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 has been the norm of late, my week was busy, I only got to take photographs on three days, but I did manage to get a very nice photograph that was actually enhanced by the crazy cloudy weather we’ve been having recently.
This week I give you a scene from the Botanical Gardens, I was in the central area of the Seven Ponds, where some of the Nation’s revered men have been laid to rest; including the first Guyanese Governor General, Sir David Rose, the First President of Guyana, Arthur Chung and the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter.
Facing the ponds is The Mausoleum where the body of the second president of Guyana, Forbes Burnham, is entombed. Linden Forbes Samson Burnham was the first Executive President of Guyana, and was called the Founder Leader during his tenure as president.
The Mausoleum is a recent addition to the Gardens being built in 1986, it has numerous sculptures on the interior walls done by Ivor Thom.
The reflection in the pond was what drew me to this scene, I hope you like it.
It’s been another crazy week, somehow not finding the time to do certain things, like check out other photography blogs and process some of my photos. I took photographs on only three days this week, so one of them had to work for this week’s Deck Photo.
It has been a while since I tried out my Macrography (or Macro Photography), and since I came upon a moth recently in the house, I was quick to grab the opportunity to try some out. Since I don’t have a nice Canon Macro Lens, I went the old route, I grabbed my 18-55 Kit lens and my Raynox M250 Macro Lens, snapped them on together on the camera and experimented with the subject.
I didn’t have a lighting option available to me, neither softbox nor macro flash, so I was relying on natural sunlight, with it being an overcast day, that wasn’t too helpful either, but I think I got a good shot none-the-less.
I have the Raynox lenses from when I shot with the Canon PowerShot S5, and I love them both, the 250 is a larger magnification, so since I was only using a maximum of 55mm on the kit lens, I went for that one, how they work is that you screw in the Raynox lens onto an adapter and snap it onto the front of the camera lens.
Here’s a portion of the moth’s wing:
Macro of Moth Wing - Canon 18-55mm with Raynox M250 Macro Lens
There’s an old Koker (or sluice) on Camp Road outside of the Guyana Technical Institute that I have been keeping an eye on for months, I always want to stop and photograph it, but most times there are some homeless men or just loafers around it, then at other times, the scene just wasn’t appealing to me. I was accompanying Nikhil as he headed up to David Street to photograph a scene his wife had pointed out to him when I noticed the lighting and the overall scene and asked him to stop so that I could get it at least this once.
I was a bit pressed for time this week, I haven’t processed any of my other images for the week, I took the easy route and did some minor “light” editing in Oloneo for this week’s image.
How I started the project for the 2010 Deck, the photographic week ends on a Thursday, this last Thursday also happened to be the day before a national holiday in Guyana, a Hindu festival called Diwali or Deepavali (pronounced Deepawlee). There is also an annual event on the night before Diwali, the Diwali Motorcade, featuring lots of illuminated vehicles.
Although the image I have decided to use for this week’s Deck Photo is not the best image for the week, I thought that I should use something representative of the Holiday. Moving night photography is definitely not my thing 🙂
This is a portion of the winning “float” of the night, it was from the Edward B. Beharry Group of Companies, and executed beautifully by Andrew Arts.
Oloneo just extended their current Beta version of their software to December, and I remembered that I had wanted to experiment with a single image in their software and see what lighting possibilities there were, so this week I chose a photograph that I had wanted to do some minor lighting adjustments and colour saturations to. As Oloneo can work directly with the RAW file I actually got quite a lot of noise in the process, and I then used some noise reduction before uploading.
As a stand-alone RAW processor it is not bad at all, nowhere close to Lightroom, but then nothing is. I like the slider controls and I would recommend it for HDR work, and if you like experimenting, it has a unique “Relighting” HDR feature, for controlled shooting conditions, check out their site if you get the chance.
I only took 86 photos this week, but for the small number I had a slightly hard time choosing one, I think it is just because of my experimenting in Oloneo that I chose this one 🙂
This was taken at Diamond (village) on the East Bank of Demerara, the cane fields are in bloom, the sun was about to go into its daily descent for sunset and some of the clouds were reflecting the sun’s glow nicely. Oloneo stripped out the EXIF information from the file, I hope they fix that in the final version.
I seriously doubt that I should classify it as an exhibition, but failing to find another name for it, that’s what it was in essence. There are a series of events held under the patronage of the local tobacco company, the Demerara Tobacco Company, where they associate their premium brand of cigarettes, Dunhill, with various forms of art, featuring local artists. I understand that prior to the event at which I was involved, there was one where they showcased a local painter, some of his finished work as well as one he was working on at the event itself.
The event planners had shortlisted a few up-coming local photographers, you know, the ones who aren’t famous locally as yet, and we were invited to a meeting to discuss the event. At the end of the meeting they had decided that this would most likely be the first photographic exhibition event they were doing and since both Nikhil and I had a “portfolio” each to choose from, they would like it if we did the event. Our portfolios were originally sent to the event planners by another photographer (he’s the Professional one) Dwayne Hackett, so a big thanks to him.
At first we were flattered, and then we were panicked, as we had to choose (together with a representative from the sponsors) and print the images by the next day.
Amazingly we managed to do it all, and even helped to mount the images, with LOTS of help from the guys who work with me at the sign company (DD Signs), without their help it would not have come off, definitely not!
