Copyright: Jeffrey Martin
Type: Spherical
Resolution: 3.2 Gigapixels
Uploaded: August 2019
Updated: August 2019
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Here is the "second courtyard" of the Yick Fat building (aka THE MONSTER BUILDING), one of Hong Kong's most famous (but still slightly under the radar) amazing spots. (You can CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FIRST COURTYARD)
For those of you who don't know anything at all about Hong Kong, it is an island city right next to China. It was a British Colony from 1841 to 1997 (with the Japanese briefly trampling their way through and occupying it from 1941 to 1945). Although Hong Kong was "given back" to China on the first of July 1997, it remains a very different place from "mainland China". The biggest differences between Hong Kong and the rest of China are: 1, it remains a relatively free place, without the authoritarian government and censorship in many parts of public life including the internet; and 2, a lot of people not only speak great english, but also are far more communicative with westerners, due to essentially having lived in this tiny corner of the United Kingdom. Lots of signs on the street are in English as well.
Another difference between Hong Kong and Mainland China is that in Mainland China, there isn't much preservation of old stuff. Besides a large majority of objects and places being destroyed in the cultural revolution, lots of other buildings, neighborhoods, or even entire cities are regularly torn down to make way for whatever new highway, factory, or modern city is needed in that place. This makes for an extraordinarily efficient and fast-growing economy, but it leaves a bit to be desired in terms of cultural and historical artifacts.
In other words, Hong Kong is bursting at the seams with weird old crusty historical stuff. (The same can be said about Taiwan, but not with the insane density of Hong Kong).
I fell totally in love with the "crusty old side" of Hong Kong, and found myself searching out such places. Talking to my friend Aaron Tango Tang (@hahatango), he urged me to come here. So I did!
I spent about 3 hours shooting this image, using a Canon 5Ds and a 50mm lens, mounted on a Seitz VRDrive gigapixel robot. I shot 5 exposures, ranging from 1/8 second to 30 seconds. The camera shot 104 different positions, from straight down to all around in a circle, to straight up, totalling 520 photos. The photo you see here is derived from a 16-bit PSB file, tonemapped HDR from the original 5 exposures. This really did take a long time, but the detail of this is place deserves it! Not every courtyard needs such resolution, but this place has all kinds of interesting details. I can say that it's possible to see far, far more in this photo than you'd be able to see with your own eyes in real life if you were standing here.
This photo is also available as a true HDR, 32 bit EXR file.
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