Before visiting Hong Kong, I’d been reading a lot about the use of camera flash from Strobist: seemed pretty cool and very “pro photographer”. Halfway through my trip, I remembered some of what I read, and began to experiment as I continued to tour around. The Hong Kong Museum of History, which I entered with Lukybee’s glowing endorsement in mind, was a great place to try out experiments with my flash: lots of shadows.
My first flash experiment, the day before visiting the museum, some outdoor exhibit late at night:
The first picture is without a flash, the second with a fully automatic flash, and in the last, flash power was manually set to about half. My goal was to go send the light just far enough to reach the subject, but not touch the exhibit. Obviously still a bit too strong.
The Hong Kong Museum of History, free admission during the Lunar New Year!
Another experiment with flash; the goal here was to look into light up the shadows “just enough” to be able to see detail, without obliterating the shadows entirely:
The first picture is no-flash, the second is with the flash power manually set, the third is auto-flash; the latter two were on-axis (i.e. head-on) flash. Note how the no-flash it’s too dark to see the details without straining, and the auto-flash obliterates the shadows.
At this point, I was starting to get the hang of setting the flash power manually. For the bottom photograph, I lit up the background enough to see the paintings clearly, yet left enough shadow to preserve the intended “look” of the scene in this Chinese opera exhibit.
The museum wasn’t all about flash practice. The museum is really quite good, after you get past the initial sections on Hong Kong archaeology and move to discussions of more recent times. Lots of great exhibits and photo ops.
I particularly liked this solemn fellow (look at that handsome chiseled profile), and a lovely diorama of the not-so-lovely opium trade period of Hong Kong:
I also learned a lot of fascinating Hong King history at the museum. The museum does a great job of including well-written, interesting texts next to the exhibits, explaining the relevance in a enticing manner without wasting words. Particularly memorable was the Treaty of Nanking, essentially Hong Kong’s unconditional surrender when the British conquered it and made it a colony:
The museum had a small movie theatre playing a good documentary on this period in Hong Kong, and I particularly wanted to take this picture to remind me about the incredibly punitive terms the British imposed on Hong Kong. Photographs weren’t allowed in the theatre (I got yelled at 
), but fortunately I was able to position myself during the second showing to get a picture through the diorama above (which had a glass window into the theatre and thus I could see the screen from outside the theatre).
My modern interpretation of the Treaty of Nanking:
- The British are in charge now.
- HK has to pay the “loser’s fee” for losing the war.
- HK must compensate Britain for the British lives lost while Hong Kong was defending itself.
- HK owes Britain for the ships, munitions, and food that were spent conquering HK.
I’m not particularly nationalistic (at all, really), but I thought this was a particularly memorable example of the winner writing the rules!
The Treat of Nanking also reminds me of a space warfare computer game, VGA Planets, that I played in university, and a very particular instance that I played. In that one instance, my military forces so completely dominated my friend’s forces that he faced total annihilation. Grandstanding it as “mercy”, I offered to spare him if he agreed to a permanent cessation of resistance, monetary compensation for my effort of destroying his forces (even accounting for the ammunition expended), and an agreement to provide me with war weapons in order to better defeat other military forces (i.e. my other friends that were playing). Funny how human nature is so consistent, eh?
