Billboards offer tourists a glimpse of smog-free Hong Kong

Mr. Alex Hofford is hiding something. I live in Hong Kong and deliberatly went to see what is happening there last Saturday. It is NOT a solution for tourists taking pictures when the air quality is bad. In fact, we do have many days of clear weather this Summer. I know cause I work in that area.

Now back to what Mr. Hofford is misleading us. They are boards to hide the renovation work behind. I have pictures to show it but can't post them here. I'll post them in Nikon D3 forum cause I shot with a D3s +Leica R 105-280/4.2.

Pcitures are deceiving sometime. But this time it is not the pictures. But the one who presents the pictures.

The billboards are both amusing and sad. I've visited "emerging" cities for the last 40 years, from Sao Paulo to Bangkok. and the story has been the same. Duringl industrialization air and water pollution is similar to what you see in China. CO2 is not the problem -- it's particulates in the air from manufacturing & from coal-fired power plants and cars/motorbikes.

Much of what you see in Hong Kong's air drifts in from plants in Shenzen (just over the border from HK). Over time, public pressure mounts and air quality improves, sometimes rather dramatically -- witness Los Angeles in 1970 vs today, or London. Boycotting China may be emotionally gratifying to some, but it won't help Hong Kong as much as public pressure in the locality itself. Wait a few years and you'll see better skies in China. Meanwhile, visit HK in the winter and you'll have a good chance to see Victoria Peak. http://www.flickr.com/photos/99183821@N00/6246665966/in/photolist-avZNam

The UN clearly needs to punish China for its blatant destruction of the earth's environment. The Chinese are the world's worst criminals when it comes to promoting Global Warming, which threatens the lives of everyone on our planet.

Yet another clear indication of the corruption and lack of morality that exists within the Communist Party leadership in China.

Blue skies over HK Harbour still happen,
according to Alamy search:

http://www.alamy.com/search/Imageresults.aspx?CreativeOn=1&adv=1&ag=0&all=1&creative=&et=0x000000000000000000000&vp=0&loc=0&qt=hong%20kong%20harbour%20blue%20sky

Is the human race smarter than yeast? The answer so far is a resounding no.

OMG; the editors at dpreview MUST be loonies to have this posted - the pictures are boarding for construction work.

Nothing else.

To attribute this to anything else is poor reporting. If you read the article it shows that.

This is not to say we don't have poor air quality - I live here and you have no idea how bad it can get on days like this. And YES I would love for the environmental protection department to get their act together, but THIS is not one of them, and rightfully shouldn't be - they have better ways of improving air quality than this.

Article complete rubbish as stated below. The clarity in HK is dependent on season, if the prevailing wind is blowing from the continent then you get thousands of miles of dust and then, yes, its pretty smoggy here. In the summer the wind comes from the ocean and the views are very clear.. I've been taking many crystal clear 30,000 pixel wide panoramas here recently which is to say it isn't so much self-generated pollution as geographical nuance. The weather is just beginning to revert to the dirtier conditions, in which state it will remain over the several months of no rain at Winter.

On the subject of tourists taking photos in front of the backdrop, tourists (the majority of whom in TST are mainland Chinese often on their first trip out of China) here will take photos in front of virtually anything, it is hardly a compelling narrative.

This article and the source articles are very misleading. This was actually a hoarding board erected by the Architectural Services Department to cover a construction site on the Avenue of Stars in TST. It had nothing to do with smog or air pollution but it just happen to become another snap shot photo op for many tourist.

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1298663/billboard-offers-picture-perfect-harbour-views

May be it has clean air and clear sky but its very hot and humid, and an very congested city.

It's obvious to anyone who understands HK politics that this is their way of making a point to mainland China about their pollution. What better way than to show the snap-happy mainland Chinese tourists what their country is doing to neighboring lands.

sometimes I'd prefer smog over bokeh.

Unfortunately this is a world of make-believe, the people accept, because man is an animal of habit. What is natural nowadays suspects. The time we set out the discovery of natural landscapes, social values​​, talking with people on the terraces and cafes, on the street corner, sharing a house with friends is increasingly less common, even being in a family. Nowadays increasingly everything is at a distance of a button, a false scenario, a filter, a mobile phone, and forget the contact with reality, and with people and real things. Virtual reality came upon us without doubt. A few more than others.

OK - Ill say it again.

THIS IS A TOURIST THING.

Asian tourists like to photo themselves in front of scenic vistas.

This is a service to those tourists.

They visit Hong Kong, and its all smog. So --- they will go home without the image. So, they cry themselves to sleep. This is done out of kindness.

And it is free. In US the same kind of thing - photo yourself with a Cowboy - often cost money.

One wouldn't have suspected that the Chinese government were capable of something this witty.

It won't be too long, as the world's population goes on expanding, with the level of consumption ramping up (as required by the prevailing economic model), before they'll have to put up posters of the current pollution levels to remind people what a paradise has been destroyed.

Population growth. Maybe a few wind farms will help.

Was there someone out there who thought that sending most of our manufacturing to the far east while accelerating our demand for dirt cheap pricing on everything from cameras and phones to boots and jackets was going to be free of consequences?

China and others get rampant pollution (as just one consequence) and North America gets governments who must now borrow to stay afloat (as just one consequence.)

Much of this is our fault and so long as we all pray to the shareholder value gods while demanding that WalMart roll prices back weekly it is rather unlikely to change. So why are we complaining? Surely missing out on the view of the Hong Kong harbour is rather low on the list of calamities to be addressed and hopefully one day reversed.

It is a construction site fence board printing sight seeing photos, please don't fool us! The original photo is come from a anti-china site.

If people don't notice the creases in the background they deserve to be hoodwinked. :-)

There's absolutely no industry whatsoever in Hong Kong, guess where all this pollution come from....

How lame can that be? What about doing something to actually reduce the pollution you bunch of morons??

I haven't been to the touristy areas in while so I didn't know these posters were set up there. It's a pretty stupid idea, since it prevents people from shooting the beautiful night skyline.

The irony is that most of HK's tourists come from Mainland China, the source of the pollution. HK moved away from factory/industrial business ages ago, so much of the air pollution comes from Mainland provinces like Guangzhou.

BTW, the skies have been getting smoggy, but we still have good days in Autumn and Winter. And summer usually brings weeks of clear skies due to high pressure systems acting like a dome over the entire region.

Bugger Hong Kong - get a picture of yourself on Mars.

There will still be life on earth after humans are extinct.

This smog was reaching even Japan, seems depends on seasons winds change. In spring Kyushu was also quite bad, several times higher than japanese safe limit and about 8-10times higher than usually. Authorities even strongly recommended to stay inside house as much as possible and wear masks.

So spring in Kyushu is not really good for landscapes, sky is mostly gray, mountains are lost in smog. And Japan can't really do anything about this :(

Wow. That is one pathetic non-solution.

great! no depth of field problems...

They're breathing the smoke that's the industrial byproduct of the manufacturing of the very camera they are using to avoid taking a picture with that byproduct in it. That's like an ironic enigma, wrapped in the matrix, folded up in a house of mirrors by Nietczhe, Marx, and Kant, and then placed inside a burrito that was fed to Ronald Reagan and crapped out into a toilet made out of the graphs that Ross Perot used to draw.