Hong Kong street photos and camera review A2/M6

January 2005 (back to the blog)

A user review of the extremes of photographic technology at the end of 2004

I recently had the opportunity to use both the Minolta A2 and the Leica M6 cameras for about a week in Hong Kong. These cameras are about as different as cameras get in their technology. The A2 is a digital camera with a zoom lens and was one of the best of breed available in 2004. The M6, although a 2003 model, is so very little different from M series Leicas over the previous five decades that it could be considered a 1950’s model. That means it uses film. I had it loaded with ISO 400 black and white film and attached to a fixed 35mm lens.

This review is intended to be a user’s review of practical stuff like how the cameras coped and how much I enjoyed using them. It is not a button by button guide (google search if you want this - there are plenty of reviews out there). Neither is it particularly technical. No actual pixels evaluation or mtf charts. This is about what I felt about these picture taking machines as I was using them and later as I reflected on the experience whilst typing this on the return flight to Europe.

Child playing in park near Hong Kong zoo.

Taken with the A2 using the longer end of the zoom. Although this child was aware that I was there and taking pictures, the fact that I was able to stand back and not crowd him as I would have had to do with a wide angle lens meant that we could enjoy our joke without any feeling of concern by his parents. In fact I was standing next to the park’s security guard when I took this. The same situation with the Leica would have resulted in a very different shot.

My photographic “week” was a mixture of four continuous days which were entirely Leica days and a series of half day sessions which were dominated by the A2. I took over a thousand frames with each camera of which about 10 percent were Nephew and Niece shots (it was Christmas after all) which I’ve excluded from this review as I wanted to limit my consideration of these cameras as potential tools for street photography and even candid shots of children that you know are easier to set up than genuine street shots. The family photography time was a good opportunity to familiarise myself with the cameras (one of which was new to me and the other I hadn’t touched for nearly 12 months) and make the various adjustments to the digital camera which I’ll explain later.

The Leica

Leica rangefinder cameras need very little introduction. The have been around for ever; are still in production; have superb lenses; and have avoided almost every innovation in the last three decades of development.

To give my camera its full title, I was using an M6 TTL with a 35mm f2 Summicron lens. I also had a 50mm f2 Summicron lens, but I only used this on one day. I used ISO 400 black and white film. Most of the film used was Kodak Tri-X but I also used a little T-max 400.

This brings to the fore one of the more obvious points about using a film camera. You have to buy the film and get it developed. It has been well over ten years now since the security staff at London Heathrow would allow film to go through a hand search instead of an x-ray search and since 9/11 this has become the same the world over. Checked luggage x-rays can destroy film and even “photo safe” hand luggage scanners and degrade film. Anyway, who wants to add 40 rolls of film to already heavy hand luggage.

My normal black and white films are Ilford and Fuji films. Neither of these brands is easy to come by in Hong Kong so I decided to use Tri-X. Even this is limited in circulation although it did not take me long to find Stanley Street (Central, Hong Kong Island) which has a number of Pro dealers all of whom stocked it. I bought the T-max on my first day to get me started (I’ve nothing against it - it is just a film I’ve never used and don’t know) as this was slightly more widely available, although again, if you want to buy more than an odd roll, Stanley Street is the place to go.

Before I travelled to Hong Kong, I downloaded the Pro dealer list from Kodak Hong Kong’s web site but this is next to useless. The first two addresses I visited were no longer photo dealers and clearly had not been for some time. In the declining years of film usage the film companies are doing themselves no favours. It never has been easy to find black and white film in a city that you don’t know, but availability is now severely restricted.

