About Hong Kong Thru My Eyes

Why Another Photoblog About Hong Kong?

I landed in Hong Kong in 2012 and the first thing I thought was: it’s real.

Everything I’d seen in movies, in dramas, in tourism ads — it was all actually here. The neon, the density, the harbour, the mountains behind the skyline. You can stand on a street corner in Tsim Sha Tsui and pin-point the exact shot from a Wong Kar Wai film. It’s not a Hollywood set. It’s real. It’s live. People live here. *I* live here now.

So I took my phone and started taking photos.

That’s the whole origin story. No grand plan, no photography ambitions. I walked. I shopped. I ate. I pointed my phone at things that caught my eye and uploaded them to Instagram. Eventually I got a real camera — a proper one, with a wide angle and a telephoto lens. Didn’t stop using my phone though. The phone is always with me. The camera bag? Not often.

Most of the 5000+ photos on this site started life as Instagram posts. Shot on whatever I had in my pocket, uploaded the same day. You can see the quality of the photos improving as Apple got better with their cameras. Some are good. Some are just moments I wanted to capture. All of them are Hong Kong the way I saw it that day, that time, that place.

The city

People think of Hong Kong and picture shopping malls and skyscrapers. Fair enough; it does have those things. But it actually has everything else too. And I do mean everything.

Mountains. Actual mountains (or hills, you know…), with trails and waterfalls and views that make you forget you’re twenty to thirty minutes walk from a subway station. Beaches, real ones, not reclaimed land with a railing. Islands you can reach by ferry in half an hour. Museums that would hold their own in any world-class city. And thanks to the public transport, the MTR, the buses, the ferries, the trams, the minibuses… it’s all absurdly accessible. All you have to do is try (apps are your best friend for navigation).

You can hike up a mountain in the morning, spend the afternoon at the beach, and be in a nightclub by midnight. That’s not a joke. I’ve actually done it. Freaking tired by midnight though. Phew, that was a heck of a day.

From street eats at a dai pai dong to fine dining with a harbour view. Cheap beer at 7-Eleven to some of Asia’s best cocktail bars. The most expensive hotel rooms and housing in the world, a few kilometers away from cage homes where people sleep in wire bunks stacked to the ceiling. Ultra rich. Extreme poverty. Often just an MTR station away.

The contrast is vast. It’s what makes Hong Kong endlessly photogenic. There’s always something next to something else that shouldn’t be next to it, and yet? There it is. Lovely.

This site

Hong Kong Thru My Eyes is 14 years of photos, organised by the places and themes I kept coming back to. Neighbourhoods like Mong Kok and Central. Themes like Nights / Neon and Transport. You can browse them on a map, read the stories behind them, or just scroll through the feed.

Stuff is messy. I just dumped what I had on IG to a WordPress site. So the titles and crap have hashtags in them. Sorry not sorry. I’ll fix these when I get the time. I mean there’s over 5k posts on here!

It’s not a travel blog. I don’t rank the “top 10 things to do.” I live here. This is just what I see. I don’t clamber up to the top of water towers and stuff. What I see, is what you can see too. 

As the years passed, I’ve added stuff to my arsenal of digital eyes; 360 cameras, drones, POV camera and lately… AI glasses. Still, what I see is what you can see too.

I’m not a professional photographer. Most days, I’m just a guy with a phone. These pics aren’t meant to be gallery-grade stuff. Just crap that I snapped.

I just thought that having all that stuff sitting on my iCloud or in the gated Instagram garden was a bit of a waste. So here it is: Hong Kong.

I love it. I lived it. I took pics.

Come see.