Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

One of my favorite things to do with my camera is just to go wandering. On my January trip to Hong Kong, I stumbled across the Graham Street Market, which is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) in Hong Kong. Out of everything I saw, there were two scenes that particularly struck me.

The first was at a seafood shop. As typical for the Guangdong region, much of what’s on sale is alive and kept in polystyrene water containers. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the aeration tubes. What really struck me about the photo, though, is the smile on the face of the woman helping a customer.

(As an aside, one of the reasons why I was shooting in black and white is because it doesn’t require me to color balance. Street market vendors use all kinds of lights, each of which has a slightly different color cast. Tungsten lamps are orange, fluorescent lamps have a sickly greenish cast, and the energy-efficient metal halide lamps that light streets the world over spread a yellowish light. Provided there is enough contrast, switching to black-and-white means that I don’t need to deal with the horrid color clash from all the lighting.)

The second scene, which I didn’t capture as well as I would have liked, illustrates the captivity of traffic to pedestrians. Only a small fraction of Hong Kong residents own cars because the government taxes automobiles very heavily and the transit system is possibly the best in the world. The street market is actually a street. As I wandered around, I noticed that trucks were making deliveries, but they sometimes had to move very slowly through single-lane streets that were choked with pedestrian traffic. At one point, I noticed a car moving slowly through the pedestrian crowd. It wasn’t just any car, either. I love the contrast of the immaculately polished white Bentley moving through a crowd of pedestrians.

In January, the IEEE 802.11 working group met in Taipei. The week before, I hosted a meeting for Task Group U in Hong Kong, a city that everybody should visit for its unique blend of traditional Chinese and Western culture.

I’ve been going to Hong Kong for over 15 years, though there was a gap of more than ten years between my first and second visits. In that time, one of the most notable changes is an unfortunate side effect of the rapid economic development in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and the entire Pearl River Delta region. Air pollution has become much more prevalent, to the point where it can often be hard to see across the beautiful harbor.

After the meeting one night, I took one of the Star Ferry’s Harbour Cruises with some of my fellow attendees. As we passed by the Central district, I noticed flashes of light coming from up high on Victoria Peak. At this point, I am so accustomed to the seemingly permanent haze that it took me a while to realize that the flashes were tourist cameras going off on the peak.

As the boat docked, I debated whether to head to the peak at 10 pm, since I was quite tired. My companions provided the needed encouragement, and I’m glad I went. By the time I made it up, many of the buildings had turned off their colorful night lights but it was still the best view I’ve ever had of the harbor:

I later spoke with my colleagues who live in Hong Kong, and they told me that a night so clear almost never happens. I feel very fortunate that I happened to be in the city at the time.

I was in Helsinki for an IEEE ad hoc meeting recently. On my last night in Helsinki, I went out for a walk after night, and took this picture of the statue of Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, the first President of Finland, in front of the Eduskuntatalo (house of the Finnish Parliament).

What I found remarkable about the experience is that the statue is only the width of a driveway across from the front steps of the building. I pulled out my tripod and proceeded to fiddle with my camera to set everything up. Nobody approached me and told me that photography was forbidden, or that mysterious security rules dictated that I move along, even though I was only a few meters from the entrance to the building. The parliament may not have been in session, but I can’t imagine that I’d be allowed to set up my tripod anywhere I wanted to on the U.S. Capitol grounds.

More photos from Helsinki are in the Helsinki gallery here.

Like most people I know, I own way too many battery-powered electronic devices. My photography habit is only making the matter worse, since I have a ton of equipment that is powered by AA batteries. Many pros will use nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries because their high capacity and low internal resistance are good characteristics for many photography applications, most notably, powering flash units.

The trouble with NiMH batteries is that they self-discharge rapidly, about 1-2% per day. If you charge up a set and leave them alone for a month, they’ll be almost flat. Photo pros don’t have a problem with this, since many of them shoot in high enough volumes that it’s not a big inconvenience to keep charging them since their usage runs way ahead of the self-discharge.

For the rest of us photographers, it is a major annoyance. It also prevents batteries from being used in some attractive applications, like remote controls. Remotes don’t draw a lot of power, but the self-discharge will make rechargeables run flat far too quickly to be used.

Fortunately, Sanyo may have come to the rescue with their new eneloop batteries. They’re lower capacity than most NiMH batteries, but Sanyo claims they don’t self-discharge. I haven’t done any quantitative testing, but my personal experience so far is that the claim is not completely farfetched. I bought a set of AAs and popped them into my flash on July 19. I’m still shooting with them, so even a month after installation they still have something.

(Sanyo claims that they retain 90% of their charge after 6 months, 85% after a year, and 70% at two years, but I have not attempted to verify those figures. Sanyo ships them charged and says they can be used immediately on receipt, which certainly is true.)

The next qualitative test is with the set of AAAs that arrived on Friday. On Sunday the 19th, I installed them into my Logitech Harmony remote. I’ll report back when I need to recharge them.

Earlier this year, it seemed to me as if I needed a circular polarizer for daytime shots. Last week at the 69th IETF meeting in Chicago, I think I proved myself right. Here are two photos of the Aon Center (I’m old enough that it will always be the “Standard Oil Building”) taken seconds apart. The shot on the right used a polarizer, and the reward is a deeper blue in the sky.

