Photos from Hong Kong, June 2010

I finally finished processing my photos from my trip to Hong Kong in June.  I only had a few evenings free for photography.  I spent them mainly in Central.  I was shooting with my new Canon Rebel T2i.  I was really pleased with its high ISO performance.  It was also quite light and compact, at least compared to my 20D, which I had been shooting with for several years.  Highlights of this trip were some time on the Star Line Ferry from Wanchai to Tsim Sha Tsui and then from Tsim Sha Tsui to Central photographing the skyline, some visits to the bar and night life area Lan Kwai Fong, and some aimless wandering around Central, I think in the area roughly between Central and Sheung Wan. 

In SoHo, I had a nice dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant named Scirocco which was right next to the Central to Mid-Level Escalators, which I have photographed previously.  In Lan Kwai Fong, I came back to a cocktail bar 2121 every evening to refuel.  I like the ambience, which was more quiet and lounge-like than some of the other bars I saw there. I had a couple of dinners in Tsim Sha Tsui that were also pretty good, both in the new iSquare complex. One was at Chao Yang, and one was at nan hai no. 1. Those restaurants both have spectacular views of Hong Kong island. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures.

Here is a slideshow of favorites from the visit, from my Smugmug smart gallery of favorites:





Be sure to check out all my Hong Kong galleries, and my selected favorites from all my trips to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong skyline at night, from the Star Ferry

I was just in Hong Kong for a little more than a week.  I was pretty busy, but had a few opportunities to get out in the evening and shoot.  I had my new Canon T2i with me.  The T2i is my 'upgrade' from the 20D that I have been using for the last few years.  So far, I am really impressed with its high ISO performance.  As I will show, shots at ISO 1600 and even ISO 3200 are quite usable.  On the 2OD, ISO 800 was OK but ISO 1600 was spotty.  The camera is also light and generally easy to use.  The display on the back is a huge improvement on the 20D as well.

The first batch of photos I processed are from the Hong Kong skyline.  I took the Star Ferry from Admiralty to Tsim Sha Tsui, then from Tsim Sha Tsui to Central.  It wasn't too crowded so I had no problem getting a seat with a nice view.  The ferry is also very cheap.  The views of the skyline looking toward the island are spectacular.

The examples below were all shot handheld on a moving boat, with the EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS.  I didn't apply noise reduction in post-processing to any of these photos.  I did use Lightroom 3 to boost contrast, darken the blacks, sharpen, straight and crop, and do perspective correction.  For the full gallery, please visit my site at Smugmug http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Hong-Kong/Hong-Kong-skyline-from-Star

I'll be posting more photos from my trip soon, so be sure to check back in a few days.

Here are a few shot at ISO 3200:

And a few at ISO 1600...

BIG improvement in Smugmug stats: information on referrers! Thanks Smugmug!

Smugmug recently upgraded its statistics to add a new page with information about referrers.

This is very handy because it finally provides an easy way to locate photos from my site that have been embedded in blog posts, forum posts, or websites via links.  I mostly don't have a problem with that sort of use of my photos, as long as whoever did the embedding acknowledges that the photo wasn't theirs.  I do prefer that in addition to embedding the photo they also provide a link to the gallery from which it was drawn so that anyone who likes the photo has an opportunity to go to the gallery and see others from the same setting, and perhaps order some downloads or prints.  And so far, most people who have embedded photos of mine in blog posts, have also provided a link to the gallery, and thereby helped increase traffic to my site.

Until now I haven't had any way of finding out where my photos were embedded in forum posts, blogs, or other websites because Statcounter and Google Analytics only provide information on visitors to galleries.  They rely on Javascript to gather information about page views, and JPGs embedded elsewhere obviously don't trigger the Javascript that would lead to a page view being recorded.  In principle I might be able to get this information from Google Webmaster Tools, which is supposed to find links to a site, but right now the user interface for that service is too clumsy for me to figure out what I would have to do to get such information.  And I haven't had much luck searching for links to my site on the various search engines.

