Amateur Photograper_A Day With The Hong Kong Photogrtaphers - 1959

J Allan Cash, F.I.B.P., F.R.P.S.

Sees the Famous Early-Morning Mists with

Francis and Daisy Wu

Francis & Daisy Wu. This picture was taken before members of the Six-Twenty Group started their photography for the morning. 1/00 sec at f11. Verichrome Pan Film

On a recent trip trip to Hong Kong, Francis Wu and his wife Daisy took me out to some of the places where the local photographers have made their famous photographs. It was an unforgettable experience, in more than one. We are all familiar with the sort of work that comes out of Hong Kong. – The beautiful misty effects, with fishing nets, sampans, junks, or just a few reeds, all against the pearly grey of hills half hidden in the early morning mist. Francis promised to take me with my wife on the first Sunday morning when the weather looked right. I was to be in Hong Kong for only two Sundays, of the worst time of the year for weather, and he warned me that there were very few Sundays when conditions were just right, at any time of the year, This was going to call for more than the usual amount of luck.

Miraculously, the weather cleared on the Saturday evening and Francis rang me up to say that he would collect us at the hotel at 6am. We crossed over to Kowloon, on the mainland, on the first ferry, at 6.20am. Quite a few cars were on the ferry, and an astonishing number of camera appeared, whose owners started to shoot dimly seen liners looking out of the mist, fuzzy ferries surging by, and an occasional huge junk with its sails sagging for want of wind. I began to understand the expression: “The Six Twenty Group I understand it even better after we had driven some miles through Kowloon into the hills of the New Territories. We stopped at one good vantage point overlooking a deep valley all filled with mist.

“The First Lesson!” Francis declared, with a mischievous grin. While trying to compose a picture through the tree branches, I heard other cars stopping and we soon found that we are virtually surrounded with people with cameras. Each car that pulled up disgorged photographers clutching cameras, no one seemed to be without one. There were the Hong Kong photographers out for pictorial shots on a suitable morning. Hence the Six-Twenty Group, the people who catch the 6.20am ferry, the first one of the day.

Nets are hung up to dry 1/100 sec at f16. Verichrome Pan film

But this is nothing to what we saw in the valley, where the sea comes into a long inlet, flooding the mud banks and rank grasses at high tide. Shatin is the name of the place, and if you have ever looked at pictures from Hong Kong in the London Salon or other exhibitions, you are bound to have seen the inlet at Shatin. It has everything – a wide expanse of water, with high hills on the far side, fishing boats, nets hanging up to dry, fisher folk living on their boats, mud flats, reeds, narrow streams through the tidal flats – but above all, a luminous misty atmosphere that repeats itself quite frequently through the year, even if not often enough on a Sunday morning to suit photographers on the one day when they can get out with their cameras.

This particular Sunday morning was just about perfect. The weather was right, the subjects were there, and most fortunate, the tide was just at the right level, coming in to its peak during the hour or so that we spent t this delectable spot. Passing it later in the day, the tide was well out, the lights was harder and the atmosphere clear. It was not worth a second glance and it would have been a master of pictorials indeed who could make anything out of it then.

The day with the Hong Kong photographers was undoubtedly one of the main highlights of my whole nine months trip to the Far East.