About

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 Mong Kok and pin-point the exact shot from a Wong Kar-wai film. It’s not set dressing. 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 always.

Most of the 5,137 photos on this site started life as Instagram posts. Shot on whatever I had in my pocket, uploaded the same day. Some are good. Some are just moments I wanted to keep. All of them are Hong Kong the way I saw it that day.

The city

People think of Hong Kong and picture shopping malls and skyscrapers. Fair enough — it has those. But it has everything else too.

Mountains. Actual mountains, with trails and waterfalls and views that make you forget you’re twenty minutes from a subway station. Beaches — real ones, not reclaimed waterfront with a railing. Islands you can reach by ferry in half an hour where the loudest sound is a dog barking. Museums that would hold their own in any world 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.

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 brochure line. I’ve done it.

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 blocks from cage homes where people sleep in wire bunks stacked to the ceiling. Ultra rich. Extreme poverty. Side by side, same neighbourhood, same MTR station.

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

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.

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 loved it. I lived it. I took pics.

Come see.