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.
As soon as I saw this scene, somewhere in my mind I could hear strains of Vangelis’ compositions playing, and that name has stuck since then, even though I have only now processed the image itself 🙂
Unlikely to be anything but a “nice” photo, but I like it 🙂
2013 | Canon EOS 60D, Sigma 17-50mm
I was originally just going to upload the photo and post a link to Facebook, but then I decided I actually had something to say…
Across the globe things are changing, rapidly in some places, slowly in others. While everyone is striving for an education and a job that earns a high salary, I think we too easily forget the way of life that actually matters; satisfaction at the end of the day’s work, a ready smile for friends and strangers alike, playtime as well as work-time, and actually caring about another human being.
This photo reminded me that we should pass onto other generations the joy of life, of actually living, and not just the drudgery of daily toil that has no reward but a monetary one.
Work hard, but enjoy the benefits of your labour, be able to say “I did that” with pride and with satisfaction; play easily without the need for satisfaction, but able to enjoy it for what it is, human interaction and the joy of Life; cry for joy and for sadness, because sadness means you were once joyful.
Look towards the horizon, curiosity is a good thing, but remember your roots, remember Home.
Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tamron 18-270mm | 1/125s, f/8.0, ISO 200 (46mm)
Click on the image to see it in the “Up East” Gallery (it only has 14 pieces so far) 🙂
Third time.
I have no idea why I keep going back to this particular set of images, I’d shot a few frames of these fishermen on a photowalk in 2013, and I realized yesterday I’d now processed three of them…
one was a cover image for my Facebook page, a second one I had processed as a vignetted sepia image (two years ago):
And yesterday, I clicked on one and felt the need to process it in black and white…
Different but similar images, treated differently, tell different stories.
Click on the images to see them in their respective Galleries.
There was this “plume” of clouds in the sky that reminded me of the smoke signals I remember seeing in old Western movies, except that it was more contiguous than the separate puffs that I remember from the movies.
I was trying to get an average exposure, but no matter what I did that day the birds in the boat just “glowed”, the intensity of the afternoon sun I guess was just too much for my camera lens/sensor.
I only looked back at this image today and decided to process it through anyway 🙂
Canon EOS 60D | Sigma 10-20mm EX Lens (@20mm, 1/125s, ISO100)
Click on the image to see it in the Black and White Gallery, along with many other of my Black and White images.
It is usually a breath of fresh air to read in the newspapers that some small group of people have embarked upon a “clean-up campaign” along our seawalls; one of the more recent ones would have been the one involving the Ministry of Natural Resources, the EPA (Guyana) along with the Pick It Up Guyana campaign, in the past the Guyana Shines group did a stint, on International Coastal Clean-up Day various NGOs came out in numbers, even the national Football (real football, not that American thing) Team even joined Youths For Guyana on a round of cleaning.
I prefer to re-iterate that cleaning up is an after-the-fact solution, our primary goal should be NOT to litter in the first place, we should be encouraging our peers, and children on a daily basis to do the right thing and put it in the trash!
How hard is it to keep your trash with you until you reach a suitable receptacle (the garbage bin in your yard works marvellously for this) to dispose of it in the right way?
When I take photos along our coast, invariably there is trash within spitting distance, much less within the scope of my camera lens, some of us include it deliberately to make a point, many of us (myself inclusive) try to compose to minimise the presence of the debris and detritus.
When I took this photo two years ago, I dismissed it out of hand as not appropriate for what I was doing at the time, but now, I think it makes a statement. Why should our children, who look forward gleefully to playing on the seawalls and seashore, be subject to the dangers, physical and health-wise, of the abundant and widespread disposal and accumulation of garbage on the seawalls?
We shouldn’t have to “Pick It Up” because we shouldn’t have thrown it down in the first place, let us live not for now, but for the future, our children’s future.
Click on the image to see it in the “Streets” gallery
Karran Sahadeo recently did a presentation at Moray House with this title, when I chose this photo for this week’s entry for the Deck Project, it popped into my head.
Often, all we have of moments and events of our younger days are memories… with the current deluge of photos being taken with various cameras, smartphones, tablets, webcams, etc., the current generation may have a different take on it in 20 years.
I can look back at what might be considered a relatively large amount of photos from my younger days, relative to the general population at the time in Guyana at any rate, and I can sometimes remember the moment, the event, the atmosphere, the sounds and other tiny things that made the moment memorable, but there are many more points in my life that have no such record, and all I have are memories.
