Once In A Lifetime

O

nce upon a time I lived and worked in a far place. In Asia, in China, in Hong Kong. Sounds glamorous doesn’t it?

It wasn’t.

Just like most “glamorous” ventures, the hard work and effort is usually done in the deep background that most people never see.

In order to do my job I had to ride the world’s longest escalator, walk through very crowded streets to an MTR station (subway), take a train, change trains and walk about a quarter mile to my work place, often in heavy rain and always in humidity that makes New Orleans’ heat and humidity look tame.

That’s just for prepress work.

If I was working on press, printing the product, I was either given a ride (not frequently) or I would repeat the first segment of the above process, but this time taking the MTR under the harbor and all the way to the end of the line to Tseun Wan in The New Territories where I would catch a bus to the printing press.

Sometimes this happened at two o’clock in the morning. Press checks happen at all times of the day.

Eventually as my worth was proved, my colleagues would give me rides every day to The New Territories which sped up the process appreciably. They liked that. So did I.

That’s not all.

Try grocery shopping in small stores, packing your food into totes and walking up a steep hill to get home. In the heat, humidity and often heavy rain. In crowds rushing to get someplace. It was just like being in rugby scrum. I suppose that prepared me for photographing second lines in New Orleans.

Life is mostly a continuum.

T

his picture came about because was walking home one night. I always carry a camera. I saw this scene and made a lot of exposures. On film.

You are seeing it because I’m working on my project with PicFair. I decided to move my best pictures from everywhere before I started in on second and third versions. I’ll tell you stories about them because they are about my life.

I’m probably going to leave Instagram because they are in a death match with Tik Tok. Once, they had reels which were short videos of anything, mostly cats. You had to click on an icon to see them. As of this week the fine folks at Meta are mixing the videos in with my still photography feed. This doesn’t work for me. I usually go to Instagram twice a day unless I am posting or expecting something. I scroll through my entire current feed. That takes some time. Now that time is doubled.

Nonsense.