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.
This is what the blog is about, the results of my being a Photo Hobbyist
You can call this an introduction to a new album I decided to start. Part of Nikhil’s fascination with Street Photography led us into the market area at Bourda, and since I am less of a street photographer and more of a non-human subject type person, I took more of the items being sold than the persons selling them 🙂 So, I decided to start a Market album, it may not go far, or if Nik drags me screaming and kicking into the markets again, it might grow 🙂
I find that I am not fixed in my photography habits as yet, as I spend more time with Nikhil, I tend to absorb some of his outlook on different types of photography. Going into “taking pictures” I never even knew that there were so many areas of photography; Macro Photography (or macrography), Model Photography, Product Photography, Landscape Photography… You name it and there’s probably some type of photography associated with it! Anyway Nikhil has a fondness for Street Photography, he knows the Famous of the genre, like Henri Cartier Bresson, and also some of the not-so-famous 🙂 Anyway, some of it is rubbing off on me, maybe because I usually accompany him on his jaunts to find his next subject.
While it is still “not my thing”, I don’t discount it as a style that I may adopt from time to time, I just don’t think that I am any good at it 🙂
So just for starters, here are three recent ones that may fit the category.
I heard the drumming before I saw the drummer, and by the time I got across the street the original drummer had switched places with this youngster.
A popular sight on the pavements of Georgetown, everyone wants to see the latest movies:
And this one is outside a busy “Betting Shop”
So goes my first forage into Street Photography, but I have others from the past that may fit the category, I’ll add them to the collection later 🙂
This week I took more photographs than normal, but that’s because I went to a Birthday Party 🙂 I had quite a selection this week, but went for one that actually surprised me, since I never thought I could see this particular scene in this was, very little of the wires that I always see in this general area.
Not much to say about it really, just a photo I like. It is of the National Library, here in Guyana. The Library sits at the corner of Church Street and Main Street, it faces the Bank of Guyana.
James Bunch put this as succinctly as I think it can be put, my friend Nikhil has expressed the same development of “Vision” to me over the course of this year, I think this blog-post is well worth the read, if you can spare the two minutes it will take to read it, you will be well rewarded.
via James Bunch
I doubt if I have all the facts, but I think I have the general gist of the thing. For as many years as I can remember, and probably for as many years as I have existed, there have been three “Gas Stations” on Vlissengen Road, right next to one another; from north to south it was Texaco, then Esso and then Shell. I think most Guyanese grew up calling these places Gas Stations, instead of the more internationally acceptable “Petrol Station” or “Service Station”. At Mashramani time, these stations were always popular meeting places, and even “drinking places”.
A few years ago, the Shell service stations were purchased by Sol, and are operated under the Shell brand/franchise, shortly after that Sol also bought out the Esso service stations, these now operate either unbranded or as Sol service stations. So at this point Sol had two service station competing with each other, right next door to each other, on Vlissengen Road. I figure that it was only a matter of time before one had to close down.
The Esso service Station was known by many as the KC Correia Service Station, and it has been under that management for more years than I care to count. I was told that it is now closing its doors. That is sad, but changes are inevitable and we must either change with it or be left behind. It seems that the old Esso Station was chosen to close its doors over the more modern Shell Station.
I took this photo last Friday, not knowing when I would get the chance again.
One of my favourite photographs is one that I did twice 🙂 You know, so nice I did it twice? Anyway, I took it originally when I shot with the Canon PowerShot S5, a beauty of a camera, bigger than a compact, but a super-zoom with amazing results, and then when I moved onto shooting an SLR, I tried again to shoot a similar shot, similar because you can never get the same shot twice, not really. That was my “Fleur de Lis Fence Toppers“, and although I was less pleased the second time around, it was probably because I was expecting more.
Recently I took another shot of a Fence Topper and did a monochromatic rendering, several of them had already “disappeared” off the fence, so instead of trying to catch several of them I concentrated on one and tried to get a nice background, nice not as in scenery, but complimentary.
