China - 12/23/08

I've been in Macau and China the past few days. No pictures to post yet because no access to laptop until right now and only briefly. I'll post pics when I get back to HK on the 25th. Been averaging about 250 pictures a day. Since I have access to a laptop right now, I went through all the pictures that Perry (my cousin) and I took since the beginning of the trip (~2000 as of today). Found out my 5D has a shit load of dust on the sensor and I don't have anything to clean it. So I'm not a happy camper right now.

Decided to leave the SX10 in HK and haven't regretted it yet. Looks like I made a mistake purchasing it but it's still a nice little camera. Just not for me. Think I'm going to try and sell it when I get back to the states. Really wish I had a flash with me too. Can't get any family pics when we're out and about at night. Good thing Perry has the Rebel XT. At first, I didn't want to carry the 5D around the streets of GuangZhou for fear of it getting damaged or stolen. I noticed, however, that if there's a large group with me people tend to stay the hell away from me. There has only been one time where I felt threatened and it was on the bus.

Some "fishy" looking guy got onto the bus behind me and he'd been following us for quite a bit too. I was already suspicious of the guy. Once on the bus, he got in a position directly behind me. I was facing the window of the bus on the left side (standing) and beside me on the left was Perry and on the right was a stranger. Perry had his camera directly in front of him and I had my camera slung across with lens facing my left side. I looked behind me to see what the guy was doing and he was eyeing my camera. So I put my left hand on the hood of the lens and moved it slightly to the front of me. He looks shifts his eye to Perry's camera when I did that and then looked down at the ground afterwards. I decided to let go of the camera and let it slide back to the original position on my side. Again he looks at it but sees that I'm watching him and quickly turns away. I let it hang there for a few seconds before putting my hand on the lens again. The guy keeps looking at my camera every few seconds but makes it look like he's not. This whole time I'm keeping one eye on him. Then I decided to "play with him" and let go of the lens again and turn slightly away from him. I nudge Perry and told him in English to watch my camera for me, in particular the guy directly behind me. We get to the first stop and people move toward the back of the bus as more people get on/off. I move a few steps toward the back of the bus and the guy follows. Again he stops directly behind me. Perry is practically staring at the guy the whole time since I told him to watch the guy. As the bus starts to move, I decide to turn around and face the guy with the camera slung directly in front of me.

At this point, I'm about 1 feet from the guy and looking right at him. He turns away nervously and just keeps looking at the front of the bus. I keep staring him down until the next stop. We again move a few steps back (where the door for getting out is) and I turn to face the window again. I push the camera back to my side but slightly further behind me. I tell Perry to watch the guy again. He hasn't moved from the position we were at before the stop. We arrived at the next stop and the guy moves to the door to get out. The doors open and the guy gets off. After he gets off, Perry says he guy was looking at my camera the whole time as he walked toward the door. Then as he was about to walk pass me, he looked at the door then back to the camera then door again. As the door opened, the guy looked at my camera then looked up at Perry then quickly looked away and left the bus.

Could of just been someone interested in the 5D because he likes photography but I suspect him to be malicious. I first noticed him following us about 5 mins before getting to the bus stop. At the bus stop, I noticed he kept looking toward or at me which got my suspicious. Anyway, that'll be all for today. Pictures to come soon. I'll be back in HK on the 25th and will be going through the pics to post that night depending on what's going on. Till then.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

Day 2 in Hong Kong - 12/19/2008

Finally got access to a laptop and internet connection. The first day was nothing short of exhausting. Wasn't able to sleep on the flight over and right after we landed it was straight to see the sights, etc. In the 24 hours since leaving LAX I was on a plane, bus, subway, boat, car, and cable car. I also took about ~400 pics so far. Over 200 today (it's about 9pm here... I think).

A little side note, I'm using my uncle's laptop and everything I'm doing including editing/converting my pics are being done with programs running off my USB flash drive. I'm using Irfanview to open my RAWs from the 5D and converting them to TIFFs. I then use The GIMP to open, edit, and convert to JPEG for upload to Flickr. I'm also editing my blog with NVU/KompoZer then upload to my server using FTP. Also, I use Firefox for all my web browsing. All these programs are running directly from my USB. Quite nice really.

What's sad is... I don't want to use the SX10 that I bought. I hate it... I hate point and shoots now. Also ran into a few times tonight that I wished I had my 40D or external flash. Had to try and take pics of the family next to the water with my 35mm prime @ f/2 and shutter speeds as slow as 1/3rd of a second. Oh, and the only editing I'm doing to my pics are resizing and maybe a little cropping. Can't really do anything else... I'm also trying to figure a way out to upload videos all without installing anything on my uncle's laptop. If you know of a way to convert .mov files to wmv or something small that I can upload email me.

So, picture time!


Plane from Taiwan to HK


Bridge (can't remember name...) taken from bus


Homeless man - Taken on Nathan Road in Kowloon


Cable cars!


Seaside - This guy had quite a bit of equipment with him... Tripod, 40D, 17-40L, 580ex, Omnibounce, and grip.


Seaside - The red thing on the far right of the image is a large replica of the Olympic torch.


Couple walking down the street


Hong Kong - This is one in a sequence of 4 which I'll convert to HDR when I get home

Took me a good hour and a half to do this post. Converting from RAW to TIFF, resize and output to JPEG, upload to flickr, download blog source, edit blog source, embed pics, upload source to server, and publish to web. Oi... so much trouble. Anyway, more to come. Going to be leaving for Macau tomorrow and then from there to GuangZhou. During this 5 day period I probably won't have internet access or at least no access to a laptop to update the blog. But keep checking back...