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.
Every time I say something about the Sea, I have to wonder how many people think about the fact that what we see beyond our shores is not a sea, but an ocean… but it would sound really silly calling the barrier the Ocean-wall.
Anyway, back to my fascination with the sea (or ocean) and our coastline, here’s a photo 🙂
Sea – 16-2637 | Canon EOS 60D, Sigma 10-20mm | 2016
Click on the image to see it in the Black & White Gallery along with many other Black & White images in my collection
Often, I can just sit on the edge of the rising or ebbing tide, and marvel at the forces at work, to keep in constant motion this massive amount of water that must weigh an unimaginable but calculable amount, the Pacific Ocean alone takes up almost half the Earth’s surface…
Pull and Push – 16-1777 | Canon EOS 60D, Sigma 10-20mm | 2016
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery
Some photos have a way of leaving you feeling unsettled, or just not quite right…
Awry 15-9930 | Lusignan, East Coast Demerara, Guyana | 2015
Click on the image to see it along with others in the Black and White Gallery.
Sometimes we become entangled in the minutiae of our daily lives and forget or overlook the things that are truly important, I’m no philosopher but sometimes introspection leads to thoughts about things that I often figure are best left to wiser men to figure out – like, why does the toilet paper always seem to run out when you really need it and can’t reach a new one easily? 😀
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I saw this cloth tied to a bamboo pole on the seawall, not sure if it was part of a Hindu ritual, a flayed and battered Jhanda (Jhandi flag) or just a piece of cloth tied to a pole… It intrigued me enough that I took quite a few photos of it, trying to catch it and freeze it’s motion with a fast shutter speed… and when I was processing the photo, only then noticed the bit of seaweed tangled in some of the threads… this might have been a bit of that Sargasso Seaweed that recently washed up on our shores.
Canon EOS 6D, Canon EF24-105mm | 105mm, 1/500s, f/8, ISO 200
A cruel world, tears and flays
The skin and nerves apart
Love and life, soothes and calms
This tender fragile heart
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery.
In the larger picture, the broader landscape, what is the message?
Is there a message in the bottle, or is the bottle the message?
Do we read the message, do we even notice the bottle?
2015 | Canon 6D, Canon 24-105mm
Click on the image to see it in the Seawall Gallery in the Collection
I’ve never been one to do a lot of “dodging and burning” in images, but this image I liked and I wanted to recover some detail in the shadow of the rock, and I didn’t want to tone-map the entire image, that would have been overkill I think.
So I used the brush tool in Lightroom to lighten just that area to get that detail I wanted. the rest of the scene worked to my satisfaction.
This is a stretch of the seawall at Lusignan, and at High tide that rock, which seems to be pointing North, is normally covered.
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery along with other images from this year’s Deck Project.
As I was titling this photo I was somewhat reminded of the TV Series “Bones”, maybe it was a recent discussion on the show that prompted the title “The Wood in the Frame”.
I saw this discarded wooden frame amidst the rocks on the seawall. and by contorting myself and peering through it I could see that I might be able to frame some of the Jhandi flags within it… I could not get both my head and the camera into the space available (and I didn’t really want to move the frame), so I know my focus might be spotty, so I was fully prepared for some crazy images to come out.
I had angled slightly down to ensure I got the base of the frame, so it was expected that I’d most likely get the wood lying across the frame in focus. 🙂
I think it came out nicely. (Yes, I know, most of you would have moved the frame so you can get the angle right, the focus right, everything right… I like the experimental method over absolute perfection sometimes)
1/250s @ f/10, 24mm, ISO200
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery.
For those of you who were there at the presentation at Moray House (9th October 2014) or have subsequently seen the video that Fidal did and posted to his YouTube Channel, or even saw the images from that presentation which I posted to my site in the Oniabo Gallery, you’ll have gathered that I spend some time at the seawalls.
I was about to say that I think it’s “a magical place”, but that just reminded me of Coleson’s line in the “Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D” series where he keeps saying that Tahiti is a magical place….
But… maybe the seawall is magical, I don’t spend a lot of time there, but when I do I enjoy it, every moment of it… and I do get some lovely images…
In a way, I go there to unplug from the daily work, the constant access to and intrusion of technology… If anyone saw me while I was taking this photo I am about to share, they would have seen a huge grin on my face… because I was thinking just these thoughts when I saw this:
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery along with other images from this year’s Deck Project.
I don’t always get a week that’s full of photographs, so on some weeks, like Week 22, there are slim pickings, and I have to choose either the more appealing photo, or one that no one would get…
I have the flu, so processing one that’s appealing is easier 😀
Maybe some time later, I’ll do the other one that I was considering 😉
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery.
Have you ever latched onto a word with unusual fascination? When I first read or heard certain words, there was an undue fascination that I got for them, one of those was “singed”… No, it has nothing to do with singing, so no funny quips about that 🙂 Another one was “chaos”, that one was simply because I’d read it in a book and had formed this pronounciation in my head that turned out to be completely wrong.
So… back to “singed”
It was the first week of 2014, and I was walking the seawall looking for a few photographs when I came across the piece of singed wood… it was laying across another piece of wood forming a cruciform shape, the harsh midday sun cast a strong shadow and I decided that it might make a decent photograph 🙂
I also took the opportunity to try out LightZone to process it from start to end… I finally found how to straighten the horizon in it… using the crop tool just like in LightRoom (silly me couldn’t find it the first time I was processing an image in it). I must say, that while there are some things I miss from this piece of software, it is a very powerful application, and the integration of the changes into the saved file (JPG or TIF) makes it easy to go back and adjust the processing.
LightZone also professes to be able to work as a plugin to LightRoom, so if you just want some of the neat features in LZ, you can try it as a plugin. For an OpenSource (read that as FREE) software, it is powerful and user-friendly, this is not a stripped down software, but a full fledged product for RAW image processing.
Now… to the image. It probably won’t rank as a great photograph, but I liked it and it gave me a good opportunity to try out LightZone
Canon EOS 60D, Sigma 10-20mm | 1/160s, f/9, 10mm, ISO 100
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery along with other images in the Black and White collection
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