Cheap Low Life: Property Slaves

(Camera: GXR A12 50mm)

We have two kinds of live forms in Hong Kong, with property developers and speculators as the supreme life-form and owners and aspirant owners of a property as the cheap low-life one. These are some of the whys:

-- In Hong Kong, touting for tickets of any sort is illegal and offenders are liable to conviction for ticket scalping. Applying this logic to the property market will be a long time coming, if that will ever happen. Do you have the ambassadorial eloquence to justify why landed-property scalping activities, a.k.a. speculation or investment, are permitted at the expense of the general public's interest?

-- Just as most booming countries in this part of the world, property prices have skyrocketed in recent years. Members of the public have urged the government to rein in the crazy property price hikes to, not surprisingly, no avail. Just days ago, a local property developer commented in public that the property prices were way too high, so much so that even his son could not afford one: he was talking about luxurious homes pitched at a unit price of over HK$100 million! What a funny mockery, Mr Developer! And this attitude is not a coincidence.

-- To add to the plight of the public, the government has defied yet another logic. In anywhere else around the world, robbery is an offence in law. But the reality here makes us more circumspect in accepting this truth. Recently, the government has in the name of redevelopment bulldozed ahead with the legislation of robbery in nature. It empowers property developers, after securing the consent of 80% of the owners of the designated properties, to make compulsory sale of homes of the remaining 20%. In a nutshell, the developers can sell people's properties without reaching a mutually acceptable agreement with them. And now that's LEGAL!

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A Real Hero

(Grip On Reality: This photo was taken on my way to work. I was walking past trucks parking on a cul-de-sac when the ropes caught my attention. The light was right, the colour was right and the criss-crossing pattern was perfect and I held up my GX200. People passing by checked me out and wondered what could be made out of such a boring scene. To me, the fun in photography is that the photographer makes something interesting out of what is not obvious to most at the scene. The ropes tied in knots somehow reminded people I know who are in the grip of the recession) You must have also known a friend or two, or even yourself, being baffled by the spiral downturn of the economy. Bank went bankrupt and the rich was faced with a shrinking wealth. A friend of mine has just had his salary cut by over 10% and some of his colleagues started to be shed. But, wait. Was this done really for the sake of continuing the business? Or is there a factor or greed in it? I wonder whether the

New Low Prices

The window shopping some hours ago has almost provoked my AgIDS illness. Just in case you’re in Hong Kong or are coming here, and have the money to burn (All in HK$/ body only): GX200 = $3,280 GRD2 = $3,380 LX3 = $3,180 G10 = $3,280 Prices are available form a gear shop on the 1st floor of the Mongkok Computer Centre. Besides these new low prices, I found that Wing Shing Photo (55-57Sai Yeung Choi St., MK Tel: 2396 6886/ 91-95 Fa Yuen St., MK Tel: 2396 6885) is offering a Sony A700 + Carl Zeiss Lens package for HK$9,980 (hopefully, a bargain will make it some hundreds cheaper).

Eye Contact

(Leica D-lux 5) The digital era may make it easier to end up with fave shots. Even lousy photos may be turned likable after a few clicks in the post-processing workflow. But if digital advancement or amendments have any bearing on the cultivation of personal style, no photographers will need to discover his or her own photographer’s eye. Undoutedly, this is out of the question. Only with a trained photographer’s eye can we give a thinking gaze and capture an eternal moment, in our unique style. Style is the soul of a great photo. A few posts have been written in GXG to touch on the topic of photographer’s eye. Instead of finding an answer, which would require academic discussions, the posts are intended to give my general reflections and spark interests in moving towards further exploration of the topic. The posts can be viewed after the links: 1) Photographer's Eye: Storytelling 2) Photographer's Eye: Little Show of Observing 3) Photographer's Eye: Sight-Worthy 4

GX GARNERINGS

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