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.
We arrived in Barbados in the afternoon, almost five o’clock, and after getting settled in we were deciding on the what/where for dinner.
What do you do for your first dinner, first night in Barbados? Fish at Oistins of course! It’s a lively area with many many places to sit and get you fried or grilled fish, and the fish was good! I don’t like eating and suddenly hitting those little bones that stick in all those nice soft spots in your mouth (and throat), the fish at Oistins is known to be fillet (or at least with only the large bone pieces that are easily removed), everyone was happy about this, even me, but as luck would have it, I found seven little ones 🙂 But even that could not diminish the experience of that excellently prepared fish!
Although I didn’t go to take photos, I snagged a couple, just for the record. The men at the grill were totally engrossed in their work and doing a great job of feeding the multitudes, I think feeding 5,000 might be a regular thing for them 🙂
The street running through this area had emblematic lighted fishes down the street, I thought that a nice street shot with one would look nice ang give a sense of Oistins.
A Drive up the Rupert Craig Highway carries you past the villages of Plaisance and Sparendaam on the East Coast of Demerara. My dad had once pointed out that what most people referred to as the “Catholic Church in Plaisance” was actually situated in Sparendaam (this would be the Church of St John the Baptist), and I couldn’t help but notice that the Saint Paul’s Anglican Church at Plaisance is also in Sparendaam.
I suppose that quibbling about the name of the location is minor since the street that marks the division of the two villages is the same street that both churches are on. Now the street, that has name issues of its own…
As with most of the place names in Guyana, they reflect our past colonisations and our change from Colonial rule to Independence, the name Plaisance is of French origin, and Sparendaam comes from the Dutch. Our last colonial masters were the British, when our country was known as British Guiana, and the two main streets running the length of Plaisance were (and to some extent still are) Queen Victoria Road and Prince William Drive.
During the “Burnham years”, one of the changes (some might call it an attempt to eradicate our history) was to rename streets that held “colonial names” to names that were more meaningful to a country emerging from colonial rule and striving for successful Independence. In Georgetown one of the more notable changes was the renaming of Murray Street to Quamina Street. John Murray was the Lieutenant Governor of Demerara from 1813 to 1824, Quamina was a slave involved in one of the largest slave revolts in Demerara during that time (in 1823 actually).
In Plaisance, Queen Victoria Road was renamed to Ben Profitt Drive, and Prince William Street was renamed to Andries Noble Avenue. Ben Profitt was a notable village chairman of Plaisance, and Andries Noble is touted to be one of the best midwives of Guyana, there’s probably very few people over the age of 35 from Plaisance and Sparendaam whom she didn’t help bring into this world.
Although the name changes were made more than a couple of decades ago, the streets are still referred to by many using the original names, although most people who have grown up in the villages know them by both names, So St Paul’s Anglican Church is sometimes referred to as being on Queen Victoria Road, and sometimes on Ben Profitt Drive, likewise it is also sometimes referred to as being in Sparendaam, as well as being in Plaisance..
I started this blog post just wanting to say something about St Paul’s Anglican Church other than “Here is a photo of the church with it’s cemetery as seen through a gate in its fence”, one thing led to another and now the post is almost 500 words long.
Without further ado; “Here is a photo of the church with it’s cemetery as seen through a gate in its fence” 🙂
St. Paul’s Anglican Church
Click on the image to see it better in the Gallery, along with other images from this year’s Deck Project.
Aday.org had come up with an idea to present “A day in the world” through photographs, they wanted photographers worldwide, from amateurs to professionals, basically anyone with a camera, to take a few photos on May 15th and upload them to their site. They had so many uploads they quickly got problems handling it and I am still not sure if my photos are there and if they are eligible for the final project, I think a lot of the information went AWOL during the upload. At the time of writing this blog-post, they are still sorting out everything to relaunch the website.
I took a few photos within the city to contribute, and I am choosing one of those to share as my photograph for Week 20 of this year.
Its a very familiar scene in Georgetown, this was “after-work” and these people are most likely workers on their way from their jobs to get transportation home, and I used City Hall as a backdrop for some added familiarity 🙂
Click on the image to see it better in the Gallery.
Age is a relative thing, something (or someone) is either younger (or newer) or older than another by a certain amount of time, whether it is by minutes, days, years, decades, centuries, etc.
I’ve grown up knowing the Hand-in-Hand Insurance Building (and others of its time) and they’ve become landmarks to me, that makes them old, or older than the stuff that went up in the last decade anyway.
They may not be of the Victorian era, so their architectural aesthetics may be less appealing, but they are certainly a lot more appealing than many of the concrete boxes that are being erected these days.
The Hand-in-Hand building always reminded me of a concrete and stone attempt to look Victorian, or maybe semi-Greco-Roman, but I’m not an architect and my terms may be far off the mark.
I had always admired its arches, the wrought-iron fence, the wrought-iron “fret-work” that created the arches between the columns, the low-sprawling style of the building.
When I took this photo I never intended to process it in Sepia tone, yet that is what appealed to me when I began processing, and to help the age along a bit, I added a light vignette (hopefully not too noticeable)
So this building is Newer than Victorian, but probably older than I am 🙂
I liked how this particular image came out, not necessarily for art, but for the framing of the couple on the bench. It’s one of those Georgetown Seawall scenes that can be somewhat iconic.
This scene brings to mind the song by Dave Martins and the Tradewinds entitled “In Guyana”, it’s mostly of a time gone by, and mostly even before my time, but some of it pulls at my heartstrings.
Sunsets on the seawall, enjoying the breeze, Sweet Caribbean Music, blowing through the trees, a stroll along the seawall, from the Bandstand to Ayanganna, that’s how it was, In Guyana…
OK, I know those aren’t the words to the song, but I hope Dave won’t hold that against me 🙂
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. 🙂
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