Hong Kong is a place many photographers know for its special atmosphere and concrete urban jungle. I was wondering what I would find once I landed there, and everything was far beyond what I really expected. At first, I felt a bit lost trying to capture the verticality of the city—everything was so different from the places I knew, and I had to go out of my photographic comfort zone to explore more here.

The city is built on two sides: one older side on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, which faces it across the ocean corridor. On the main island, the density is completely overwhelming, and everything is vertical. The city is built on different levels, connected to each other with stairs or covered passages, and the crowd of people rushing there every day is truly intense. Thus, making some photos with so many details was a difficulty I loved to face. It's here you find the most dense urban fabric in the world, and some old buildings are something else (the most well-known of them is the Monster Building, or Yick Cheong Building).

In front of it is Kowloon—the local heart of the city, where you barely find tourists. Here is the perfect place to spot everyday life and the atmosphere of the real, old Hong Kong. I had such a great time walking around this place. I was more and more captivated by the city's special aesthetic—a unique one I had never known before. Around Kowloon, you also find some collective buildings, very colorful, with local life inside each block. Some spots for architecture are literally out of this world if you like verticality, density, and geometric lines.

But besides all of these aspects, nature is everywhere. The area is very mountainous and full of peaks with amazing views over the metropolitan area. You can escape the chaos in just a few minutes and feel entirely in another world. 

So, if I had to summarize Hong Kong, I would keep in mind these three words: verticality, density, visual story.