Greetings, folks. So, then, yes, not in Hong Kong anymore.

This sounds all kinds of corporate double speak and all, but it’s the truth. It just wasn’t the right fit.

I have wanted to move overseas again for years, and to Asia in particular. Last year the fine people at Code:Red gave me that chance. And I was thrilled to take it. However, there were problems early on. I REALLY did not like Hong Kong. As it turned out, I was not really prepared to work on my own, and it was hard to keep in touch with the home office from 12 hours ahead in HK.

This lead to unhappy customers, unhappy bosses, and unhappy TCB. A few weeks ago the CEO of CR and I had a talk, and he offered to bring me back full time in Boston for a few months and then see what happens next.

For me, the problem with this was that even if it all worked out swimmingly, the end result was still that I would up back in Hong Kong, a place I don’t like much and a place I don’t really want to live. In addition, Boston was also not where I wanted to wind up. So, we decided to part ways.

This was truly a mutual decision, agreed on by both parties. Code:Red gave me a very generous severance package and I honestly wish them all the best and if I can ever help them again I will.

That said, this situation leaves me unemployed, a bit rudderless, and back in New Haven for the time being. Not sure what happens next, but I don’t suspect I’ll be here for too long. Please, all, keep in touch.

For most of the classical era of photography, think up to Ansel Adams, most pictures were printed at the size of the negative. That is, for an 8×10 print you used an 8×10 negative, taken with one of those huge accordion looking contraptions you see in Charlie Chaplain movies. Even Ansel himself rarely enlarged a photograph more than 2:1 or so, and he was using those big accordion view cameras too.

Because of this things like lens sharpness and film grain were not such a huge deal. The films and papers of the day were not super high resolution, and nothing was being greatly enlarged, so as long as the lens was good enough for the paper for the print, it was good enough for the job. If you read old school books by early photographers you find very little discussion about lenses beyond focal length and depth of field. Lenses were considered fairly interchangeable creatures as most any one would do the job.

There were plenty of attempts at smaller ‘consumer’ cameras, the Kodak Brownie for example but eventually we settled on 35mm as the standard consumer film format. Still, the 35mm you hear so many photo luddites was poetic about was very much a compromise. There was this guy, Oskar Barnack , who worked for a German optics company called Leitz. Oskar loved to take pictures, and Oskar loved to hike. Oskar was also asthmatic and generally not the heartiest fellow, so hauling around a big view camera wasn’t really an option for him. So Oskar, being an enterprising engineering type stuck a lens in front of a ‘shoots across the focal plane’ paper shutter and used a two frames of Edison motion picture film stock. Thus Oskar made him a teensy little camera he could take on his hikes.

His camera eventually became the Leica III which, if you’ve been lucky enough to see one, is a work of pre-battery engineering art in itself. So exquisitely was it designed that it was made with trifling changes from 1933 until 1960, a run that has to be unequaled in the history of photography. Some mountaineers still swear by them because they don’t need batteries and if bash most of the ice of the damm things they’ll usually work. Not that they were perfect, if you’ve ever used one, you’ve also wondered if Oskar had nine tiny double jointed fingers on each hand to load film into the little bastard, but that is another story.

The Leica III and its various copies made the popular photography revolution in the 35mm format. In addition, war photographers from the 40s on LOVED the things. Two Leicas and ten rolls of film gave the photographer a number of frames that in the old view camera would would have called for a squad of sherpas to move and a genius to shoot fast enough. And again, the resolution was good enough to go onto the grainy front page top of the fold snapshot of the day. There are some wonderfully Rudyard Kipling-esque pictures of war photography legend David Douglas Duncan, two Leicas around his neck, and he still had room to carry a combat rifle. They just scream, ‘All right, I’m ready to take pictures, let’s go kill some Koreans,’ because that’s how they talked in those days.

35mm also spurred the development of better lenses, film stocks, and papers. Whereas Ansel would print his ginormous negatives with little or no enlargement, getting a lens/film/paper combination to print passably at 8×10 from a 35mm negative was no small task. Eventually, humans being humans, we managed to do it, but 35mm was always a compromise format, a ‘good enough’ format.

To make photography even MORE portable, various teensy teensy negative formats were also developed. The original Olympus Pen cameras cut the 35mm frame in half, meaning your pictures really looked like crap but the thing was tiny. Kodak came up with the Instamatic series, which used even crappier 110 film but the film came in a cartridge so anyone with a thumb could load it. Some genius eventually decided to leave one or two of these sitting at each table of a wedding, and thus left to us photo documentation of excess alcohol consumption of a quantity that truly makes the mind reel. Still, for your amateur enthusiast, 35mm remained the standard from the 30’s until the end of film itself.

The iron-fisted reign of 35mm ended, well, it depends on when you want to say it ended, but whenever it ended it was digital that killed it. Early digital cameras, like early digital audio recordings, were truly awful compared to their analog predecessors. Serious amateurs even scorned them at first, but once the sensors got big enough, and once the pixel count got high enough, the advantages of digital photography and software manipulation became obvious. From there on it was just a matter of time.

