GX GARNERINGS

Today, our regular section about SY Hsu has a monologue given by Hsu himself about his more sentimental view on photography. By SY Hsu   (edited by Nevin): " TO ME , PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE MOST HONEST LIE IN THE WORLD . " We all see consequences happen in our lives. Every choice brings a different result whether you like it or not. It is hard to tell if it will be positive or negative until life's end. "That’s the reason why I take photos," I said. Photography is a large part of my life.  Like an animal searching for its quarry, my desire for photography guides me to struggle to survive. I scream in silent darkness, shout at secret moments, stand in a quiet world; and I am like every part of me wanting to find the perfect attachment, every single picture framing a moment of my life.  While I am trying hard to construct my own pictures, I am buried in my own creations. There, interestingly, I have found my loneliness. "If you can unders...

(A link to the sample shot pages is at the end of this post) Ricoh’s CX1 is not a serious compact. But it features some really exciting serious functions which tickle many photographers’ fancy. But the CX1 uses a CMOS sensor instead of a CCD. What are the possible reasons? Over the course of development of digital imaging sensors, the CCD (Charge Coupled Device) had had an advantage over the CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) sensor in terms of image quality. When Sony’s DSC-R1 saw the light of the market in 2005, both technologies fared much closer in IQ as far as sensors of larger sizes are concerned. The R1 is powered by a CMOS sensor. But in the small sensor battlefield, the CCD still did a better job in reproducing images then. But owing to the cheaper cost of CMOS, we have seen most mobile phone manufacturers using CMOS for the built-in camera function. On the other hand, the production of significant small sensor cameras with a CMOS has been few and far between b...

Hong Kong is very much a gastronomic city whose sensational street food is as famous as the haute cuisine in the Michelin starred restaurants here. For greater fun, however, you have to go local. In the course of taking photos for the contest themed on people who sell things, I ran into an interesting story of baked potatoes. The story takes place in Mong Kok, an eater's mecca jam-packed with kiosks and shops offering choices of local food exotic and weird alike. The baked potato is hardly a novelty in Hong Kong. Go in almost any western cuisine restaurant and you can order any baked potato prepared to your choice. The interesting thing is that the dish has seemingly returned to its old style: street food. Originated in England as revealed by historians, baked potatoes were sold by peddlers on the street as early as in the eighteenth century. The food became an instant hit and turned into a famed dish in England soon. As many as ten tonnes of potatoes were sold by the peddlers ea...

Over the meetup with Tom and Yuan Yuan , fellow bloggers and photographers from London last week, we walked by some policemen being on duty. Cameras were pointed to the policemen at once. I held up my GX200, they the GRD II and my friend a LX3. Click, click, click. We nodded a knowing smile to each other when powering off the cameras. As we all know, the British government has proposed a ban on photographing police being on duty. We quoted Cristi for his recent post about this and joked that tourists being able to photograph police without offending the law could be an attraction for Britons. Police is a dream job for all boys at some point of time in their childhood. The traffic police on their vrooming motor bikes won my especial admi- ration because of a Japanese TV programme about some superheros I saw at a very young age. Fact is, I still like those superheros but only for reason of nostagia. When I incidentially bumped into a video of an opening probably filmed in Thailand, I...

The theme for the February photo contest of Ricohforum is ladies/men behind the counter. So I had been looking for the right scene. The other day when I had a chance to stroll along an open market with the GX200, I came across this strawberry kiosk which had exactly what I had been looking for to make my submission. (I could not resist putting the pig head chop on the shade. So I kept this for fun and picked the first photo below for the contest. This one is hilarious) Since most contestants submitted photos of such men and women with interesting facial features of some sort, I planned to take a photo of the subject without showing his or her face. An image with a simple message and a sense of humour was what I had in mind. A composition technique in photography immediately sprang to mind: superimpositing objects in composition. Why Superimposition? Photography is basically a planar art form to reflect a three dimensional world, meaning that the spatial re...

This series of photos is taken at the same place where I did this . What make this series different is that I stood at the other side of the stairs to face the setting sun and expose for the highlights. To see the photos in colour, click open them. (This photo is defocused but gives a taint of sweetness to the image with the couples leaving the subway) (The difficult thing about this series is not the technical part. The position I stood was quite windy and below the top of the staircase. So I had to check out ladies wearing skirts... so that I could aviod any upskirt shots. I didn't hope to get caught by the police. I like both photos, especially the one with the golden outlines) (Another thing is that I had to stand really close to the side. It was a time people going home. And the exit of the subway was so narrow that I was very much standing in the way of people going past. I like the one with the daddy holding his son. Sweet!) (These two young men gave the same pos...