I’ve been doing some casual investigation of camera shops in Hong Kong. Real shops. Not Broadway and Fortress, not shops in computer centers, not rip-off places along Nathan Road. Shops for professionals and advanced amateurs.

There isn’t too much info online either, at least not in English, and most of what I could find was 5 or 10 years old, gathered from different threads in photography forums. One of the drawbacks for foreigners in HK is that most of these places don’t advertise in English language publications (and why should they bother, 97% of their target audience is local).

Oddly, there don’t seem to be many on the Hong Kong side. There’s a handful along Stanley Street in Central and one on Lyndhurst Terrace. And another one on Queen Victoria Street. I’ve also noticed a couple of shops along Des Voeux Road towards Sheung Wan. These are okay, except they are relatively small.

There are two areas to go for hard core photography stores – Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui.

In Mong Kok, the #1 spot to go is Wing Shing Photo Supplies. They have two large branches, the first at 66 Sai Yeung Choi Street, the second I think is on Fa Yuen Street (aka Sneaker Street). Another great shop is Man Shing Photo Supplies, at 106 Tung Choi Street. Seriously, if it has anything to do with photography and is being sold in Hong Kong, these places will have it.

Another great shop with two floors filled with almost everything you might want is Tin Cheung, at 6B Carnarvon Road in TST. Tin Cheung also buys and sells used cameras and lenses.

The mecca for used stuff is in TST, on Nathan Road just south of Kimberley Road. There’s a place there called, I believe, Champagne Court. The half-dozen or so of the shops there feature thousands of used items – every type of film camera ever made, I think, from old Nikons to Hasselblad and other large format cameras.

Now there are some cheaper places out there. And if you know exactly what you want, then by all means save some money. I’ve recently come across an online shop (with some info in English) called CartCart that has seriously cheap prices on cameras and lenses. David D. Busch, who has written some very good books on Nikon, likes a place called HKSupplies. (Clearly they’re marketing to a US audience, all prices there in US$.)

I just got the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens and managed to get a price about $600 lower than Wing Shing’s price from a random shop in Mong Kok – and then saw it for $300 less than I paid from CartCart. (I haven’t tried ordering from them so I don’t know how good their service might be; their site is all in Chinese but relatively easy to navigate.)

(David Busch’s book on the Nikon D300 is so much better than the 400 page manual that came with the camera. I’m learning so much more about the camera’s options, not just how but why to use them, from this book.)

The thing is, price aside, the shops I’ve mentioned above are all honest. They don’t charge tourist prices, they don’t do bait and switch, they don’t do grey market goods with a warranty only from their shop, and the people there actually know about the stuff that they’re selling and can be trusted to advise you on stuff that’s good and not just stuff that’s filling up their back room. Sometimes it’s worth it to pay a little bit more for knowledgable service.

Next purchase for me will be a decent tripod to replace the cheapo one that I got up in Shenzhen.

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One of the benefits of the photography boom in Hong Kong can be found at Open Rice, which of course is the best site for info on restaurants in HK. The site is all Chinese but again, easy enough to navigate. You can input an English name for a restaurant in the search box – and from the results you’ll see how many people rated it, an average rating, opening hours, phone numbers, which credit cards they take, average cost, link to Google maps for the location, etc. Of course it helps if you know the Chinese characters for districts and even better if you know the characters for the various types of cuisines. (I’m not 100% but working on it.)

And thousands of food photos! I mean, it seems like everyone who goes out to eat is bringing a camera with them. Not all the pictures are great, but certainly enough to get the info you need. Here are two pics I grabbed from the site, just to give you a brief example.

The first from Hebe 101, one of my local faves.

And this is from Chuen Kee, one of the waterfront seafood places.

I was wondering if local restaurant Wing Wo does yum cha – this photo makes the answer to that rather obvious, doesn’t it? (Only rated by 8 people – 5 liked it, 1 okay, 1 didn’t like it.)

Even this little hole-in-the-wall The Dumplings House in Sai Kung gets a few photos:

Open Rice lists 211 restaurants in Sai Kung … I think I’ve got my work cut out for me.

There’s a bakery here called Kookie? Gotta try …