Hong Kong Harbor At Night

[rpcrowe]

I visited Hong Kong last month on a China Focus Tour. We left our hotel early in the morning with no expectation of visiting the Kowloon side of the harbor at night - therefore I did not bring my tripod. I did not normally use a tripod for day shooting since that would slow down the tour group. That is just one negative regarding visiting a photogenic area with a tour group.

Visiting the Kowloon side of the harbor to see the light show was a last minute decision and totally unexpected. We arrived at the Star ferry Terminal too late to get a spot at the seawall where I could have braced my camera on the guard rail so I had to shoot hand-held.

I used a Canon 30D with 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens at 44mm. My exposure was aperture priority at f/2.8 and I exposed using a -1 stop compensation and a three stop auto exposure bracketing which actually gave me three exposures at -2, -1 and 0 compensation.

In order to use a shutter speed which would give me a reasonably sharp image and which could possibly stop the movement of the boats on the water, I used ISO 1,600. I decided that I would rather have some noise in the image than have a fuzzy shot or a shot with motion blur from the moving boats.

My post processing with Photoshop CS3 included straightening the horizon, dual sharpening, first with USM at 250% and .7 pixels and secondly with USM at 120% and 1 pixel. And reducing the size to 800 pixeld across and the resolution to 72 ppi for web posting.

I used Topaz Adjust 3 DeNoise for noise reduction.

How would I have shot this differently? Of course, given the opportunity I would have used a tripod. Lacking this, I would have arrived at the Star Ferry landing early enough to get a front row position so I could have braced my camera on the guard rail. A prime lens of f/1.4 would have allowed a faster shutter speed but, I could not have shot the image at 44mm using a prime lens. "Zooming with my feet" was not possible. Using a 7D or a 5D2 as my camera would have given me better high ISO performance but, that was not an option financially.

I tried several shots from further back trying to show silhouettes of the crowd in the foreground but, these did not turn out well because the crowd was moving and my shutter speed would not stop the motion that close to the camera.

I run hot and cold regarding being a member of an organized tour. Since this is the only way my wife would have considered visiting H.K. and Mainland China, I had no choice in the matter. The positive side of the tour was that it was comparatively inexpensive. We could not have done the things we did at the price we paid. However, the lack of freedom in shooting choices was very frustrating.

Given the limitations I described earlier, I am quite satisfied with this shot.

I have more H.K. images in my smugmug gallery at: CHINA FOCUS TOUR 2010 - Hong Kong - rpcrowe's Photos

I also have other galleries of my China trip at smugmug.

[fullframefotos]

nice night shot

[ML Photography]

Lovely.

I would have appreciated it with a shorter lense too...