Test two is finding someone to process the film as it is even more sensitive to x-ray in an exposed but unprocessed state. The Stanley Street dealers would all accept the film but were clearly simply sending it out. For better service and results I wanted to find the processing lab and deal with them direct. A web search located John Leung (Heard Street, Wan Chai, Hong Kong Island) who proved to be reliable, fast and cheap. Don’t be put off by the doorway. It looks like the entrance to a block of flats because it is the entrance to a block of flats. They are a professional outfit with an English speaking receptionist who knew enough of the business to accurately estimate processing time (if she said “today” it was always ready “today”). They provide a light box and a loupe if wanted and would obviously be pleased to get more than just the processing work. As I scan my negatives for printing I didn’t even get contact sheets printed, but I saw other work that they were producing being collected by photographers (or, more likely, their assistants). I would have been happy to commission prints.

It took about a day of internet research and footwork to get this all sorted out. Of course, none of this was necessary for the A2. I also had to plan into each of my major photo days a trip to the processor. Although Heard Street is moderately central this still takes about an hour unless you happen to be staying in their part of town and this has to be factored in to your time available for shooting.

Harbour side, Sai Kung

Taken with the Leica. A fairly typical shot in technique terms with everything preset. Although I’m sure this situation is repeated several times daily as other families come and go, it only lasted a second. Immediately after this photo was taken the both parents grabbed the child. The next frame on the roll isn’t anything like as interesting. The A2 might not have got this.

When you do get your negatives back you have the originals in your hand. Digital storage has a number of weaknesses (of which, more later) but you can take copies which are identical to the originals and which do not affect the originals in any way. I am quite a fan of the WOSA (write once, store always) properties of film in that negatives are remarkably robust, but they are not indestructible and they are not un-loseable. A thousand negatives is quite a bundle and they need some looking after 6000 miles from home.

My particular model Leica has a battery, but all it does is light a couple of little red lights in the viewfinder which jointly indicate whether the camera agrees with your chosen exposure setting. If the battery fails all you lose are the lights. Everything else goes on working. The current models in the range differ in that the M7 has slightly more automation and is more battery dependent and the MP has no battery at all. My way of working with the Leica is now geared to these little red lights. Most of the time I ignore them. For ISO 400 film I know the likely aperture and shutter speed settings for a range of common situations. These are based on experience - both mine and that of others - and the acceptance that the speed of use available by presetting major camera controls means that he occasional frame is junked because of my error. I carry a small Gossen handheld light meter in my pocket but I can assure you that at a shutter speed of 1/250th you can take measurements all day on sunny Hong Kong streets and you will get an incident reading of f16 plus or minus trivial amounts given the exposure latitude inherent in black and white film. Equally, step in the shadow of a tall building and f5.6 will show on the meter every time.

Shutter speed and aperture are set on big easy to use dials that can be read with the camera at waist level. This means that these things can be set as you walk towards a situation that looks interesting. All you have to do is focus and shoot.

Fish being dried near the port, Sai Kung

Taken with the A2. On this occasion either camera would have been able to take this photo as I was under no time pressure and could get as close or as distant from the subject as I felt like. The A2 has the advantage that you can dial in the film speed equivalent and the original capture is in colour. This means that you are not limited to the film that happens to be in the camera at the time you see the subject. This picture needed fine grain/low noise slow “film” and colour. A film camera with slow colour negative film loaded would have had the advantage that the wider exposure latitude might have held detail in the highlights. There are several points here where the highlights have burnt out.

Well, not quite all, because you have to load the film and remember to wind it on. I missed one interesting shot because I hurried a film loading and got it wrong. The film slipped on the spool and I had to spend the next few minutes retrieving it and reloading. By which time my interesting subject was several blocks away. I also stumbled on another occasion because I had triggered the camera without noticing it and when I came to raise the camera for a shot the shutter was not ready and I had to pause and wind on. No great deal, but if you are coming from a digital camera these things will take you a day or two to get used to. I can’t recall ever missing a shot because of a roll of film coming to an end. But I was more aware of the number of shots remaining with the Leica than with the digital camera because I had to change films just over twice as often as I had to change memory cards.

