Month: January 2013

Calendars

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography2 Comments

I had mentioned in a previous blog (or two) that at the end of last year, some of my images had found their way into three Calendars for 2013.  I recently blogged about the one from Banks DIH, today I turn to the other two, I don’t want them to feel left out.

As someone who has worked in the Computer Graphic Design field for a number of years, I can tell you that some Calendars are in themselves works of art.  The standard multi-page calendar normally carried a photo at the top and the date pad at the bottom, this is nice for us photographers who don’t like people “troubling/editing” our images, it leaves the image alone at the top, simply as what it is… a photograph.

Other calendars are designed to incorporate the photograph into the design of the Calendar and these tend to be more conceptual or themed, and can be surprisingly pleasing to the eye.

Having a photograph used in a Calendar is a big deal for us, especially since most of the ones we see use “foreign” images.

The Banks DIH Calendar was designed and produced by Xc!aim Media, the one that featured photos on each page that were mine was from Maggie’s Snackette and Catering Service, it was designs and produced by F&H Printing Establishment and the last one (but not least) was one that featured images from myself and Nikhil Ramkarran, and it was from NT Computeac, designed and produced by Duane Ton-Chung at Micropoint Graphics.

Below you’ll find the images for the flats that contained our images (the artwork remains the copyright of the companies and individuals as listed above, the photographs in the Calendars are copyright to the photographers, namely myself and Nikhil)   🙂

2013 Deck – Week 04

On By themichaellamcollectionIn 2013 Deck, Photography4 Comments

On some photo-walks you just never know what you’ll come away with.  We were walking around the area near Parliament Buildings and Big Market (Stabroek Market), when we noticed this building.

It was aging, had a nice muted colour (due to faded paint by the harsh sun), and the paint was peeling.  If only I had caught someone leaning on the building!  But I still think it’s a nice shot, even without the person leaning on it  🙂

Click on the image to see in the Gallery.

A walk on the beach

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography12 Comments

A few Fridays back, I joined a few other photographers on a walk down to the large jetty (pier/groin) that marks the end of the Kingston seashore and the beginning of the Demerara River mouth.

As with all walks with photographers you go hoping to come back with a good image, or even a great one, yet when I downloaded my haul I was very disappointed, maybe I was hoping for too much.

Does this mean that the walk was not a success?  No.  It was what it was… a walk on the beach.  To be with friends, people with a similar pursuit, and enjoy the conversation, the breeze… that was enough.

All the photos were not horrible, but not jumped out at me, yet I decided to process at least one to make a show of reaping something from the toil of the harvest.

As I look at the image I processed, I wonder if this scene will get worse or better with the development of the new Hotel on the seashore.

Click on the image to see it in the Gallery along with other Seawall related photos

Get them out!

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography, thoughts3 Comments

If you are serious about making the art of photography a pillar in your life, if you want the work that you do to be seen and recognised as being worthy of use or even just of praise then you have to get your work out there.

I came to this realisation late, but it is true, whether you use Facebook to just upload some images to albums and share with your family and friends, or the Flickr community to have a wider reach, or you are feeling more demanding for larger space and go for your own website, just get your images out there, it is doing you no good sitting on your hard drive (or worse yet, on your memory card in the camera)

I started with Webshots, which, before it was bought over, had a good community and lovely photo Challenges to inspire you… then that went south… and recently it went out, I think it’s called Smile now.  I had also begun uploading to Flickr since I already had a Yahoo account, I figured what was the harm, I might as well use the service, but when I wanted somewhere online to store high-resolution images (as well as make them available for friends to see) Nikhil suggested Zenfolio.  That was a great decision!

What is great about having people see your photos?  For one thing, you open yourself up to not only praise, but also criticism, which helps you grow, it makes you see the work as other’s see it, through their eyes and not just your own.  For another thing, it gives a wider group of people a chance to see what you are doing, not just your friends and family, but other photographers, other artists and even the business community.

I like to think that my more “artistic” types of photos are the ones that are important to me and the ones I hope others like and appreciate, but the others that I take seem to demand equal or greater attention, the ones from events, such as Mashramani, Diwali Motorcade, Easter and others.  Were I to confine myself to just making available for viewing those that I want to “promote”, then these others would never be seen not appreciated for what they are.

This year my images made it into three calendars in local firms; Maggie’s Snackette and Catering Service, and NT Computeac both used images which were more to the artistic side, but the company that surprised me was Banks DIH Limited, and this is the one I am drawing reference to.   While both Maggie’s and NT Computeac chose what I thought were aesthetically pleasing images, Banks DIH chose images that were more representative of the events that they wished to highlight, even though those I would not put as my best images, it appealed to them and probably to those viewing it too, those images are worth something to someone, and had I not uploaded them for others to see, then they would never have made it into the Calendar.

They did a twelve page Calendar, and of those monthly pages, Dwayne Hackett and I got half, with images that represent our culture and our life as Guyanese.

Don’t let your photos sit idly on your Hard Drive, Get them Out!

2013 Deck – Week 03

On By themichaellamcollectionIn 2013 Deck, Photography2 Comments

Although I like to think of myself as a photographer who likes to take Landscape photos, there is not a lot of scope for that living in the city, but I’ve always had an interest in capturing images of buildings, especially old ones that may not survive due to neglect or just continued development (or any number of other reasons)

During the third week of the year, I had an inexplicable desire to take some photos of St Rose’s High School, just before attending a presentation by Hew Locke (an artist with some amazing work), Nikhil and I took a walk around the block, and I got my chance to take a few images.