I was out on the seawall on the way to work one morning when I saw the sky to the south as I approached the portion of the wall right behind my old school ground (Saint Stanislaus College), as I stopped to take the photo, memories of times there came back to me.
I’m not a sportsman, never really was, but I do remember trying a few sports, simply because the teachers said you had to “try”… I remember being left behind in the 100m sprint, I remember being lapped once in some one of the longer runs, I remember wanting to try the shotput, but being a small fellow, no one would let me, I remember trying the long jump and not doing too badly (as in, at least one other person fell shorter than I did); I also remember getting sunburnt, falling in the grass and bruising my knees, climbing the pavilion steps, eating snow-cones and icicles, and drinking Blackcherry Soda… (Both Banks DIH and DDL had lost their Cola franchises, Banks brought out the ICEE Blackcherry to fill the void), I could go on, but my point is, I can look back on “this” photo and have those memories renewed even though I don’t have photos of any of those moments to look at.
While this photo can mean that to me, for you, it may just be a very plain, very empty black and white photo; for me, the field is filled with students; the pavilion with teachers, students, parents; the gateway and fence lined with vendors selling snow-cones, tamarind syrup and green-mango 🙂
Canon EOS 60D, Sigma 10-20mm | 1/100s @ f/7.1, 10mm, ISO100
Click on the image to see it in the Black and White Gallery from the Collection, while there, take a look at the other images in the growing Black and White Gallery.
In going over older photographs, I usually have an easy time of picking out the ones I want to keep and those that I either will never use or would come back to later (eventually).
This one sort of nagged me. I don’t think it’s a particularly great shot, but I kept going back to it, I decided yesterday to process it and see what developed, and although I still think it’s just a photo of a rock on the seashore, I’m partial to it.
Click on the photo to see it in the gallery along with others in the Black and White Collection.
Bask
Battered by the pounding waves
at times of high water,
stood upon as a refuge
from the swirling foam…
pinched by crabs as an anchor
from the pull of the receding waters,
Covered by shifting sands,
and uncovered by the waves,
ebb tide is past and
the waters are gone
basking in the warmth
of the sun, this fine dawn.
Most photographers will tell you that the worst time to go shooting outdoors is noon, with the midday sun directly overhead casting deep shadows on people’s faces, or flooding subjects with overhead light giving it very little dimension, this applies to landscapes as well… As Lady Luck would have it, that’s when I get to go outside… at midday, whether it’s to accompany Nikhil on his walk or leaving work on a Saturday… it’s the noon sun I usually have to shoot under.
This one is not the type of thing I normally do, but something about it caught my eye and I shot it… left it to percolate for almost a year, then went back to it with fresh eyes.
Not something that many may like, but here it is anyway 🙂
Click on the image to see in the in Gallery with others from the Black and White Collection
If I had the time in the middle of the day, I’d probably be doing just like this fellow in the photograph… sit and just stare out to sea for a while; but I was taking a walk and taking some photographs 🙂 (The walk ostensibly for health reasons and the photos for my sanity) I’ve photographed this spot many times, I was going through an old album when I came across this one and thought that a square crop would work nicely, then I saw the faint details of the clouds and thought that some tone-mapping would give me more detail and a monochrome version might just look nice, and voila! I got a bit of haloing, but I can live with that 🙂
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery along with other images in my Sepia Collection
I had taken this photograph of one of the many trees lining the Main Street Avenue, it struck me that I could look up at these canopies along the avenue and feel a sense of calm and even tranquility but when I look back down and around me I am surrounded by rushing people, rushing vehicles, horns blaring and exhausts fuming.
Whilst processing the image I couldn’t think of much to say about this to put on the blog here… and I thought I’d take up a suggestion someone once made about using a Haiku Poem to accompany it (for some reason the image gave me an Oriental vibe). I read up on Haiku and realised that anything I attempted would likely come out wrong… and probably be laughed at by anyone who knows about Haiku, so I decided to at least put in these two paragraphs to accompany the photo, and yes I will put the attempt at Haiku under the photo… If you don’t know about Haiku, then I’ll be fine, if you do know about Haiku… just don’t laugh out loud 😀
Fresh scents, a clear day
Trees adorned with other life
A busy street thrives.
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery
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