Buildings – Queenstown, Bourda… and Clive Lloyd Drive

On July 20, 2010 By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography3 Comments

Have I been taking numerous photos of buildings recently? Yes I have, and it’s all Nikhil’s fault! As usually happens, when we take a walk, it’s usually centred around a small area in Georgetown, and what else is there to photograph in Georgetown except buildings? Maybe some trash on the road-corner, but that’s not my style of photography (well, not yet anyway).

Georgetown has a very wide array of “architectural styles”, so you can often go around one city block and come back with a nice diverse set of photographs, while I may photograph the entire structure most times, it is usually a combination of the smaller features that really draw my attention.

Combinations of both wooden and concrete portions are somewhat common to see these days, usually because of “additions” to the original structure, but sometimes it is a deliberate architectural decision.

Even buildings constructed with one type of base material have very appealing little characteristics sometimes. Something I don’t see too often these days is the use of shingles, especially on the walls of a building, quite interesting to see that, especially when you’ve grown up in either wooden houses (with tongue and groove wood walls) or in concrete boxes with louvre windows like I did.

This blog-post is going to be particularly shot on words, but heavy on the photographs. I have six photographs of buildings that I wanted to include in this post, all taken in Georgetown, some from the wards of Bourda and Queenstown and one from the Kitty area, on Clive Lloyd Drive.

I am not sure how many residents of Georgetown (much less Guyanese) know where Clive Lloyd Drive is. It’s that little stretch of road from Vlissengen Road to Sheriff Street running along the Seawall, I think that it becomes the Rupert Craig Highway at Sheriff Street.

Now that I have filled up the space between these two photographs with words, I can now go on to show you the other photographs 🙂 Two are of the “Open Bible Church”, whose “building” is for sale, so it’s not likely to be there for much longer. One of my goals is to try to photograph some of the more interesting buildings around town before they disappear, and are forgotten. I have an open list, so feel free to send suggestions, and no, the concrete box with the louvre windows is not that photogenic, seriously!

Open Bible Church, Oronoque and Lamaha Streets

HDR – International Conference Centre, Guyana

On July 12, 2010 By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography2 Comments

Opportunity Knocks.

On Saturday, I had to take the vehicle to the mechanic for a strange “shuddering” that was making driving a bit nauseating, I get motion-sick it seems. Synchronizing for someone to collect me from the mechanic was not too easy, especially as I seem to make an earlier start than most folks I know. So, instead of waiting around outside the mechanic shop, I decided to start walking towards town, and get picked up on the way. It was one of those times that opportunity knocks, the sky over the Conference Centre at Liliendaal was very nice and I looked at the whole scene for a minute and finally decided to try a HDR of it.

After taking two sets of three exposures I continued my walk, I have other photos from the walk, but this post is abut the HDR, so that is the only one I will link to for now.

As most photographers, whether hobbyists or professional, have discovered (sometimes the hard way), it is important to always have your camera with you, you just never know when opportunity will knock.

International Conference Centre, Liliendaal, Guyana.

E-magine

On July 2, 2010 By themichaellamcollectionIn Commentary, Photography3 Comments

For anyone who lives in Guyana and uses the internet regularly, GT&T teased us for a few weeks with what was to come, a brand new internet experience! They promised that from the 1st of July 2010, we would have four times the current (advertised) bandwidth on our DSL connections, most of us use a 256kbps connection so that meant a whopping 1Mbps.

Most of us, never having experienced anything like this, since we are all local born, bred and grown, with little or no exposure to the internet beyond our shores, were ecstatic with just the thought of it, some of us probably went to bed on June 30th drooling with anticipation.

I have heard people compare our DSL connection to being slower than what they get as dial-up in the cities of North America, I can’t vouch for that, but yes, it was slow. I once thought that internet error messages were designed with a Guyanese connection in mind, but surely we’re not the only ones suffering such a fate. During my growing years, I was always told that somewhere in the world there are people worse off than I am, and that is true. I have a home (mortgaged), a job that I like, a family that I love, I earn enough to feed and cloth myself and enjoy a few of the things offered in life, and I have access to the World Wide Web. So I have to thank the telephone company for at least that.