On the assumption that the film is loaded correctly and you’ve set the sunny 16 settings for your stroll in the park then focus and shoot are all that remain. And here is a secret. With the 35mm lens set to around the 2 to 3 metre mark virtually everything is in focus at f16. Of course, if you’ve the luxury of time then you can focus more accurately, or choose a selective focus or change the settings for less depth of field. However, in the heat of the “oh my, look at that” moment all you have to do is raise the camera and click.

The particular 35mm lens that I was using has a little tab on the focussing ring. It is very easy to learn where it should be for a couple of distances. I’d never used this before so I just memorised what it felt like at two and half metres and infinity. Extraordinarily useful. The 50mm lens doesn’t have this and it would anyway not be so good as the shallower effective depth of field means that focussing accuracy is more important. That little tab is one of the reasons the 35mm lens stayed on the camera.

The Leica rangefinders are about the fastest cameras ever made in translating trigger finger movement into photograph. There is no SLR mirror to get out of the way. No autofocus motor to drive the lens to the right place. No exposure algorithm to calculate. All of which means that a photographer can move from seeing to capturing more quickly with an M6 than just about any other camera. Yes, you can preset other cameras, pre focus autofocus, measure and hold exposure readings and so on, but I’ll comment on these aspects when talking about the A2. Be assured, the slowest thing about the image capture with the Leica was me. And that’s been true of no other camera I’ve used.

Which brings me back to the little red lights. Why use them at all? Well, I found them useful as a nag when I had stopped concentrating. If the camera was telling me the exposure was wrong and there was no obvious reason - like strong back lighting - then I was getting tired and it was probably time for a break. The lights were my “coffee necessary” indicator.

Couple kissing. Christmas decorations in Central.

Taken with the Leica. Everything preset. I was standing in the evening crowd in a large square. The Christmas decorations were due to come down the following morning so the square was very crowded. The large display screen suddenly flashed this message...... Wouldn’t have got this shot with the A2. Manual cameras only need apply.

The downside of not having a zoom lens on the camera is of course you miss some shots that you can’t get close enough to or which demand a certain angle of view. I wasn’t particularly aware of this whilst shooting but a quick review of the negatives versus the digital files (which in this context means fixed versus zoom lens) showed that I had a different mix of subjects on the A2.

I did also miss some shots by fluffing the focus when it would have been critical. And of course, some of the exposures would not stand examination in a zone system context (although, please note, there are many more shadow tones in the black and white photos here than my web connected computer monitor can render). However, both these things can be improved by practice, unlike a software dependency when your only option is to work around the shortcomings of the camera involved.

The Minolta A2

Again, to give the camera its full title it is a Konica Minolta Dimage A2 compete with a lens the equivalent of 28mm to 200mm in traditional film terms. Being a new model in a fast moving consumer electronics world it needs more by way of introduction than the Leica did.

The camera has an 8 megapixel chip and was one of five similarly chipped cameras released in 2004 by the major camera companies. It is widely regarded as the best of the crop and at the time of its release was Konica Minolta’s most serious digital camera (although they have since produced a digital SLR). It is not a direct vision camera like the Leica or most film compact cameras. Neither is it an SLR with an optical viewfinder. The photographer can either view the scene to be photographed through the electronic viewfinder or the rear panel LCD. The current digital camera market has a range of devices with similar viewing methods so they aren’t new but they do differ from all traditional photographic devices in that the photographer is viewing heavily processed information, not reality, or even a mirror reflection of reality.

It is not intended to be a professional camera. Professional cameras at the time of writing typically have sensors both physically larger and with a higher pixel count. They also have faster processing speeds and larger memory buffers. On the downside they are bigger, heavier and more expensive. The A2 could rather be considered a contender for the crown of top non-professional camera. Professionals carry them on holiday! And, more seriously, the big players in the imaging world like Adobe and Phase One support the recording format used by the A2 in their imaging software.

The A2 is fully two generations newer than the Leica. And that’s two real engineering generations, not marketing ones. It contains just about everything that camera makers learned at the end of the twentieth century in terms of automation and zoom lenses together with the twenty first century advances in digital capture and recording. All of this in a camera no bigger than the Leica. The A2 is also quieter and lighter than the Leica.