To emphasize the building more, I used an “orange filter” setting whilst processing, this darkened the sky and made the building more pronounced.  Although I did not intend to combine “street photography” into it these two boys strolled past just as we were there.

As always, click on the image to see it in the Gallery

An image for Mash

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography12 Comments

Recently, I was fortunate to have a photo of mine selected and used for the cover of the Caribbean Airlines in-flight magazine – Caribbean Beat (November – December 2012), and they have also used another to accompany an article in the current issue (January-February 2013)

Click on the image above for the full PDF article by Vidyaratha Kissoon along with the accompanying image.

Amazingly it was an image that I liked, but not one that got a lot of attention  🙂  Getting great images during the Mashramani parade is not easy, I’m thankful to come away each year with more than a few that I like.

Here’s the image: Click to see it in the Gallery along with a select set of photos from last year’s Mashramani

In Quiet Solitude

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography, thoughts5 Comments

As I was processing this photo a poem began to form in my mind, but by the time I had finished processing, I had lost it… that’s how it goes.

The title of the photo is the same as this post “In Quiet Solitude”, yet as I thought about it, I wondered how accurate it was,

it wasn’t that quiet…  there was the sound of birds chirping, the rustle of leaves as the monkeys jumped from branch to branch, the gurgle of the water as it flowed from the creek to the lake, and the subtle but distinct snap of a camera behind him  🙂

By the same argument, he wasn’t alone, remember the birds, the monkeys and the photographer….. (or the monkey behind the camera) 🙂

But I still stick with the title, sometimes you can just stand beneath the trees, with a gentle breeze blowing, and be thankful to be away from the noise of traffic, the voices and machines of city life, the constant ping and ring of mobile phones, and maybe even the conversations that you were listening to but not really hearing.

Click on the image to see it in the Gallery.

On the Street

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography2 Comments

OK, maybe the title isn’t accurate, the photo I will use was taken a little distance from the street, but it’s also about a point I made recently.

On the Guyana Photographers Facebook page, we had a Challenge for “Street Photography”, and one of the points we made was that it did not have to be literally on the street; the genre encompasses images that capture aspects of “Life”, it will always have a human figure in it, because that’s what the genre is about, human’s and their actions .  It can be a shot of a vendor on the street, or a vendor in a market stall; a woman riding a cycle down the road, or hanging out her laundry in the yard; a man on the corner reading the morning newspaper, or at his desk writing a memo.  The best street photographers usually manage to tell quite a story in one image, there is often irony, or action; discourse or solitude and regardless of what story you get from it, it’s a story that you the viewer can understand whether or not its the story being told.

I am NOT a Street Photographer, I fail dismally at my attempts, but mostly because I am not into taking those types of images, except by happenstance.  If you want to see good Street Photography by Guyanese photographers, check out the works of Nikhil Ramkarran and Avinash Richard, while neither do the genre exclusively, they both capture moments of time in the life of Guyanese that can be spellbinding.

This one is one of my better ones to date… but only because of the irony  🙂

Click on the image to see it in the Gallery.

My Tamron 18-275 lens has some dust inside it, by pointing towards the sun two spots showed up in the image which were later emphasized by the BW processing, those were cloned out  🙂

2013 Deck – Week 02

On By themichaellamcollectionIn 2013 Deck, Photography6 Comments

During week two of this year, I actually used at least three of my lenses, including the ultra-wide Sigma 10-20mm.  On Friday, Fidal had arranged that we meet for a drink near Ogle, but before we went,  he and Rosh suggested we go to the seawall nearby to get in a few shots 🙂 (we were joined by Savita and TJ, if you must know)

As it turned out, that was a pretty good idea, there was a lovely sky above and some unusual streaming clouds (probably from the jets passing), and I got down into the grass to get a low perspective shot.

While processing it I remembered a song that I probably hadn’t heard since I was much younger, I had come across it on an LP my father had, it was called “Grazing in the Grass” by Friends of Distinction; it was one of those 70s songs, and I didn’t understand the lyrics then, and I don’t quite understand them now (yes I went and listened to it again), but then, I probably need to be high on something for those lyrics to make sense to me.  You can check the song out for yourself  🙂

As always, click on the image to see it in the Gallery.

A Good Photo

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Commentary, Photography, thoughts6 Comments

For my Deck Photo last week I used a black and white image of a bird walking across a wet expanse, one of my friends and fellow photographers told me that she didn’t like the photo, because it made her feel sad and lonely

When she told me that she didn’t like the photo, I was a little disappointed to tell the truth, but when she told me that it was because it made her feel sad and lonely, I was elated.

One of the things that makes a good photograph is the conveyance of some sort of emotion to the viewer.  For most photos, we look at them and move on, it was a photo of a sunset, or a flower, or an insect, or a door, or a building, or a bird, or any other subject you can think of, but when someone can say that a photo of mine made them reminisce or feel happy or sad, of any other emotion, then I feel that the photo was not only good, but better than I’d hoped for.

Each photo has the potential to reach past the optics of the viewer and into their emotions, when it does, then the photo was worth taking, it was worth the pixels that were spent on it, and the time it took to take and process.

None of these photos are new, but each one has had an emotive response from a viewer, it may not do it to everyone, but to me, that is what makes photography a challenge, to reach into as many of the viewer’s hearts as possible, but to even reach one, is usually enough for me.

As usual, click on the images to see them in their respective Galleries in the Collection.