Category: Colour

River Safari

Posted on by eddietay in About Singapore, Colour

We’re still on the theme of street photographs taken during family outings some time back.

This is the newly-opened River Safari in Singapore.

I went absolutely berserk with the various compositional possibilities in front of the large fish tank.

As everyone else is looking at the exhibits, no one is looking at me – that’s the perfect set up for a street photographer.

I’ll call this series The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Taking Photographs (see Damien Hirst).

Utter fascination.

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Innocence.

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Musing. This is a work of art.

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Look! Look!

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Looking.

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The trick to this is knowing telepathy and fish language.

I’ve managed to convince those fishes to frame themselves around the human exhibits.

I am a very talented photographer.

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Still looking.

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Finally, a decisive moment.

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Thanks for reading!

Village Life in Hong Kong

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

This is the dilemma I face whenever we have a family outing.

Should I bring along my Leica M6, my Olympus XA2, Canonet or Yashica? Do the kids look like they’re going to give trouble? Are we going shopping which means I need a high ISO film?

At this point I would once again settle on my Canon G11 over the 600D. With a family in tow, I’ll go for a compact auto focus auto exposure digital everything because there’s usually no time to focus (in both senses of the word) if you’re looking to do a bit of street photography at in-between moments. I’ll bring along my Leica when the kids are older…

My daughter’s kindergarten organised an outing last Saturday for their students and their families. There was a huge turnout. Five gigantic bus loads.

Here’s our guide:

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She sings very well.

Here’s our driver:

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I was 2 seats behind and this is a reflection of him from the driver’s rear-view mirror between two curtains.

We were at a farm at Sha Tau Kok. It was a 20-minute walk to the farm and there were fascinating ruins.

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I think some of these are occupied.

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There’s a certain socio-political economic situation to village houses in Hong Kong.

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In land-scarce Hong Kong, villagers are given a plot of land to build a three-storey house in recognition of their indigenous status. They could remain as they are but a three-storey set-up means you could lease out two floors and live on the rent alone.

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Usually the villagers in a single village are related and have the same surname.

And they would set up small businesses. This area for example is a cycling, fishing, kite-flying and bbq area combined with a vegetable farm.

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When we say Hong Kong is short of land, we are thinking of built-up areas like Kowloon or Hong Kong island.

Sha Tau Kok where we were is huge and relatively sparsely populated. But it takes a certain character to enjoy life here I suppose.

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Here’s another village. I was told it’s a traditional Hakka village. Because these are popular sites for local excursions, the villagers have set up small stalls selling traditional snacks.

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The black blobs are called errr… “tiny chicken poop” in Cantonese. Yummy! I was told it’s good for my sore throat.

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Thanks for reading!

At Tsim Sha Tsui

Posted on by eddietay in Colour

Again, at Tsim Sha Tsui.

There’s so much happening here.

I don’t mean shopping and eating, though there’s lots of it too.

Sometimes we’re bored while waiting for the bus…

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But there’s so much to see …

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I suppose it’s about framing and movement…

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There’re so many people at work.

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I figured I could fire off two clicks before they notice me …

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I simply love the lomography effect with Fuji Superia 800 film.

Thanks for reading today.

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.