One of the Ten Thousand Buddhas, Sha Tin

Taken with the A2. To get this angle of view I had to stand on a wall and use the zoom to get in close. Also, the colours are important. Not a shot for the Leica.

Quieter. Now that is a real advance. Leica rangefinders have been the last word in quietness for decades. Radio studios used to demand that photographers used Leicas so that no camera sound would be transmitted. Yet, there is still the mechanical clunk and whirr of the shutter mechanism. The A2 is a close to being silent as is useful. There is just the faintest of swishing noises as the aperture blades flick closed. Anywhere with background noise the Leica isn’t noticed but I did have several experiences where subjects were alerted to my presence by the shutter click. This never happened with the A2. Of course, this was after finding where in the menu structure the fake camera noises were switched off. Something I recommend any user does immediately, along with all, or at least most, of the bleeps, blips and dings that electronic equipment burdens our lives with.

I say “most” because it was sometimes difficult to tell that the camera had taken a photo. Because the view finder is dependent on computer power it could sometimes be jerky or lag reality if the camera was busy doing something else, like trying to write the last shot and focus the current one. There is no SLR blackout as the mirror flips and potentially no sound. The shutter release button provides no feedback unlike the Leica which communicates the act of taking a photo through the mechanical motion of the shutter button, so if the screen is slow there can be some doubt as to whether the camera has shot or not. The temptation is then to shoot again if the subject is suitably slow moving which increases the workload on the processor and can easily lead to the whole machine locking up whilst the files are written and the buffer cleared. You will have to decide yourself what level of beep annoyance it is worth to minimise the uncertainty about whether the shutter has tripped or not.

The problem, in reality, lies with the lack of computing power. If the screen was real time and the buffer never filled up then you could trip the shutter with impunity. Note this in not a bug with this camera or even a design shortcoming. The reason that the A2 shines over similar cameras is that it is faster and has a better buffer capacity. Future generations of camera can only get better in this regard provided the manufactures attend to it. There are apparently serious cameras on the market which lock for five or more seconds between shots when used in RAW mode. The A2 is just acceptable and if you are shopping for a digital camera for use in RAW mode then use the A2 as your benchmark. Anything slower is not worth considering.

(This is not the place to discuss the merits of RAW over TIFF over JPEG. Suffice to say that if yo want control over your photographs then shoot in RAW. If other things are more important such as file size or immediate transfer to your picture desk use one of the other formats.)

In practice, and ignoring the times I accidentally pushed the shutter button twice, the A2 kept up with my picture taking and kept the buffer clear in most circumstances. Fast moving children were an example of when it did not. This is not a camera to take to the formula one race track, but then it doesn’t set itself up to be. In a fast moving sequence the second shot is actually available faster than with the Leica (no film to wind) but the third one was sometimes not available and certainly there was no fourth for a few seconds. Frustrating, but no worse than that for street photography.

I was using SanDisk Ultra II memory cards for on camera storage. These are one of the faster cards available and well worth the premium over standard cards. The buffer full problem would be much worse with slow cards. Cards are getting faster all the time and different brands leapfrog each other. Get the fastest card you can afford if using this camera.

However, I have run ahead of myself. The first thing that you have to do when starting a project with the A2 (or any similar camera) is set all the functions to your taste. I haven’t counted all the buttons and dials and menu options but it comes in at roughly.......too many. Partly because it is a piece of consumer electronics and falls within the school of “it is possible to add this function, so we will” and partly because it is trying to be all things to all people, this camera is complicated. Even so, I found it relatively straightforward to use, so the user interface is well designed, but I was left searching through the manual on a number of occasions. For example, the anti shake indicator has four colours to inform the user of its status. I never could remember which colour meant what. Unlike the day I spent in Hong Kong buying film and arranging processing for the Leica, setting up the A2 can be done in advance. However, if the camera is new to you budget on about a day getting to know it and programming the controls.