It wasn’t a very good week for me as photography goes, but of the few good ones I did put aside, I had a hard choice as to which one I would be using for this week’s Deck photo. What I ended up doing was displaying them all on the screen and see which one jumped out at me, whether it was just different because of colour, composition, content, or if it was just very different to what I’ve taken recently, this shot stood out from the rest.
It is simple, but I like it 🙂 In Guyana, this is called “Bora”, taken at one of the stalls on Merriman’s Mall by Bourda Market.
I had first created a Sepia album when I frequently uploaded to WebShots (I slowed down because of their whole “captcha” usage for putting comments, too many people complained), and I had called it Sojourn in Sepia, I like the alliterative title. As I gained confidence in my photography I found that I was taking more and more images geared toward monochromatic post-processing, so the sojourn continues with this one that I took last week.
The latest addition to the Sepia album is one I tried on a walk down Brickdam, I was standing back waiting for Nikhil to take some shots when I looked up and noticed this stair and landing framed by the trunk of the tree.
On another note, all along I’ve been using the WordPress.com as the main blogging address, and I’ve also been using the sub domain as a forwarder although it wasn’t being treated as a full sub-domain, today I made it into a fully applicable sub domain, so all the blog address are now blog.themichaellamcollection.com addresses with sub-folders etc. The sojourn continues. 🙂
So, I’m figuring that if it’s not a photograph for The Deck, or something thematic like Monochromes, what do I do with the photographs? Nikhil came up with a brilliant idea for his blog, he started a weekly review of his photos for his 365 Project. That gave me an idea for these photographs that don’t fit into my regular type of blog post, here’s the ones that did not make it onto The Deck 🙂
First up is this image taken in the Gardens, I was off to get the photograph of the Kissing Bridge when I found this corner of the bridge interesting, so I shot it, I still can’t quite put my finger on the reason it interests me, it just does, so I tried my best to frame it right and get a decent photograph of it.
Then, of course, there is the bridge itself! Although I preferred the one I used that week for the deck which was in Black and White, I did take one in portrait orientation that I quite liked as well, so I dropped that one into my “Georgetown,Guyana” album, and here it is 🙂
I used to take a lot of photographs of flowers, that was when I shot with a Canon PowerShot S3 and S5, it seems that since I moved onto an SLR my focus has changed (excuse the pun), but every once in a while I still catch one in my viewfinder and get a fairly decent shot of it, like this one I saw on Brickdam.
And then, of course, there’s one of my favourite areas to photograph things, the Seawall. I often just thought of the seawall as just the Georgetown Seawall, but it extends along most of our coastline, these two were taken up near the village of Montrose, which is known most for the Starlite Drive-in, although I am not certain when it was exactly the they last showed a movie there.
Well, now that I have gotten that off my chest, I can rest knowing that these have not been ignored 🙂 I hope you enjoy one or more.
I really really thought long and hard for a title for this post, and couldn’t come up with a single thing worth using, so here’s three for the weekend…. Three photos, that is; this is a blog about my photographs after all.
The first is a building that I have had my eye on for some time, I seldom ever see it without a few to several vehicles in front of it, and I didn’t want the vehicles in the photograph, at least not this photograph, I wanted the building. Of course getting a nice composition is challenging, especially with the many wires crisscrossing the street in front of the building. Whenever I saw it nice and clear, the lighting would not be optimal, and whenever the lighting was right, the place was very very busy, well I finally saw it clear and with a nice morning light.
It only takes a small rain shower to ensure that pedestrians walk on the roads instead of the pavement, especially on Avenue of the Republic, it probably only rained for about ten minutes the morning I took this, normally I wouldn’t be tempted to take a photograph, but the sun had come out and the colours were popping and it was even evident in the reflections in the water 🙂
Two days ago, Nikhil did a very nice close up shot for his 365 Project, and while I was also captured by the colours of the structures, I decided to wait and see what else about the scene would capture my attention, as it turns out I liked the house and tree more than the structures 🙂 This is also a move away from the norm for me, I usually do proportionate cropping if I crop the image, but in this case I found a square crop to be optimal for the image (that and I really needed to crop out the other buildings on the left without losing some of the elements in the shot)
It seems I forgot to mention that all three are in Georgetown, Guyana. Three different days and three very different images of Georgetown 🙂
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