Tag: public transport

Mostly Monochrome Singapore

Posted on by eddietay in About Singapore, Colour, Monochrome

I’ve lived in Hong Kong long enough such that I could see Singapore with a fresh set of eyes.

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Some of the buildings have become rather futuristic.

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And public housing flats are beginning to look very homely.

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Singapore is home, a comfortable grid.

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We’re all fitted into grids.

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Nice looking public housing.

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Was at Hard Rock Café with my family.

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An amazing acoustic set – it’s nice to listen to local acts with my wife… while trying to get our children to eat their broccoli.

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The HRC I know were Saturday clubbing nights, 2 decades ago.

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As I looked around at the various tables, I saw expat families with kids, tourists and middle-class locals out for dinner.

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Times have changed – or perhaps I have changed.

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Once upon a time, I wanted to be a rock star with my acoustic guitar.

The lyric he’s singing: “I’m all about that bass, about that bass, about that bass…”

Subsequent serious research (Google and Wikipedia) tells me it’s really a very cool song.

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Now, I see HRC as an F&B outlet using rock music as a marketing tool, reaching out to customers like me who’ve come of age with the likes of GnR, Bon Jovi and Skid Row.

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Perhaps I’m getting older and more cynical.

Still – it’s good to be young and idealistic.

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HRC still looks impressive.

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The colour is wonderful.

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Orchard Road is gearing up for Christmas.

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Hilton façade with a dash of nature.

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A Martian landscape in full colour.

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Equally interesting in monochrome.

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It’s nice to be young…

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An empty bus looks somewhat disturbing, like an unfulfilled promise.

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This looks better – all blurry and full of promise.

Thanks for reading!

 

Camera: Canon 600D

Legacy Lens: Meyer-Optik Gorlitz Lydith 30mm f. 3.5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Monochrome Poetry

Posted on by eddietay in Monochrome

Photography is … visual. That much is obvious. As a published poet and literature professor, I’m supposed to be able to convey ideas with words but what happens when something is a visual idea?

This would take us from visual to verbal to visual again. And the first and last visual may not be the same, even though we’re talking about the same photograph.

I look and look and understand how a photograph works, but I’ve yet to properly learn how to say why it works and why I enjoy it.

Photography has made me rethink some of those things to do with literature that I’ve forgotten. Of course, the experience of a literary work is not the same thing as a book review or a scholarly paper.

The experience … the experience … the horror … the horror … the “oomph” … it starts with the experience, and sometimes I feel like all one has to do is to read and look and be quiet. That was the experience of reading in my youth which put me on the path of academia.

The subjective “oomph” comes first. All the bits about literary/intellectual history, the meaning of meaning and so on, comes after.

This explains why my colleagues down the corridor could spend so much time on books that I genuinely find boring and pointless … and of course, vice versa.

Anyway, back to what is visual “oomph”, at least for me:

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That’s the Leisure and Cultural Services Headquarters at Shatin. Perhaps this is what the Ministry of Truth looks like in Orwell’s 1984.

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The mini-bus and high-rise apartment buildings. So very Hong Kong. This is at the elevated bus interchange just outside New Town Plaza, the hard-to-miss shopping mecca at Shatin.

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Walk down the sloped pavement by the side onto ground level and you’ll see an entire length of village houses, some of which have been converted into eateries.

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That’s just below the bus interchange, right next to more mini-bus terminal stops. I like the different greys of the pavement…

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Yet another village house … with a gothic feel.

All these images are taken from within 200-300 metres. That’s how packed Hong Kong is. Keep in mind this is the urbanised area of the New Territories, third in line in terms of urban development, coming after the Kowloon/Tsim Sha Tsui areas and the Central/Wanchai areas on Hong Kong Island.

Thanks for reading.

Mini-bus

Posted on by eddietay in Monochrome

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Modernity is an engine we need to learn to operate. I suspect we are all operating with metaphors, whether we know it or not. Depending on road conditions, a mini-bus driver knows which buttons to push, which gear to shift into. He knows the number of passengers, the stops available to them.

He may not know the final destinations of his passengers, and he does not need to understand. He takes them where he can, on fixed routes, and leaves them to their own fates. The passengers do not know their driver, except that he has a useful and crucial function to serve. In this way, by attending to fixed routines, the disorder of modernity is brought under control. We are all engines (dare I say machines?) connected to one another.