Photography; I shoot what I like, and sometimes people like what I shoot. All photos are copyright to Michael C. Lam unless explicitly stated otherwise.
A walk on the seawall… or at this point, the dam that has rocks beyond it.
Maybe not appealing on an artistic level to many, but to Guyanese, it has some appeal 😀
Saturday 1 | Instagram | Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini Duos
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery
My Jhandi addiction continues, I just find them visually appealing. Of course, getting a shot of them that doesn’t look like ones I’ve already taken is getting more and more difficult.
This one was a toss up between this coloured portrait oriented version and a landscape oriented BW processed one, but the coloured one appeals to me on a different level, even though I tend towards the BW because I had originally intended the landscape ones as such because of the textures and contrast in the water / foam of the sea.
I hope you like it.
Canon 60D, Sigma 10-20mm | 1/125s @ f/8.0, ISO100 (10mm)
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery
As strange as it may sound, sometimes when I can’t find a paragraph or two to express what I want to say, the words come out as a poem…
HOME
The call of the Kiskadee
on a rain-kissed afternoon
The sung sweet melody
of an old Tradewinds tune,
The shout of a passing man,
“Creketeh! get yuh Crawbeah!”
And the woman just behind
singing “Broom ay, broom ay”
Sundays- dressed, in church,
And the Saturday movie night,
A show for the family,
or maybe one with a bit of fright,
The sweet salty scent
of the breeze on the seawalls
A tasty mouthful
of pholourie or egg-ball,
Walking the water’s edge,
feeling sand, feeling the foam,
It’s where I belong,
this is Guyana, this is home.
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery along with other images from this year’s Deck Project.
In June of this year Imran Khan had done an article on the new insurgence of young (and not so young) Photographers in Guyana in the form of the Facebook Group Guyana Photographers, this was recently re-blogged on the GuyanaPhotographers.com site. In it he mentioned that the Seawalls seem to be a favourite or default location for their “treks”, this is very true.
With most of the population of Guyana living on the Atlantic coast, this is inevitable; with the majority of (accessible) roads meandering along the coast, this is inevitable; with the majority of the coastland given over to farming (and now housing) leaving the only scenic areas being the seawalls stretching from east to west along the coast, this is inevitable.
I’m not saying that there aren’t more places that would make nice photographs, there are, they are just not as “easy” to get to. You can read “easy” as being “not too expensive to get to”, “not too arduous to get to”, “not needing to plan a trip weeks in advance” and ‘not requiring a four wheel drive vehicle with a winch and hi-lift” to get there. 🙂
So, for someone who has a full-time job but would still like to get a nice photograph, as Imran so accurately pointed out, the Seawall becomes the “default” location 🙂
With that said… here’s a pair of Jhandi Flags… on the sea shore, just in front of the Seawall
Click on the image to see it better in the Gallery, along with all the other entries for this year’s Deck Project.
Lunar Perigee and the 2012 Supermoon
In 2011 and 2012 there was much reference to the term Supermoon, which is an astrological term, as opposed to the Astronomical term Perigee. What was so Super about it? Well, I was out there and it looked like a regular full moon, but we’d all love to believe that we could see it larger and brighter than at other times 🙂
Perigee is the time at which the moon is closest in its orbit to the earth (doesn’t matter what phase it’s in), while the Supermoon refers to a New or Full moon that occurs when the moon is within 90% of its closest approach to the earth in its orbit. So I suppose that the perfect Supermoon would be a Full moon at Perigee 🙂 (incidentally, the time when the moon is furthest away from the earth in its orbit is called Apogee)
The Perigee varies from around 357,000km to 369,000km (in roundish figures), and while a difference of 12,000km sounds like a lot, the difference to the naked eye is negligible.
On May 5th, the moon was at its fullest at 1 minute to its perigee, so that’s about as perfect a Supermoon as we can get I suppose.
Anyway… on May 5th this year, I was up the coast near Lusignan when this year’s “Supermoon” was supposed to occur, two things happened (well, more than two, but two that are relevant to this post); I had lent out my telephoto lens, so getting a close-up was out of the question, and the clouds were conspiring against me, So I ended up with a wide shot full of clouds 🙂
After playing hide-and-seek with the moon for several minutes I gave up and headed out, one that I took would work, so this is one that worked 🙂
Click on the image to see it better in the Gallery.
It is not every week that I can come up with something that pleases everyone, so this week don’t expect something that pleases you 🙂 but if it does, hooray!
I went to the Essequibo Coast a few weekends back for a wedding (photos from which I don’t have permission to share as yet), I took photos other than wedding ones, so here is one from the first day there, which happened to be the last day of the 30th Week of 2011.
It seems that from the North-West region to the Corentyne Coast there is a common theme on the shores of our land, Jhandi Flags! You can’t seem to walk the beaches, sea-walls or the coastline in general without seeing them.
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