As soon as I saw Smugmug was now providing information on referrers, I checked it out, and sure enough, it provided some URLs where my photos had been embedded in forum posts, blogs, or other websites.  It was certainly gratifying to see that they appeared in the context of being introducing an area where they lived, or were familiar with, and used my photos to introduce the look of the area to viewers.

Basically all you have to do is go to the Referrers tab on the Statistics page and when are interested in finding the referring URL from a particular domain, click on 'Hits'.  Then you'll get a list of the pages at the site that link to your photos.

In this forum post, someone fondly recalling what Shanghai used to look like before all the construction of the last few years used some of my photos to introduce forum readers to the Shanghai he remembered...

http://www.ccthere.com/article/2912443

Unfortunately, he didn't link back to the gallery.  That would have been nice.  I guess I will write him.

In this blog, someone who had just moved to Nanluoguxiang from somewhere in the suburbs used a photo to give his readers some sense of what it looked like:

http://haonowshaokao.livejournal.com/3734.html

I was pleased to see that he also included a link to the gallery that included the photo.

Now this is where things get a little odd...  In a Spanish language site that I think is devoted to some kind of online role-playing game, someone embedded a photo of some mountains near the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in a post that I think was related to some kind of scenario for the game.  I hope it was, anyway:

http://www.comunidadumbria.com/?__Pg=1&PARTIDA=15280&ESCENA=3&MW=2&SW=201&MW=10&SW=0

And this post at SkyscraperCity in a forum thread devoted to pictures of the last stops of transport lines includes a picture from my site of the view from the platform at Waterfront Station in Vancouver, Canada...

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=9844942&postcount=10

Unfortunately, no link to the gallery.

Overall, the addition of the statistics on Referrers is for me the most important and useful addition to Smugmug statistics so far.  Almost everything else provided in Smugmug Statistics duplicates functionality offered by Statcounter or Google Analytics, but the Referrer statistics stand out for finally providing information about links to individual photos, as opposed to galleries.  Along those lines, I guess the other distinguishing feature of Smugmug Statistics are the counts of photo views, as opposed to page views, available under other tabs.

Way to go, Smugmug.  Keep it up!

Unblocked in China, sort of

A few days ago I heard that in China, some previously blocked websites were now accessible again.  While my photo site has always been accessible, my blog was blocked.  I don't think it was because of any specific content, but rather because it was hosted at Blogger.com, and everything hosted there seemed to be inaccessible.

I became curious about whether my blog was now accessible again, so I went to the very, very handy Website Pulse website to use their tool (http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html) to test.  I entered my URL, http://blog.canghuixu.com and tried it from their servers in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou.  The tests from Shanghai and Guangzhou worked, but Beijing was FAIL.  I guess two of three ain't bad.  I have been using the Website Pulse occasionally over the last few months to check accessibility and this was the first time the blog was accessible from any of the servers in China, so I guess that is a good sign.

Don't believe me?  Here are the screenshots, beginning with Beijing FAIL, followed by Shanghai and Guangzhou Woo-hoo...

I guess the real test will be if I actually start to get traffic at my blog from China showing up in my logs.  My photo site gets a lot of traffic from China, but my blog hasn't had a hit from China in months.  If I start getting page views from China again, that will be interesting.

I poked around a bit more at the site and a variety of other sites that I know were blocked in the past, were accessible again.  The Twitter website remained accessible.

We'll see how long this lasts.  The optimistic interpretation would be that the Chinese government is stepping back from what seemed to be a growing mania for blocking practically anything, and may move back to blocking a narrower range of sites.  This would certainly make sense because I think some of the latest efforts at blocking were so erratic and incomprehensible that sooner or later I think they would start turning off potential investors who didn't care at all about politics but did want to be sure that their corporate sites were accessible.

My cynical interpretation, and this is completely unfounded speculation, is that maybe they were trying to upgrade their blocking software to make it even more effective, and something went wrong and we have a window of a few days while they fix the upgrade to make it work.  Again, I'm just making this up, and have absolutely no basis for this, but I can't help but wonder...