The event itself was…. not too bad. It was held in the Blue Lagoon Bar at the Hotel Tower, we had to contend with lots of music from a separate event outside, the portable AC units were not doing the job of cooling the room, and we were asked to wear formal attire (I think the last time I wore a suit before that was to my sister’s wedding). The attendance was poor, but that might have been a good thing for two very nervous photographers, we had less chance of embarrassing ourselves 🙂
We had our cameras, but they were mostly there to identify us as “The Photographers”, and I don’t think either of us took much more than a few token photographs.
For our regular readers, we decided that since we didn’t bother to actually take photographs of our photographs on display, we’d link a few here on the blog post 🙂
Nikhil’s Set
My Set
And here’s one taken by another up-and-coming photographer on the scene, Troy Parboo, in it we are graced by the presence of Ms. Shannon de Haas, another of the short-listed photographers.
Michael, Shannon and Nikhil
It may not have been the ideal coming out party for a photographer, but it was exposure, none-the-less 🙂
Thanks for all the encouragement and well wishes folks.
I almost didn’t get to sort out this last week’s photos, and I may have already used my best image for that last post 🙂
This week’s image has a little novelty, a small moon in the background. While this week’s image may not be too special, today is special for myself and Nikhil, we were both chosen as “Featured Local Photographers” for an event being held by the Demerara Tobacco Company as part of the Dunhill Experience, so a few of our images will be on display at a semi-private event and we are expected to be there to discuss our photography with the guests. This is a first for me, my fifteen minutes of fame (or shame, if I can’t put two words together correctly). Wish me luck, I am not too worried about my friend Nikhil, he’s a lawyer, he’s faced worse people 🙂 I think that they will feature other photographers at later events, so we’re like the opening act 🙂
Anyway, here’s the photo of the Susamacher Methodist Church 🙂
Recently I have taken to “not” reviewing my images until Friday morning, when I would choose my photograph for the 2010 Deck collection on the main site. But this week I broke from the norm to attempt another HDR (High Dynamic Range) image. I went with Nikhil out to get his daily photograph, and we turned down the dividing road between the villages of Better Hope and Vryheid’s Lust, I wasn’t much inspired by the things I saw, but the sky was very nice, and I thought that a wide-angle HDR would turn out nicely. I had also just downloaded my trial version of Nik HDR Efex Pro and I wanted to try it out.
I have blogged about how I normally process my HDR images before, so this post is more about showing the results of trying the new software from Nik. I was impressed with the similarity it has to the other Nik software I’ve tried (like the Nik SIlver Efex) and it is easy and intuitive to use. I did not try to learn too much on this first try, just played with the basic settings to see how it stacked up against Dynamic HDR from Mediachance.
I think the resulting image speaks for itself, both Nik HDR Efex Pro and Dynamic HDR were able to help me to portray the variety of tones that I saw, in this case I was facing the slate afternoon sun, so the image has a lot more detail than a standard shot of the sky which rendered the buildings in the foreground as mostly silhouettes.
Take a look and let me know what you think 🙂 If you click on the image the site has it a bit larger.
Do you see the humanoid looking speck at the top of that hill?
That’s my brother Andre, also known as The Lunatic. Always willing to go the extra mile or the extra climb for that perfect photograph, We were already on top of a hill and could see a nice view and a good distance, but Andre just had to go for a higher vantage point.
That’s my brother for you! When he was a teenager he rode from Georgetown to Lethem, he will tell you that he actually didn’t start riding until Linden, but that’s like saying the glass if fifteen-sixteenths full and not full all the way. Anyone who has travelled the trail in recent years knows that its rough, well that trail didn’t exist in that state when he rode it, it was rougher, with steeper hills and swamps.
He is the kind of person who will run towards the tornado to get a good shot, instead of running for cover like the rest of us, he will hang off the edge of cliffs looking at waterfalls, and jump out of a moving vehicle on a precarious hillside just because he sees a photo opportunity, leaving the rest of us panicking in the vehicle, worrying more about him than ourselves.
When Andre makes up his mind to do something, he’ll move mountains to do it, and accomplish it with style and a smile on his face.
Why am I saying all these things about him now? Men in our family generally don’t express that much emotion to each other, we acknowledge things like pride and love with a nod of the head and a small smile. Andre is the second member of our family to migrate this year, Joan married and migrated a few months back, none of the family have done so before, and the feelings are bitter-sweet. We are happy for them and wish them well in their lives, a future that is unsure as always, but sure to be filled with many things new and wondrous, yet we are sad that we are losing them, it is hard to say goodbye to someone who has been a part of your life for all of memorable time.
When this blog-post goes live, I will be at the airport saying goodbye to my brother, my friend. Vaya con dios! Hasta la vista!
This week was fairly good as photography goes, I took a lot of photographs, 311 of which I’ve downloaded, the remainder were from a wedding that I was helping my bother Andre out at.
Choosing an image for this week’s deck proved more difficult than I would have thought, but that is mainly because the image I wanted to use, I decided to relegate to another blog-post for tomorrow. The image I eventually decided upon was chose for the unusual perspective, at least for me, I am usually more of an angular person when it comes to the direction from which I generally point the camera, Nikhil is usually the one who goes for “head-on” views.
I had the Sigma 10-20mm Wide angle lens on my camera, and I thought that the image would look good from a head-on view facing the horizon, unfortunately the shoreline and the horizon were not exactly parallel at this point, but I think I got the image to where I wanted it 🙂
This was taken along the seawall somewhere between Montrose and Le Resouvenir on the East Coast of Demerara.
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