(Yeah, I know that neither of the two photos are well-composed. However, the couplet is the best illustration from all the photos that I took because the angle of the shot relative to the sun was in the best possible position for maximum effect of the polarizer.)

Tonight (actually, I’m posting this early enough that it’s probably “last night” by now), Michael Williams put on an awesome get-together. In addition to some great Indian food, Michael and his wife organized a belly dancing show for us.

Yes, belly dancing. Here’s one of the better photos from the night, with a slow enough shutter speed to show off the action (and some post-processing to punch up the contrast):

The restaurant was a challenging shooting environment because the ambient light level was so low that a lot of the photos came out grainy. Even at ISO 1600, the ambient light required 1/8 - 1/15 second exposures. I tried using the camera’s built-in flash with a index card jury-rigged into a bounce card. A couple of times, it even worked really well, as with this shot of Frédérique with her back to the camera. With the flash, I was able to cut the shutter speed to 1/40 second, and freeze a wonderfully radiant smile:

The full gallery from the night is here. (You should also check out a couple of fun clean-up photos: the first dancer pictured above balanced a speaker stand on her head, even when the phone rang.)

Interop ended the week before last, but Las Vegas is good enough at being angry-making that it took me a week to sort through all the pictures that I took. During Interop, my major activities were related to the OpenSEA Alliance, an organization that I helped found, and the Interop Labs, the legacy of Interop’s conference and research focus.

My favorite photo of the week illustrates why the Interop Labs is so valuable for attendees. Those of us who put it on have a staging event a month before the show, and then we arrive several days early to set up demonstrations. It’s common to be troubleshooting all the way up to the opening curtain, and sometimes even well into the three-day show. To show off open-source admission control technologies using the Trusted Network Connect architecture, it was necessary for Mike McCauley, the CTO of Open System Consultants (maker of my favorite RADIUS server, Radiator) and Chris Hessing, the Open1X project lead, to work out some bugs before the show.

(Meanwhile, Ted Fornoles and Tim McCarthy, both of Trapeze Networks, are in the background working on another demonstration.)

Chris and Mike are both individual members of the OpenSEA Alliance, and attended a lunch meeting the group had on Tuesday. We’re all excited about the possibilities of where we might go, but there’s a lot of hard work ahead of us. Fortunately, the group has a wide cross-section of industry representation; here’s a shot of the Extreme Networks access control demonstration area, which makes use of the Open1X project software:

There are several more pictures of people involved in the group in my OpenSEA gallery.

In the Interop Labs, I was a member of the VoIP team. Unfortunately, I missed the staging event because my presence was required at a meeting in Singapore. Of the demonstrations on the floor, our scalability demonstration seemed to attract the eye of most passers-by. Here, Jerry Perser of VeriWave (on the left) is explaining the demonstration to Sue Hares of Nexthop (on the right), and one of Sue’s colleagues whose name I forget:

If you’re interested, feel free to look at the full photo gallery here.

How much do I like Interop? To answer that question, I usually point out that it’s in Las Vegas, but I go anyway in spite of the venue. I’ve made the the annual Interop pilgrimage nine times in the past decade. Last week at the close of the show, I made my way to Mix, the nightclub on the 64th floor of THEhotel in Las Vegas. The view was astounding, in part because you can look down at the bright light on top of the Luxor.

As with almost every other city I’ve been to, Las Vegas looks better at night. From Mix, I assembled a four-shot panorama of the Strip. Here’s a small excerpt from it:

The photo was made possible by my new Canon SLR. I didn’t try taking a tripod up to the nightclub, and in any case, there’s a glass wall that I had to shoot over. To handhold the camera, even rested on the glass, required that I pull out all the tricks to keep the image steady. The shots were all taken at a speed of ISO 1600, and I’m sure that the fact I was using an image-stabilized lens didn’t hurt.

If you found the shot above attractive, you might be interested in the Las Vegas gallery, which also includes a couple of photos from the House of Blues Foundation Room at the top of the original Mandalay Bay tower.

There’s an old adage that the best pictures are taken within half an hour of sunrise or sunset. My obsession with photography is now bad enough that I am annoyed with taking pictures during the middle of the day, and I try to be out and about around sunset. As an example of what the mid-day sun costs you, compare this picture of mine from the Sri Mariamman Temple in Singapore:

To the picture at orientalarchitecutre.com. The colors in my photo are washed out and lack the “wow” factor of the real-life vibrant colors.

Enter timeanddate.com, which has a world clock that has sunrise and sunset times for most of the major cities in the world. I can tell that I’m going to be visiting the site frequently.

On this trip, I read somewhere that about 80% of Hong Kong is undeveloped. You’d never know it if you spent time in the traditional tourist areas on the Island or Kowloon, both of which are uniformly tall. when I first visited Hong Kong in the early 1990s, Mong Kok was the most densely populated area in the world, with a density equivalent to shoving New York City into Central Park.

The Po Lin Monastery is in a remote area of Lantau island. The MTR stops well short of the monastery. Many guides will tell you that you need to ride a bus from Tung Chung station, but there’s a new cable car that goes almost straight there over the mountains and takes about a third of the time (though it costs five times as much).

The most famous attraction is the gigantonormous Tian Tan Buddha, shown here with humans to make its immense scale obvious:

More in the Po Lin gallery. There’s more to the monastery than the Buddha. A short walk over a paved trail will bring you to the Wisdom Path, a poem carved into tree trunks arranged in a figure-8 loop.