Thanks to everyone who contributed. It gave me a lot to think about and was helpful. I posted these suspecting there would be a mixed response and that was how it turned out though I think mainly very positive so that was nice. As I have said I am pretty relaxed about criticism especially when I have asked for it. Its how we learn. There are too many comments to respond specifically to all of them but I will attempt to make a few responses.
daveoo Funny you should mention the tarpaulin or whatever it is in the second scene. For me it works - in fact it is one thing that drew me to the scene. I liked the way it broke the view I otherwise would have had of the whole alley. I guess that is a matter of personal interpretation. Yes these scenes are cluttered though I do not know if I had any specific motive or intent in taking the shots other than that they caught my attention. I think if I did have an intention (and maybe this came after the event rather than consciously, before I took the images) it was more that I wanted to show the contrast between Hong Kong's glitzy high rise, big finance side and the ordinary things of life. Scenes like this which are more or less abandoned and definitely unkempt, but which form an integral part of everyday life for inhabitants, are found a lot in HK - usually just around a corner in a side street somewhere. Most visitors do not look, or if they do they think "Ugly!" and move on.
Benlees I think the sense of abandonment or near abandonment was something that drew me. The second image is more typical of many side streets and alleys in Kowloon where most people live in very close proximity to each other (parts of Kowloon for example are said to be the most densely populated urban environments on earth and other parts of HK are not far behind.) Finding a place with no people (or one person who has obviously just popped out for a "ciggy" and will soon leave) is a distinct novelty in a place like that.
Yokosuka_Mike Thanks for your kind words. I am blushing. What more can I say. I take your point about posting several images at a time. Good thought. Finally, you say "We’re a bunch of grumpy old men". That's probably why I fit in. Just ask my wife .
🙂
Richard G Post processing is not everything but in my case it is something. It is a part of what I do - in fact it is a big part. My feeling about the images I wish to make is that I do not wish to make final images that just come out of a camera. I guess I am more interested in "image making" than in "image taking" (i.e. rather than in photography per se). I much prefer an end result that
interprets the scene and is somewhat painterly in the image that then results. It is never just about what comes out of the camera, it is about what I do with it after. Some times it works, sometimes not. Sometimes I end up with a dozen variants of a specific image in my p.c. as I experiment with different styles then only publish one of them (or none of them). Sometimes I try a specific style and find I like it for a time but eventually discover new ways of presenting those images. All of this inevitably involves PP. But in putting these two images up for feedback I did privately acknowledge that some could feel they were over processed. I myself was not sure whether they worked or not, or if I had over done it. I think what I have concluded from this experiment is that some find it to their taste, some do not. And that is fine too. For me, I am always looking for a better way.
Rob-F "To my eye, the second photo is the one that is too busy." I understand what you say about this and the lack of a specific core subject. In way I think I had the same issue with it and wished there was a human subject as the point of reference for the image. But we cannot always have what we want when we street shoot as we cannot control what's happening in the world and need to take what we get.
I actually have had this photo on my PC for several years unprocessed, I think for that reason. Then recently looking back on older images I looked again at this one and realized it had something else - an interesting interplay of light and dark, shadow and light plus a sense of abandonment which is almost certainly what originally drew me to take it. And the presence of some red items in it help enormously. Red, just "pops". And so I then set about processing this (and another like it). I have composited these into a diptych and posted the composite below. I think in this composite image there is a bit more contrast in the above scene than the original version I posted in this thread - added in post to see how it works and to balance with its partner image which is naturally more contrasty.
The composite image of two alley scenes mentioned above.