Terminal

While other parts of the world are attempting to record every bit of information for Historical reference, and digging up (sometimes literally) any old records and references to people and places long dead and almost forgotten, I find that in Guyana, there are few records of places and people from our historical past (at least easily accessible records), whether of the recent past or a few generations back.

With the current alarming rate at which the older buildings, some with lots of history and character, are disappearing, I fear that a lot of the history and folklore that may be attached to those buildings will also disappear.

Much of what I know of Georgetown, was “told” to me by family and friends or teachers or just people who had something to say.

I was born after the trains disappeared from our shores, but I was told that this building was the Terminal (of course, there’s not much of a building left, so all I took was the side of it that has nice palm trees along the trench).  It also served as the Bus Terminal after the train no longer ran.  I vaguely remember the “Big Buses” that once were “the public transportation” of Georgetown, or as we grew up calling them; the Tata Buses.

This building also either houses or housed a foreign mission office, I remember seeing a crest or coat-of-arms on the High Street side some years ago.

 

Lamaha Street, looking down from the High Street end.

2011 Deck – Week 4

I went out on at least two occasions this week with the sole intention of using the Sigma 10-20 Ultra-wide angle lens.  Just so that I didn’t disappoint myself I made sure I chose one of those for this week’s Deck photo  🙂

This is what remains of the building that housed Frandec Travel Service and Frandec Health Insurance, it was one of Georgetown’s old wooden structures, nothing as fancy as a Victorian Styled Mansion but nevertheless, it gave the area some of it’s character.

It was burnt down this January, suspected arson.

 

Frandec's Remains

Twilight Convergence

It’s not what I was looking for, but sometimes you have to use what you have and not wish for what isn’t there 🙂  I have been looking in my rear view mirror on my way home every evening for that nice twilight glow, the sunset that has left variations in colour in the sky and the winds that have left scattered clouds or wispy clouds that add that little extra “umph” to the scene.  Well, this isn’t it, but I decided to try a few long exposures and while I was at it, an HDR  🙂

I woke early this morning, and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I came in to process this early, in a standard photograph you wouldn’t see anything in the foreground, but in this HDR quite a bit can be seen, the sky is lighter than the actual scene. but that’s because of the HDR processing, I think it balanced the scene out nicely.

 

Twilight Convergence - 3 image HDR, 2 stops apart. f/4, ISO 200, 10mm

New Header Image

I was recently reminded that I am primarily a Guyanese photographer (yes, I just referred to myself as a photographer) and that my header image was somewhat inappropriate, it being a panorama from Sint Maarten.

So when Nikhil, Naseem and I went for a drive out West on Saturday, I made a point of trying at least one Panorama image to replace the header with.

The header is cropped to fit the available space in the theme I am using, so I’ve included the original below which you can click on to see larger at the site.

This is a scene of the Conservancy down at the back of Canal Number 1, West Bank Demerara, approaching Sunset and waiting in vain for the colours to get more spectacular.  🙂

 

Conservancy Sunset, 8 image Panorama, 20mm, 1/50sec, f/6.3, ISO200

The Deck – Week 50

After three successive monochrome postings for the Deck project, I decided this week, that regardless of what the weather was like I wanted a coloured image,and I finally got something in keeping with the season, Demerara Mutual Insurance company lit up their building very nicely, and I took a few images at night to try and capture the spirit  🙂

Here’s the resulting image.  Demerara Mutual has it’s main office on Avenue of the Republic in Central Georgetown, to the right of the photo, you can even see a portion of City Hall.

 

Demerara Mutual - Christmas 2010

The Deck – Week 49

This week sees a continuation of the monochromatic trend of late, but instead of just a straight BW, I went for a sepia with a vignette.  It was on one of those walks with Nikhil, while looking for his Photo for his 365, and even though these waterways have been done, and over-done, I thought I’d give it a try, with the over-cast sky and perpetuating gloom of the afternoon this was pre-destined to be a monochromatic photograph.

After minimal processing in Lightroom, I did the monochromatic rendition in Nik Silver Efex, it came out rather nicely.

 

Yonder Bridge

The Deck – Week 48

I am pretty much disappointed with this week’s photographs, I have one of my wife that I thought was a great shot and was very tempted to put as the photo for this week’s Deck entry, but she would never forgive me if I did, so I had to settle for this one.

I intentionally took multiple exposures most of this week because I intended to do some more HDR attempts, but this one didn’t come out as expected.  For some reason my alignment was all wrong and there’s quite a bit of haloing as a result.  I did intend a BW HDR, so this I used as much to my advantage as possible.

I did the HDR merging in Nik HDR Efex Pro, and also added a vignette to it there. The final touches were added in Lightroom using a BW POP preset I got from Eric Kim, who does really great Street Photography, I hope he doesn’t mind that I used it for something other that Street Photography  🙂

I rather liked the lone tree and it’s reflection, so that’s why this was my choice this week.

Casting a Reflection - BW HDR

The Deck – Week 47

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.

 

The Mausoleum

The Deck – Week 45

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.

 

Camp Road Koker - 1/125s f/8.0 ISO200 10mm

 

 

The Deck – Week 43

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 hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

 

Diamond Fields 7505. Canon T1i, 1/40sec f/4.5 ISO200 10mm