My office colleague has borrowed a Canon EOS 400D Digital Camera for her first trip to Hong Kong and so we wonder down to Victoria harbour so she can take her first souvenir shots of Hong Kong.

I’ve been meaning to upgrade to a Canon Powershot G9 or G10 for some time. Now I’ve seen there is a G11 on the market and still I’m managing with my little Ixus 80.

But Zhaonan wasn’t comfortable with the size of the 400D, or with all the options, so we ended up doing a swap. It was good for me to see how I would get on with a bigger camera. The ghost ship (left) was one of my first shots. Not perfectly focused, but it was at night without a flash or a tripod and I like the ghost-like appearance of the red-sailed junk and the reflections of the Christmas lights in the water.

Bamboo Scaffolding
Originally uploaded by yabbox

The next shot was of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre and the impressive Bamboo scaffolding clinging to its’ side. It’s a photo which takes a second to work out because of sharp diagonal line combined with the lighting shining through the trees on to the building and the dark sky.

Funnily enough, apart from looking like a tourist with this clumpy thing around my neck, it gave me more freedom to take photos I wouldn’t normally have bothered with. Not necessarily to experiment more, but to feel more professional, rather than a happy snapper. I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

Now I know I need to upgrade my camera..

We managed a short visit before closing and managed to see most of the main temples and courtyards, bustling among the tour groups, few devotees and monks going about their daily chores. It was certainly much busier than the solitude at Mutianyu!

Here is a small gallery showing the photos I took with my Minolta camera. There are three galleries, all with the same photos as I am testing the various photo display galleries and slideshows available on WordPress linked to Flickr.

The first is called SimpleFlickr and uses SimpleViewer adjusted for WordPress by Josh Gerdes. It shows up fine in Mozilla and although this has worked in IE’s browser previously, it needs some adjusting to the code which I can’t find anymore and there is no longer any support.

The second slideshow is called flickrSLIDR and is easy to set up, but has very few extra options, hence the photo missing a border at the top and the black background. It is a solid product though.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Lastly, there is the Pictobrowser Photo Gallery, another Flash gallery but working better than SimpleFlickr. It also needs no plugin to work with WordPress. Quite nice looking and customisable. Those two points are pros and cons. If you have the settings in WordPress, you only need to set them once to propagate across your whole site, however you can’t change individual settings for one gallery. However, using this version, you have to change the settings for each Gallery (or paste and copy from code and change the set), so you may end up with a less fluid website, but can change the settings depending on the photo size and particular use each time..

So, which do you prefer? And I mean the various galleries, not the photos. Well them too!
Lot’s more photos to come on the next posts, or you can always look at my Flickr account – where you can leave individual comments too.

Mùtiányù (???) is around 70kms outside Beijing and as such is one of the closer parts of the Great Wall to the Northern Capital. It is for that reason that I wouldn’t normally advise travelling there, as, like my Aunt and Uncle, everyone else seems to be on a tight schedule and wants to fit in as much as possible. If you make the effort to travel just that little bit further away, you can be rewarded with fewer crowds and parts of the Wall which are in better (read worse) shape, relatively untouched and certainly with less hawkers, postcard vendors, cable cars, adverts for ‘One World, One Dream’, and the rest of the paraphernalia which goes with Chinese tour groups.

Having said that, I was hoping a wintry day in February wouldn’t attract quite so many people on a sightseeing mission to the Great Wall and I was right. It took around one hour to drive from their downtown hotel (Lusongyuan Hotel in Jiadaokou) to Mutianyu. We stopped in the souvenir stalls, were welcomed by the staff who were still waking up, drank some Chinese tea with them and then took the cable car up to the top. It was a bright, sunshiny day, but it was cooold and I was immediately glad I had bought my sheepskin coat, woollen gloves and hat. A lovely view. Although most of the surrounding hills were brown and dry, the wall and it’s shadow still had layers of snow brushed up against it’s side and along it’s turrets, while the bright sun reflected off the well worn steps.

We had the Wall practically to ourselves, save for a few brave and determined souvenir sellers and we wandered along far further than we may have done had we been following other tourists. We came back to the toboggan and ummed and arred, my Aunt trying to persuade us both to slide down – I think we all would have done it with a little more persuading. However, it was another, older cable car ride back down to the carpark.

Here is a Photo Gallery of the photos I took with my Minolta SLR.

-- SimpleFlickr Content --
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-- SimpleFlickr Content --
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-- SimpleFlickr Content --
(Please visit the original post page to view the details.)