I can’t remember his name, but some famous photographer once gave an interview in a magazine I used to read. (BTW – for you younger people, a ‘magazine’ was a physical object brought to you weekly or monthly by the ‘mailman’ who would be routinely menaced by your dog. Getting your weekly or monthly copy of your ‘magazine’ was a day of great happiness and joy). In the interview he made one of those should-be-famous quotes that, ‘I don’t think anyone will ever have any use for more than 3.1 megapixels.’

And here we finally get to the ‘people are weird’ part of this. Today’s digital SLRs and Photoshop Elements are so good it’s almost comical. The optical performance of a Nikon D90 and a 50mm prime f/1.8 lens outstrips the photographic capability of 95% of the public, at least. It’s also quite difficult to screw up the settings so it does a bad job. A $300 autofocus pocket camera, in terms of pixel count and sensor quality, blows the doors off the digital cameras used to shoot the crowds pulling down Saddam’s statue in 2003. The high ISO performance of my Fuji X100 is so insanely good you can take good pictures of moving objects in a dark movie theater with no flash. And finally, the cameras that go into iPhones and better Android smart phones are of shockingly good quality. The only thing keeping them from competing with that $300 point and shoot is that the autofocus and shutter release are slow, so by the time the picture gets taken, whatever it was you were shooting might have already finished happening.

One would think, then, that we would see a positive outpouring of brilliant photography as these sharp, quality cameras are suddenly, literally in everyone’s pocket. And what happens? The most popular image manipulation tool in the world is an iPhone plug-in that takes that fantastic camera and makes it look like the image was taken with a vignetted, horribly lo-res 70’s instamatic. And college kids fish out Lomos and various other Eastern European photo-ephemera because it looks like crap, all while hoarding their 100 speed slide film in the freezer. People are just plain fucking weird.

While it’s more less SOP these days to complain incessantly about travel, I have to say, all things considered the trip here wasn’t all that bad. My baggage was overweight, so I had to pay extra at the counter for that. But I can’t hardly blame them, and it was cheaper to do that than ship the stuff.  Even though I’m a pissant Asiana Gold member they shuffled me into the elite status check-in as well. Security was its quotidian pain, but that’s to be expected now. Luckily for me I scored a fistful of Ambien on my way out of town, so even though I was in the middle seat of the middle row it was survivable. I think, maybe, having done a fair bit of long haul international travel in the past few years I’m just kind of used to it. It’s like going to the DMV, you know it’s going to suck, and it does suck, but you bring a bunch of books to pass the time and then it’s over.

Since I arrived just this past Sunday, I haven’t had a lot of time to explore and investigate. Spent a lot of time in the offices of the people who are my customers. The first impressions of Hong Kong are really about the scale and crowdedness. It’s really hard to explain, but it makes Manhattan seem a bit spacious and open and New Haven seem like prairie. For example, in the mornings the subway cars are more numerous and more spacious than NYC cars and they have no seats during rush hour. Even with that crush of humanity being transported I think the trains on the Island line (the one I take) have to come by every two minutes or less.

Nearly every office building of any size has skyways or flyovers to the train stations. Again, it’s hard to explain the scale, I should take some pictures but even doing that it will be hard to understand. Put another way, on Monday I was with a client in a fairly standard, nice office building. At about 12.30 it was announced we should maybe get lunch and we should hit the food court. I was expecting the usual mall food court in the US, some frozen pizzas tossed in on oven and maybe a noodle shop. Instead the basement of the building held what was essentially a small supermaket, 8-10 pretty decent places to get takeout, a butcher/seafood cooler, a fresh juice bar, and a tapas bar.

I’ve been thinking about what it’s like to be an expat again, but I’ll leave that discussion to another day. So far, so good.

Fun facts

Buses in HK have signs on the sides, public service announcements of sorts, stating that ‘Illegal sub-dividing of flats can lead to death!’ I assume this means if you sleep six in your 400 sq ft apartment, for heaven’s sake don’t push you luck with eight. The whole city in many ways looks like an elaborately crafted fire trap. I hope the fire department is well paid and well trained.

Zhang Ziyi, the actress who played jailbait super babe Jen in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, is advertising for Oil of Olay on Chinese TV. At a spinsterish 32 who looks like she’s maybe 20, a fine time to be pimping anti-aging creme, I guess. BTW, I looked her up on wikipedia and this picture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ziyi_at_Sogo.jpg) is of an intersection that’s about a five minute walk from my temporary apartment. I get on the subway under the sneaker billboard.

My first week in HK is BY FAR the longest time nobody has told me I look like Penn Jillette, the fat guy from Lost, Jack Osborne, or various other unsavory characters. Thanks Hong Kong! I won’t call you ugly either!

Looking forward to getting under way. Got stupid sick this week, am a bit worried about air travel with a stuffy head, but with any luck I’ll be on the mend before Continental has to carry my fat ass to Dublin.

Check back soon, folks.

TCB