“Charlie,” said Mike and Corey, “we know you’ve had a little trouble lately what with being flu-ridden, your 30D breaking down - twice, and now your long lens in at the repair shop, so why not go to Hong Kong on us, stroll around, take a few photos with that new 40D, and stick them on the site. Sound like a plan?” “Thanks guys, that sounds great…”

Of course, that’s not what actually happened…

We may be getting more visitors than ever before (thankyou very much one and all), but that doesn’t mean there’s any money in the kitty. No, I went to HK the usual way - working a 12 hour shift serving several hundred people several thousand cups of tea and coffee, waking up feeling dehydrated and confused, and then staggering out into the weekend shopping crowds in one of the most congested places anywhere on the planet…with, of course, my new canon 40D…

I’ll do a proper write-up soon - without a full set of working lenses it’s difficult to compare the 40D with the 30D properly. Having said that, the so-called “kit lens” that comes with the 40D (the Canon 17-85mm image-stabilised lens) is head and shoulders above the lightweight, non-stabilised lens bundled with the 30D, the 3″ LCD screen is excellent, the automatic sensor-cleaning will, I’m sure, be a godsend the more I use the camera, and the extra pixels (up from 8.5megs to 10 megs) may not be all that apparent on a blog where the images are compressed and small, but the amount of info in the original image is staggering.

Anyway, here are a few photos taken on a very crowded Saturday in downtown Hong Kong. All are handheld and taken using the 17-85mm IS lens. I left the WB on auto, and to avoid attracting too much attention (not many people like tourists taking pictures of them), I didn’t use the onboard flash.

Looking Down. In the foreground is Hong Kong, across Victoria Harbour is the construction site that is Kowloon. The air here is usually now so bad that even this counts as a clear day.

 

Signs. A typical back-street full of signs and looking very crowded.

 

Moving crowd. A typical street scene. I deliberately picked a darkish area and went for a very slow shutter speed - 0.3 seconds - to give an impression of movement and to see how the IS stood up - pretty well I reckon.

 

Lost in his work. This pharmacy is typical of Hong Kong. I liked the reflection of the clerk in the centre of the picture, seemingly lost in all the bottles and potions.

 

Ducks. The only birds I saw in downtown Hong Kong! The auto WB gave a yellow-ish cast but that was easily corrected in PhotoShop. In the original the prices on the jars are clear and can be easily read.

 

Tired. Three ladies working on a fast-food stall. Not everyone in Hong Kong is a millionaire yet…

 

Had enough. A quick snap I took. I know just how that child felt: next time I’ll get to the forests or I won’t go outside at all…

Hardly an exhaustive workout for the camera (I took a pile of others of course, but I’m not sure how interesting these photos are to people coming to the site who are - I assume - mainly birders?), but the level of detail is apparent I reckon.

I’ve a flight home in and hour so time for a quick nap…I’ll be very interested to see if you folks like these sort of images or would prefer it if we just stuck to birds from now on!