How to take photos when you don't wanna waste your companions' time

I went to Malaysia and China the other week

but alas, it wasn't a holiday. It was a business trip with a colleague to visit some of our partners and suppliers there - however, I did bring my camera.
I mean, of course I did: this was an expansion of the radius of my furthest distance travelled from home (previously 6355km, now expanding to 9592km), and there would surely be opportunities for some unique sights and experiences to capture. Typically, I'd spend quite a lot of time taking a lot of shots, getting plenty of coverage in case there were issues with focus, lighting, shaky hands, or whatever else I might not be able to spot on the wee screen on the camera itself.
This wasn't the typical situation though. Let's take a look at the timeline:

• Monday: land in Malaysia in the morning, free for the rest of the day (jetlagged as hell)
• Tuesday: meetings all day, dinner with the team in the evening
• Wednesday: meetings all day, flight to China in the evening
• Thursday: meetings all day, dinner with that team in the evening
• Friday: meetings in the morning, some freedom in the afternoon, flight home that evening

So! Not a huge amount of time to run around with the camera getting shots. My opportunities really were to overcome the exhaustion on Monday in Penang, grab a few snaps from the hotel windows if I had the energy, and Friday afternoon in Guangzhou.
In any case, when out and about, I'd be with coworkers, which limited how antisocial I could be with my shooting. I wanted them to enjoy their time as well, so I limited how much they'd be standing there waiting for me as we explored with what little time we had available.

Here's a few of the things I did to disrupt the flow as little as possible.

Camera settings

The first thing I had in mind, was that I needed to have my camera set up in a way where I could just point and shoot quickly for a good result. That took manual focus off the table of course, and I went with my old reliable 16-50mm kit lens. It has that little zoom available, and autofocuses pretty reliably when the light's good.
I also wanted to adjust the other settings as little as possible, so I went with aperture priority, +0 on the exposure, and auto ISO.
Nobody's gonna pixel peep me so if there's a little noise in the evening shots it's whatever.
The aperture priority gave me some wiggle room on the depth of field, which is nice when you're jumping between shots of things and shots of places.

Choice of subject

I tried to have an idea of what type of photography I'd expect to be doing. If I had the chance, I took a cursory look online at the type of place I'd be in, and when I arrived at a spot, I'd take in the atmosphere a bit before starting to shoot.
That way, I had something of a vision for the type of shots I was aiming for, rather than my typical process of discovering that interest in the moment.
For both of the countries I was in, folks are generally okay with appearing in photos so long as you're considerate, so I didn't worry too much about having people in the backgrounds or for crowds to be the subject.
I ended up going more for the street photography style, trying to find interesting bits of geometry, interactions, stories, that type of thing.

Shooting

For each shot, I'd find my angle, and shoot once, maximum twice if I knew there was something more to go for, then switch off the camera and move on. If there was something really good, I'd maybe have a couple of goes from different perspectives.
Selfies and snaps with colleagues were done on the phone - it's easier to get a shot people are happy with, and frankly, I usually can't be bothered with the palaver of trying to take proper professional-looking portraits of people when out being a tourist.
I did get a few candid shots of coworkers which turned out all right, but they were the exception.

So how did it go?

Penang Hill was a nice opportunity to get some shots of the view over the cities of Georgetown and Butterworth, as well as a few shots of the monkeys hanging around on the electricity poles.

With more time there, I'd have maybe hung around their nature reserve area to get more wildlife pics, but they'd have been too far away for the lens I had with me anyway.
The binoculars up there also caught my eye, and I decided to grab a shot of them, which turned out quite nice!

The first night we arrived in China, it was close to 1am by the time we checked into the hotel. Exhausted though I was, I did get a couple of shots from the window overlooking the surprisingly dark skyline. Since I had time, I turned the ISO down, pulled the exposure a bit darker, and set the timer for 10s with my camera sat on the windowsill to avoid my shaky hands.

The free time we had expected on the Friday afternoon, ended up being a visit to Canton Tower, and a look around there. It was very hot under the sun, so it wasn't long before we retreated indoors, but I had time to get a couple of shots I liked. This one I enjoyed in particular!

In total, I ended this trip with just 90 photos, and trimmed that down to a measly 11... not a huge haul, but I was quite happy with how well these came out given how tired and rushed I was!