I mostly used the camera in aperture priority mode. This meant I used the two thumbwheels, which are the fastest way of changing any setting, as an aperture changer and an exposure compensation changer. ISO setting was a button and a thumbwheel. Switching focussing modes is just one button. All relatively speedy and no need to go near a menu. I found the rear thumbwheel clumsy to use in portrait format - it was ideally placed for landscape format - and missed some shots fumbling this. Apart from this, the controls fell easily to hand, and gave me access to what I wanted to change in a hurry.

I chose aperture priority over manual exposure because using the A2 in manual is not easy. This is mostly because it is difficult to see what the current settings are at a single glance. Yes, you can see if you look, but not if you glance. Anyway, using aperture priority plays to one of the strengths of digital cameras. The live histogram. Never consider a digital camera without a live histogram unless all your work is tripod mounted and even this case insist on instant histogram feedback once the shot is taken.

Histogram? What histogram? The histogram is a little graph that shows you where your exposure falls in the available range. Digital cameras have a similar exposure latitude to slide film (i.e. smaller than negative film) and have a tendency to blow out highlights. It is important to keep the graph in the centre of the range. Bunching at one end or the other, but especially at the highlight end, is bad news and detail will be lost. If the histogram is live you no longer have to worry about whether the scene being photographed is the same on average as the camera manufacturer’s calibration or whether the algorithm is taking too much account of the backlighting. Just look at the graph. If you can see both ends of it, push the shutter. If one end is off the scale, wheel the dial. It changes the entire way of thinking about light and interestingly makes the exposure compensation control the most frequently used control on the camera. Given that the metering in the A2 is very similar to the last ten years worth of film cameras and that slide and digital capture have similar tolerances it also shows how much of an underused control the exposure compensation dial was on film cameras. Underused because the photographer didn’t have the information to contradict the camera’s meter.

Pet shop, Central, Hong Kong Island

Taken with the Leica. I had time to focus which is as well as the lens was wide open. Maybe colour would have been nice, but there were lots of distracting colours as well as the colour of the fish. On balance the Leica was the better choice because the A2 would have added lots of noise to the picture because a high ISO would have been needed - its lens is slower than the Leica’s so I would have been at least at ISO 800 at which point lots of digital repair is needed.

Once you have taken a digital photo it has to be saved somewhere. I was using 1 gigabyte cards which were giving me a capacity of just over 80 shots before becoming full. I had three cards and these would typically last as long as my energy did - both personal energy and battery power. I always started a day with two charged batteries and never had to stop shooting because I had run out of electricity - although it was close once or twice. Cards and batteries are both easy to change on the hoof and although opening a camera in any way always introduces some risk of dirt getting in both covers are well designed.

One of the advantages of the A2 over digital SLRs is oddly the opposite of the traditional advantages of film SLRs. Because the lens on the A2 is not interchangeable you never open the “film” chamber. That is, you never expose the imaging chip to dirt, dust, fingerprints or rain. Digital SLR users have a constant battle with dust on their chips which is worse than getting dirt in a film chamber as film is at least wound on out of the way. Dirt on chips affects every photo and creates a lot of post capture work in Photoshop.

Without an assistant with a bag of batteries and memory cards, lunch stops generally required a journey back to base so that batteries could be recharged and the cards could be emptied onto a computer hard drive. This tended to mean that I planned my photo days with the A2 on the assumption that I would stop at half time and not go back out. Clearly this is overcomable but is the equivalent constraint to the daily trip to the processor for Leica users.

