I went to Cyprus for Christmas to see family. It was nice and I had a great time. My Dad has a small villa just outside Pafos on the south west coast. The villa is nice nothing fancy but only 500m from one of Coral Bay’s better beaches. The beaches in Cyprus are quite rocky in places, but in Coral Bay, there is a nice sandy beach just down the road.

In the winter the weather is nice, if you come from a cold climate, but if your coming from the tropics like we are then, well winter in Cyprus is just that WINTER! 15-18 during the day, getting down to 6-8 at night, brrr cold brr…

This is at the top of Mt. Olympus, you can see Zeus and Plato playing chess behind that treee.

During the days I was there, my Dad and I took long drives into the country and around Cyprus. It is a very pretty place and the sun was mostly shining. We had three days of lots of rain and storms, very dramatic…

a dark storm cloud rolling in…

Cyprus being a very ‘holiday’ oriented place there are loads of places to rent buggys and quads and this is one buggy i saw that looked pretty rad. Better wrap up for it in December though.

This is one of the places we visited a little fishing village, where we ate fish lunch. Well I had Calamari, now this is a very ‘greek’ culture, so when you get Calamari you expect Tziki, red onion and lemon yes? Well not in Greece or Cyprus apparently. You have to ask for that extra, and the bead is cut from a loaf, i suppose you could order pita? Regardless the strange presentation my fresh Calamari was delicious and Dad’s great whopping fish went down a treat.

After lunch we visited the ‘Baths of Aphrodite’

we took Sunset walks…

“The Sea Cave Villas” muito Carro…

In the early afternoon I took long walks along the coast shooting these landscapes.

The view from the Villa Patio…

I have been trying to complete a job request from a Spanish company who manufactured the street lighting on the new Shenzen Bay Bridge that crosses from HK to Shenzen, it is quite a massive bridge, very impressive – when you can see it. The problem has been one we know all to well here in Hong Kong and that is Air Pollution. Last week we had a week of clear blue skies and very clear air, so thinking the weekend would be the same I booked a car from Avais to drive up to the New Territories to explore the best place to get a nice shot of this big bridge. Shouldn’t be too difficult right. This is the result of the first days attempt…

That was Saturday afternoon, I didn’t bother sticking around til after sunset as I knew I was not going to get the shot the client was looking for. Instead I went exploring around Yune Long along the coast of the NT, most of which is one giant container yard. NT around Yuen Long is Container City:

The rest of it appears to be FISH FARMS, and those places where people pay to go fishing in a stocked pond.

This is one such fishing farming village, quite quaint in that run down HK industrial kinda kitch way.

Well Sunday, I thought the air might be a little more clear so I drove up to the Peak to have a quick look. Well it was more clear than Saturday, but still not one one would call ideal, so without anything better to do and the Rental Car just itching for the open road, I again drove up to the NT to the look-out spot I had scouted on Saturday, just in time for sunset and twilight. This is the result of my efforts, and while it is quite dramatic, I dont think it will be accepted by the client…

Pretty if you like AIR POLLUTION…

So now that I know the good spots to shoot this sucker, I just need to wait for a really clear day and then try again…

—————– Technical Note—————–

I used a cross hatch filter otherwise know as the ’star’ filter to get the niffty lighting effects…

Just back from 4 days in lovely China shooting Furniture catalogue for a Danish company.  We did the shoot in a huge photo studio that is dedicated to shooting furniture shots, it is located in Shunde, which is the furniture manufacturing capital of the world, you have never seen so many furniture showrooms in all your life,OMG…

Anyways this studio is fab 1000m2 and they have all the sets/props to create rooms etc as you would need to build to make a good furniture shoot… This is a picture of the team working on the shoot. There is me, the model, the two clients and the crew… The shoot went very well and now I have many many hours of Photoshop work to finish the shots…

This is what I did this weekend. Its for JAKK jewellry which is avail in fine retailers and Cathay Pacific’s Inflight Shopping magazine. Grace Choi is the model, Karen Yui did the makeup and I shot and retouched…

I am spending the week working through some Photoshop material in preparation for my Lightroom and Photoshop workshop that i am teaching this weekend. Just playing around with things I came up with this. One of our pictures from a trip to India we did last year, i tweaked the levels to such a degree that it kind of pops, with an old school crossed process feeling… ya like?

I just got a SPAM mail from John MacCain, asking me to vote for him… As if!

The thing that gets me is that according to USA LAW it is illegal to send out unsolicited email.  I have never met MacCain, I have never visited his website, I have never visited any Republican website, and to top it all off I AM DUAL BRITISH-CANADIAN citizen. So clearly MacCain broke the law…so how can he be expected to uphold the constitution or any other law?

I can just pray that the collective USA has the wisdom to elect OBAMA, cause he seems to be a straight talking no nonsense leader, with ideas to straighten out the mess THE Bush left the world in.  Look at where we are now as compared to 8 years ago at the end of the Clinton era…

The USA president is often refered to as the leader of the free world, and that he may well be as his actions affect all of us. So please American vote for OBAMA, we are all counting on you!

Last year we shot the Chairman of China Mobile for the GSM Association as part of Mobile Asia Congress in Macau.  This is the ad that was used for the Barcelona event.

Whilst digging through some old photos I came across this gem. Its from my trip to Sarawak back in late 99. This was taken in a IBAN longhouse at the end of a long day traveling up the REGAN RIVER in Sarawak. We all got really pissed on TUAK the local rice wine and boy did I ever have a crazy hang over the next day. Well as legend would have it the tatoos on the guys throat are supposedly a mark of having ‘taken a head’… but according to local historians that has not happened since WW2 and this guy does not look that old, well maybe… there were some freaky skulls hanging about the longhouse… Anyways a trip down memory lane…

Sandrine Clayton is about to lauch her first collection… We were honored to do the photography for her.

At Opera Gallery Hong Kong