Category: Colour

Sham Shui Po

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

Some time ago at Sham Shui Po, I saw them:

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In Wikipedia’s entry on “Sham Shui Po”, you see this sentence: “Sham Shui Po is an area where urban decay is serious in Hong Kong.”

It is easy to call this documentary photography, in the sense that these are pictures that serve as evidence of social categories such as “urban decay”, “poverty”, “old age”, etc, etc.

It’s hard to see otherwise, but sometimes I think we see things only as we can. Classification is easy because it means you’ve “mastered” the world and have successfully explained what you see to yourself.

At times, though, I could see them as people like myself, living their lives just as I am living mine …

I’ll just end here with the beginning of a poem I’ve been living with for quite some time…

— The Man with the Blue Guitar — (by Wallace Stevens)

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

Wu Kai Sha Beach

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

There’s something going on at Wu Kai Sha beach.

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I keep seeing Zen-like arrangements:

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The stones are speaking.

And there’s always someone painting the rocks. Sometimes, you see “God is love” in both English and Chinese etched in the sand.

And once in a while, someone builds a turtle sculpture…

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This gentleman has been at it all morning…

The sand is reclaiming its boat:

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The water has achieved what the sand is doing:

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Am I a shadow thinking I am a man or a man thinking I am a shadow?

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Or am I a shadow of a man or a man emerging from his shadow?

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I text, google, search and take a picture – therefore I am.

Beautiful Mistakes

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

Sometimes, mistakes can be surprising.

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The focus is off, but the colours are there. There’s some kind of neon lighting that is projected onto the ceiling which changes every 10 seconds or so.

The above and below are taken in a shopping mall at TST near my church. No prizes for guessing which.

I was on an ascending escalator, trying to focus on those buildings outside the glass window and the gentleman entered the frame, descending from top left. It’s underexposed so we can’t really see the person, but the repetitions of the grid and the colours are there. The metal fasteners (is that what they’re called?) look like flying seagulls.

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I’m not sure what went wrong with the photograph below. I think there’s motion blur and it’s overexposed… I don’t remember making this mistake…

I do this every Sunday on my way to church, to the taxi driver when he’s paying the toll at the Lion Rock tunnel.

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In all honesty, I’ve done a bit of post-processing to heighten the colours. But I’ve spend no more than 3-5 minutes on each, simply going along with what the images are telling me, and only with levels and curves with the generic software that came with my scanner.

I suspect they’ll look gorgeous when printed with textured paper and mounted on non-glare glass.

Now I’m beginning to see the appeal of lomography, which is essentially about creating something beautiful from intuition, serendipity and “errors”. That’s the kind of artlessness in photography I’m drawn to…

Thanks for reading.

MTR Moments

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

I suppose these are not the most technically accomplished of photographs.

Yet there are times when technicality takes a backseat – you could have a technically perfect photograph that is meaningless.

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Here, we’re reminded of how street photography is an art that requires a seat-of-the-pants attitude. Sometimes it’s about serendipity and stealth and being “in the zone”.

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There’s not much to say about the composition in the above photograph.

Perhaps I’m forgiving myself too much, yet the imperfection says something of the constraints of the art in the particular environment.

I simply can’t really walk around and compose my shots in a train cabin as it would attract too much attention.

In any case, the cabin was crowded. Most of these people were about 1-2 metres away from me.

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This person saw me without really registering what I was doing and turned away.

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This person was too engrossed in his reading to notice.

It’s amazing how we switch off when we’re commuting.

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Yet I find these moments, moments when we’re lost in our thoughts, the most poignant of all.

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I didn’t think the above would work at first. I was thinking to myself at that moment that this was a wasted exposure.

I’m biased, of course, but now I think I’d rather like the artlessness of the composition.

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Again, not perfect. It’s not sharp enough.

At times like this, I take comfort in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s statement that “people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing” (The Mind’s Eye, p. 38).

Thanks for coming by today.

Street Market and Printing

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

Though all the images here are created with film cameras, they are of course scanned from negatives and ultimately, on display here are digitised images on a computer monitor.

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I’ve been experimenting with colours lately, having bought a dedicated pigment ink photo printer and various Ilford and Harman papers.

It really does make a difference whether the image is printed on glossy or on matte, etc. And of course, I am going to frame them up, now that I’ve finally gotten my hands on photo-safe tape.

Images like the one below work on both matte and gloss. On matte, there is a gritty look which fits in with the grungy seat-of-the-pants attitude of street photography.

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A colleague who used to paint commented that the matte print looks more like a painting than a photograph. He said there’s a Caravaggio framed-by-darkness quality to it.

On the other hand, the glossy print has what I think of as a “Nirvana in Carnegie Hall” effect… a refined “fine art” treatment to street photography.

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I suppose glossy is good for portraying drama in ordinary scenes.

And now that I’ve got all of these, I’m now thinking of what I should do next. Where is this taking me?

Direction 1: Teaching and Research

A fascination with photography (and film cameras, I must admit) is now changing the way I work. I find myself making connections between photography and creative writing, between the history of art and literary history. Is there a homology between creative writers and photographers?

What would a university course on the connections between photography and literature look like?

I am now thinking of creating a course that is practice-based, one that encourages students to go out and explore HK culture using literary and non-literary writing and photography, and getting them to think about what constitutes valuable cultural knowledge.

I’ll probably throw social media (such as a WordPress blog like this) into the mix, getting them to think about the use of social media for sharing one’s work. And what is meant by “sharing”? What, really, is being shared? And what is “work”?

Direction 2:

This has all to do with the situation of one’s work, I suppose. Digital images live in one’s hard disks or are displayed on sites like this. Now that I have the physical prints on hand, perhaps the next step is to work towards a gallery exhibition.

It’s a kind of curating, I suppose, setting up one’s work for viewing …

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What kind of logistics and various other considerations would this involve? There’s a learning curve ahead of me …

What is becoming clear to me now though, is that this blog is like a thinking-in-progress technology, a depository of raw ideas… much like a building under construction …

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Thanks for reading.

Grids, lines and colours

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

I’m now convinced that Hong Kong is a street photographer’s paradise.

I’ve been paying attention to grids, lines and colours and it seems to me that all I have to do is wait a little bit and the composition would fall into place after a while.

Mongkok is rather good for that sort of thing.

For example, the rectangular green grids of this candy store window has a lomography edge to it, and all I had to do was to memorise where the framelines of my beloved Leica M6 would be and wait until someone walks into the frame. Check out the reflections and the Chinese characters – they’re there and yet not so overwhelming:

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The diagonal lines were calling out to me as I was on a bridge:

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And finally, I like the grungy and yet contemplative mood this evokes:

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And I’m keeping a close watch on my diminishing supply of Kodak Portra 400 film with which these were taken…

Thanks for coming by today.