photographs.
Boys Night Out
So, after eating dinner at a Thai restaurant, a German guy and three Americans walk into a German bar in China owned by a guy from Scotland. Sounds like the build-up to a joke, but it accurately describes my evening last night.
China Village Night Life – 11.15.11
Another night of prowling the village for some interesting shots. I used a fast F1.8 lens + high ISO to turn night into day.
Nighttime Street Food
I love street food. Especially at night. I enjoy supporting the local entrepreneurs. I guess I’m a nocturnal locavore.
Eating street food in China is like bungee jumping, every once in a while there’s a small risk of death.
Beijing – Strange Food
We found a small alley just off a main shopping district that I began calling “Scorpion Alley” because of one of the treats served there.
Beijing – Peking Duck
Peking Duck (now Beijing Duck) is an experience, not a meal. We went to DaDong (translation: “Tall Mr. Dong”. No joke.), which is apparently the number two duck restaurant in Beijing. It was only two blocks from the hotel and was so incredible we went there for dinner two nights in a row.
Village Nightlife
I went prowling around the village last night with a fast 35mm f1.8 lens to test the low light capabilities of the D3100. Not bad. Some of these shots look like they were taken in the middle of the day because of the amount of lighting in the village and the fast lens.
Uighur Family Portrait
Today while eating lunch, the wife of the restaurant owner (not an English speaker) used “charades” to ask me if I would photograph her daughter. Of course this was a great honor for me, so I came back with my camera gear and started shooting away.
