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**Me Jamie, your host, I am English and I have lived in Hong Kong for 53 years - I know the place.**
**I have personally completed 2,300+ Private Experiences (over 6,000+ guests) since April 2011 and I am considered one of the finest Private Tour Guides in Asia.**

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Hong Kong Photography Tours - Why I Don‛t Do Them

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Hong Kong Photography Tours

This is the text of my 2021 Blog Post on my J3 Private Tours Website, I have had time to reflect on what I wrote and have made some adjustments to the text with updates and such.

Let me be clear

I am not a professional photographer and I do not pretend to be but many people assume I am!
I do not sell my images, all images on my Flickr site are free to download, you do not need my permission to use them and yes people think I am mad, I do not, my images are good, sometimes great but nowhere near the quality needed to make an impression, people like my images, my Flick site gets between 20,000 - 50,000 views a day and I have seen my images in blog posts, ads and such.
I do not do Photography Tours of Hong Kong but I have taken many Professional Photographers from overseas out on a tour mainly because of my knowledge of great locations in Hong Kong
I have strong opinions about photography which have been known to annoy people
Anyone can call themselves a professional photographer, and charge you for it and we have a lot of poor quality photographers in Hong Kong!

I am grateful to Ken Rockwell a renowned expert in the art of photography who answers the simple question “what is a professional photographer?” see below for his definition, straight off his website

Full-Time Career Pro

A Full-Time Career Professional Photographer is a person who has been a full-time photographer for his entire career.

He works all day, every day, ever since he graduated college.

These guys buy whatever gear they need, since the cost of gear is trivial compared to how much they use it. If something saves them 5 minutes a day or has a clearer viewfinder to peer through 12 hours a day, it doesn't matter if it costs $8,000. For these guys, even very little things, like AF sensors that don't clutter the viewfinder, are very important.

Full-Time Photographer

A full-time pro works the same as the Full-Time Career Professional Photographer, but failed at some other career and fell back on his hobby to try to make money.

If he hasn't been doing it very long, he may still worry about gear costs since he's not sure how long it will be until he'll get another real job. These worries come from back when he had a real job, and his boss tried to get cheap with the tools.The Career Pro doesn't worry: if a new tool saves him more time over its life than the cost of ownership, it's a no-brainer to buy it.

Professional Photographer

A professional photographer is a photographer who earns 100% of his income from photography. This is the definition required for entrance into the secret Nikon and Canon factory support organizations.

Amateur Photographer

People who earn less than 50% of their income from photography are amateurs.

People who shoot weddings every single weekend while holding down another job aren't professional photographers. People who sell prints at art fairs, but still have real jobs, are still amateurs.

Different people and organizations will argue over what income percentage defines professional. I won't get into that here, but these numbers vary wildly.

These weekend amateurs are all about the cash, and will shoot great pictures, but use the cheapest gear they can. That's OK, and the way to run a part-time business. Rich amateurs will buy any gear they want.

**One of my professional photographer guests on the Star Ferry, Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong**

My photography background

I am at best a very average amateur but I came very close to becoming a professional photographer 40 years ago in Hong Kong (and no I do not regret history)

My father was my inspiration and my first camera remarkably was a Hasselblad the renowned Swedish camera, it was a film camera and more of a studio camera but I used it as a street camera and I was always very excited by the images I took.

I was offered a job in a famous photography studio in Hong Kong with a rather famous photographer | owner but the pay was so low I could not justify it (I was married with a young son) even though what I would have learned was priceless and that was the end of my interest in photography for 30 years.

In 2010 I became a full time Private Tour Guide and that got me interested in photography again and at first I just took images with my phone, then I upgraded to a cheap Olympus point and shoot and then in 2014 I bought the Mark 1 version of my Sony and then in 2016 I got the Mark 2 version and invested in Adobe Photoshop that allowed me to tweak my images, mainly to correct lighting and exposure issues.

In the past 10 years I have developed a particular style and I am known for my car and truck photography and yes, people really like my images.

The thing is that even with an extensive collection of 170,000 + images I am NOT qualified to call myself a professional photographer and that is that.

**This is my one and only camera, my Sony RX1r Mark 2 | with a spare battery and lens hood US$4,000 in Hong Kong.**

**I would not mind getting my hands on this Hasselblad!**

Why I do not do Photography Tours of Hong Kong

40 years ago my technical knowledge of photography was very advanced I could talk F stops for hours on end but in the 30 years between stopping and restarting taking pictures technology changed, yes digital cameras changed everything and I had forgotten all the technical points of professional photography and frankly I just could not be bothered re learning old tech as they say.

….and when I mean everything I mean everything and the situation has just gotten worse from my perspective with camera phones and Instagram filters responsible for the seemingly billions of images uploaded daily, if you are a decent photographer no one seems to care about your work anymore.

I care.

I have embraced digital cameras and my Sony is fantastic, it takes brilliant images and I have literally never changed the settings, everything is totally automatic, I do literally, point and shoot - but I choose my locations carefully and I do a little post editing work to every image with Photoshop.

**A very rare Pagani Zonda Absolute doing 80mph! my favourite car image**

My biggest mental block is simply trying to tell people with mobile phones that the images they take on their phone are basically rubbish, I explain it by putting my camera lens next to the camera lens on a mobile phone, then the message gets through. There is a reason Instagram limits the physical size of an image on its site, if the image was any bigger the quality and focus would degrade.

I have written extensively on the subject of “Hidden Gems and Secret Spots” in Hong Kong because everyone wants that “perfect” image to edit with filters and post on Instagram, there is one very famous image that everyone wants to take in Hong Kong and that is a playground in the Choi Hung Estate in Kowloon, the playground is surrounded by decrepit public housing that had a lick of paint in rainbow colours.

I am not denying that it is an iconic image if done properly but trust me, I have been there many times and I have never, ever been able to recreate the vibrant colours you see on Instagram, the reality is that even on glorious sunny days the colours are drab and lack vibrancy, to me enhancing the image with Instagram filters is just not real and authentic and it is 45 minutes from down town by subway so it takes a big chunk our of your sight seeing time to take a couple of snaps.!

In a nutshell my professional knowledge of cameras and images is simply not sufficient to pass myself off as a professional and I simply do not regard a phone camera as a real camera!

I do have some talent in location scouting and I am sufficiently experienced in “composition” that I have the happy knack of taking some great images (so I am told) but again, this does not make me qualified to be a professional photographer.

Perhaps the biggest reason I do not do photography tours in Hong Kong is that I am simply not qualified, people expect “professionals” to talk all the technical jargon and be familiar with digital photography down to the last electron, they want to know about lighting conditions and such, that is against my “credo” so to speak, I simply take photographs (170,000+ and counting).

…. and that ladies and gentleman is why I do not do Photography Tours of Hong Kong

I should point out that because I have done so many Private Tours of Hong Kong and have lived here for 52 years + I have extensive knowledge of great places to take photographs which is enough for most people.

ps our 3 adult sons are all working in the field of digital imagery, our eldest son is a world renowned expert in the field of colourising black and white images and our youngest son who is an English Teacher moonlights taking images of music gigs in Hong Kong., he is a chip off the old block.