Anyway, I digress! GT&T and the Internet! On July 1, 2010 I eagerly went into work, and like most Guyanese, the first thing I did at the computer was to check the all new awesome speed! and it seems that GT&T hit the proverbial brick wall (not the one on the left).

Not only was the browsing definitely not faster, it was actually slower, across Facebook (in the Guyanese community anyway) there was joke after joke about the service (or lack of), it even escalated to attacks on the source of the new Emagine Logo and mascot. I admit, I was part and parcel of all this, because we were all justifiably angry. I don’t think I ever saw so much plays on the word “imagine”

The lesson to be learnt, is never ever ever promise something you can’t deliver. You can’t say that on July 1st there’s be a newer and faster internet experience and then not deliver. And when you don’t deliver, you have people (PR) make various excuses and hastily contrived explanations and justifications. One individual claimed that they were “phasing it in”. Nonsense! you want to deliver on the promise of a faster internet that you will “phase in” the it should have been phasing in from a few days before so that you don’t make the entire company look like they’re incompetent.

The good news is, they’re ironing out the kinks, getting rid of the bugs and giving us a better service, so that I can actually upload more than one photo a day to my site 🙂

The three photos in this blog were all uploaded today, quite a milestone for me, since it was so much a hassle before, with failed uploads and just tying up the bandwidth 🙂 Now I have to go back through the older items in my catalog and finally do some processing and uploading, the new available bandwidth is giving me more work 🙂

Emagine. I was fairly busy today and still uploaded three images, Emagine the possibilities for the future 🙂

The Deck – Week 26

On July 1, 2010August 28, 2010 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2010 Deck, Photography1 Comment

I think that, if I calculated correctly, I am now halfway through The Deck 🙂

This week’s image was taken on one of those “walkabouts” I sometimes do with Nikhil. We had decided to go into a part of Queenstown and walk a couple blocks. That part of Georgetown has always had some picturesque areas, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed with the walk.

This image was of a corner building that was being brightly illuminated by the afternoon sunshine, and its colours are part of what we in the Caribbean had become accustomed to seeing, nicely sprinkled amidst the “normal” white buildings. (click on the image to go to the site itself)

As was pointed out to me recently, only when we Caribbean people travel to the “Great North” do we miss our colourful heritage; this image is an appreciation of parts of that heritage, from the colours to the “Demerara shutters”

I am proud to be a Guyanese, and like the great Dave Martins referred to it, I have my “Caribbean Belly”

The Deck – Week 23

On June 11, 2010August 28, 2010 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2010 Deck, Commentary, Photography2 Comments

A Power Struggle, and City Hall is losing

I’ve uploaded my image for the 2010 Deck collection on the site. It seems I’ve been in a monochrome rut for the last few weeks. It’s actually interesting this time, since I usually only make monochromatic shots for a few reasons;

I initially look at the scene and believe from the start that it will look good as either black and white or sepia
The sky was blanket grey and made an otherwise lovely scene look drab – I’m a sucker for a blue sky.
The post process intention was to give the image an older look

In this image, I actually got a lovely blue sky with those white clouds encroaching, something about the decaying building bothered me and I decided after some contemplation to render this in monochrome. I am mostly a fan of “whole buildings” but occasionally I like the partials 🙂

For the post-processing details, I did a bit of distortion correction and then did the monochrome editing in Nik Silver Effects.

This post is also going to be the first post where I do a bit of social commentary, in this case, specifically brought about by my photos of City Hall yesterday.

It is shameful that such a beautiful building, with so much history can be allowed to deteriorate like this, pieces are literally falling off. I don’t know about anyone else, but I pay my taxes, and I would expect certain things in return. I expect them to clean the drains REGULARLY, I’ve only seen them in our area once since I moved in more than two years ago, I even expect them to maintain the parapets, you know, weeding etc., again, never saw them, and I expect them to maintain City Hall! even if it was a crappy building, they should do it, but because it is such beautiful architecture, it is not only a good idea to keep the building that houses the governing body of the city in good repair, it is also their social responsibility to ensure that this piece of history is maintained and not become a part of history, relegated to photographs and memories.

Sadly, it may come to the point that restoration may not be an option and the building will probably be replaced by some concrete box with little or no character. From a photography standpoint, that would be disastrous 🙂