I transferred the pictures onto a Vosonic II drive which is a very simple battery powered hard drive. I liked its user interface - there are two buttons: “power” and “copy”. Because the drive is battery powered this could be done anywhere, but as I needed mains power to recharge the camera batteries I never made full use of this flexibility. I then copied the files on the Vosonic to a handy computer at my host’s house so there were already two copies of everything before I cleared the memory card for reuse. I used Photoshop CS to quickly review the files on the back-up computer to check all was well before clearing and formatting the cards in the camera (I’m told that formatting the cards in-camera is much better than formatting them on a PC but I’ve no proof of this). Because I was shooting RAW format I needed a top end photo editor to even view the files, but Adobe allows a 30 day trial period on its products which means that for temporary use like mine I could install Photoshop CS on my friend’s PC without worrying about licencing problems so as to have the same program that I use at home.

Pandas at Hong Kong zoo.

Taken with the A2. The ultimate tourist experience - viewing something from the back of a crowd through the LCD on somebody else’s camera. This shot pushed the A2 to its limits. The data file shows the lens at its longest, the aperture at its widest and the shutter at 1/15th of a second which is below normal handholding speeds for a telephoto lens. The antishake technology works. What is not so good is the level of noise generated by the ISO 400 setting. There are noise reduction programs around and I need to investigate these. The Leica couldn’t take a 200mm lens, so this one wouldn’t have worked at all.

The Vosonic drive was definitely a hand luggage item for the way home, but if disaster did strike then there is another copy of each file in Hong Kong. I learnt a lot about the practicalities of dealing with data in gigabyte sized chunks on this trip and in future will probably transfer directly to a laptop and use this to burn CDs for a secondary copy.

To counter the misloaded film episode on the Leica I had a couple of instances when the A2 crashed. It is, after all, a computer. This probably happened five times in total, but four of them were clustered into ten minutes and I suspect that there was a switch not quite settled into one position or the other. When I returned home I found that Minolta had issued a firmware update which may or may not be relevant. The update was easy to install.

With the Leica I was often pre-focussed and only fine tuned if circumstances permitted. This is more or less impossible with the A2. There is a manual focus mode and unlike similar modes on cameras I have used there is a real focussing ring on the lens (no buttons to press to cycle through pre-set focus distances). However, neither the view finder nor the LCD is good enough to focus with (and I found the optional depth of field function to be useless). One is limited to reading the distance from the very small numbers on the LCD or in the viewfinder. This works, but is not checkable at a glance and I found I was fussing about the focussing distance and not concentrating on what was going on around me. I didn’t feel that this was something which would improve with practice. On the other hand, the range of options for auto-focussing is really good. One of the common complaints from users of manual cameras is that it is difficult to predict what an auto-focus camera is going to choose to focus on. This remains true on the general setting, but the A2 allows the selection of a central point of focus, a movable point of focus or the use of the manual focussing ring to adjust the selected point of auto-focus. Each of these methods suits certain circumstances and I found that choosing the focussing mechanism as I approached a subject worked in a similar sort of way to using the ring tab on the Leica. With a bit of practice it just happened. Although on the first day I suffered from the typical camera auto frustration when I couldn’t get the camera to focus on what I wanted it to, this improved dramatically with use. Not quite as fast as the Leica but more flexible and, in some circumstances, more accurate.

One of the great benefits of zoom lenses is that you can try out different compositions on the fly. One of the problems of zoom lenses is that you can get fixated with zooming to the best focal length whilst the subject gets up and walks away. The A2 zoom is manual, unlike some similar cameras, so it is fast. Playing with options does not involve a lot of grinding of motors and ten second pauses, but nonetheless it is sometimes better to shoot with the lens as you find it, than to frame carefully and miss it. At least the poor quality of the electronic viewfinder does not encourage zoom fixation as it is actively unpleasant to use. There is nothing so guaranteed to ruin a street photography possibility as the photographer staring intently through the viewfinder for a few minutes.

Some very skilled photographers have acquired the ability to use cameras without looking through their viewfinders. Whilst this technique is often associated with Leica rangefinders it can be used on any camera in the right conditions with the right lens. A poor substitute for this on the A2 is the ability to swivel both the LCD and the electronic viewfinder to allow a view of the scene in front of the camera from above it. Not a technique for every day, but potentially fun.

Conclusion

Both cameras sit modestly in the hand and allow a photographer to blend into a scene in a way that the larger (whether digital or not) SLR does not. This is what makes them candidates for street photography.

Like all tools the requirements of each camera impose certain restrictions on the way you can work. Don’t take the A2 somewhere where power is difficult to come by. Don’t expect the Leica to be flexible for general purpose photography or take it anywhere without reliable film processing services.

Both cameras are very good. I had no quibble with the lenses on either within the known limitations. The A2 does not have a fast lens. The Leica does not have a zoom lens or any real capacity for telephoto work. The nearest I can come to a complaint is that the A2 performs less well at faster “film” speeds than it does at slower ones. I’m sure future cameras will deal with this.

View from the Peak.

Taken with the Leica. Almost any camera could have taken this shot. This is Hong Kong. Dragons, high rise living and pollution.

Both cameras produce prints up to A4 (8 x 10 plus) that can’t be beaten. The Leica will also produce good prints up to A3 size, but the Minolta A2 is struggling without digital intervention as sizes increase above A4. Neither camera is intended for poster sized prints. For book sized prints or smaller wall prints (i.e. the typical sizes for street photography) then look for no better than either of these cameras.

Both cameras take a certain amount of learning how to use. The learning takes a different form. Using the A2 requires you to learn its interface. But after that you can just leave the computer to do much of the work. The Leica requires that you know much more about photography. Be prepared to be disappointed by the Leica if you don’t work at it. Its main attractions are simplicity and speed. Its main problems are simplicity and user error.

The Leica is a faster camera for capturing fleeting moments if the photographer is. It is no longer the quiet camera.

The A2 is a better general purpose camera that can perform sterling work on the streets.

A few notes about Hong Kong.

Hong Kong strikes me as a safe city. I’m not saying that there are no areas that you would advised to avoid whilst carrying your top end digital SLR and mega lens collection, but on the whole I felt safe. Certainly safer than in many Western European cities. This is partly down to the obvious police presence and partly down to the environment (no graffiti; clean public parks; children’s play areas looked after etc.). However, it is mostly a result of the body language of the mass of the population. At no time did I feel intimidated in the way that you might, for example, when traveling on an Underground train in London. Even the occasion when a street vendor indicated a reluctance to be photographed there was no malice in the exchange. There are signs in the more obvious places warning against pickpockets, but I know of someone who has had a dropped wallet returned intact and I witnessed an obviously poor person chase after an obviously wealthy person to hand over a piece of dropped jewellery.

To the best of my knowledge I was only short changed once which makes a remarkable contrast to, say, Italy. Part of the explanation for this is the ubiquitous Octopus card which is a prepayment card that makes most small change transactions cash free. This is great news for the somebody trying to juggle cameras and maps whilst trying to buy a tram ticket or a bottle of water. Make an Octopus card the first thing that you buy on arrival.

Hong Kong is a very polluted city. It has become much more so in the last five years, and although there is growing recognition of the problem the solution is some way off. After a day walking the streets of any central district I was distinctly uncomfortable. If this is important to you then research the better times of the year to go - wind direction makes a big difference.

As a fair-haired Westerner I was never going to blend in, so stealth photography was not an option. In central areas there are plenty of Westerners, both workers and tourists so conspicuity was less of an issue than you might imagine. The usual rule applies. If you look like a tourist and you behave like a tourist you can sort of disappear, although using a modest camera like the A2 helps. In more residential districts I just took my cue from the people around me. If I was drawing attention then I wandered away. This only really happened once and was not a particular problem.

And, finally, the climate. Hong Kong is hot and humid. I was there in mid winter and the local paper was describing days that were between 15 and 18 degrees Celsius as cool and days between 12 and 15 degrees as chilly. That’s the sort of chilly I can cope with. I know from experience that walking around all day outside in mid summer is unpleasant. Again, if it matters to you, research before you go.