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.
The good thing about taking photos of your baby girl is that when nothing else has been shot for the week, you can always use one of those photos as your photo of the week 😀
Here she is at almost 6 months old.
Malina – just about 6 months old
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery
This photo was included as part of my extended Oniabo collection which I presented at Moray House in a slide-show presentation in October.
The Oniabo collection started as a collection of 6 images, but when I was offered the opportunity to present something at Moray House, I revisited the idea and extended the collection to 16 Images.
I now have a better grasp of the collection and what I want it to be, and by early next year I hope to have concluded the set, omitting some that are there now and including others that are still in the making 🙂
Compositionally I was going for the three layers that I saw; the cloudy sky beyond the horizon, the mud-flats and the receded sea, and the rocky foreground, it was fairly dark already, but I knew that the some-what even lighting would make a good shot. A couple being there helped to make this shot even better.
“couple” – Lusignan, East Coast Demerara
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery, also the visit the Oniabo collection as presented at Moray House.
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.
While I’ve never really considered this blog as a “photography blog” in the true sense, it is mostly about my photos, so sometimes, the photos just have to speak for themselves; so here’s a thousand words:
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery
Exploitative or Journalistic?
The question with regards certain street photographs is usually whether the resultant image and its use are exploitative or journalistic; this is not a question for viewers or critics, it is a question for the photographer; anyone says otherwise is trying to be self-important; yes, a fallacy, I don’t care. 🙂
I saw this chap sitting in what seemed a dejected and sad position, and I “had” to take a photograph, but carefully, surreptitiously, so as not to make him too aware of my intentions; wanted the scene as I saw it to be portrayed as I remembered it…
In the shadows cast by the trees along the avenue, in the bright midday sun, one man, sitting, alone, almost overlooked, in the heart of Georgetown.
I titled this one “In the Shadows”, because that is how I see many of our fellow citizens living; in the shadow of oppression, in the shadow of others who walk along with a brighter present and future than he may have, in the shadow of trees and buildings that have existed longer than he has, in the shadow of a life that could be better, but isn’t (reasons unknown).
Cropped to 3:4 from the original
1/125s @ f/7.1, 24mm, ISO 200
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery.
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A Saturday midday upon the wall.
The breeze was nice, there were very few people around, and I paused in my walking to see what these rocks would look like from a lower perspective… 🙂
1/320s @ f/13.0, 24mm, ISO 200
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery along with other photos from this year’s Deck Project
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Christ Church was doing some fund-raising, a friend of mine asked me to take a few photos of the church to use in the press release. The only time I had to make a pass by the church was an early morning on the way to work.
I was thinking that it’s only for a press release, so it doesn’t have to be that good, right?
I was in a bit of a hurry, but I snapped a few, then jumped back in the car and headed to work. There was some nice clouds behind the church from one angle, and kept remembering this as I downloaded the images to process, I knew that my attitude toward the shot was less than optimal and I had deliberately exposed for the building and not the skies (since it was just for the press), as the sun was rising behind the church, all that detail would be blown out.
I thought that this would be a good time to experiment with what I had read about prior to acquiring a full-frame camera, that it can capture a very wide dynamic range in one exposure.
True enough, the entire sky was blown out in the exposure when I downloaded it.
But remembering what I had just seen in the sky, I worked the sliders to see what sky detail I could retrieve from the RAW file:
And I was amazed, so I decided to process it better than I had originally intended. I made slight adjustments in Lightroom to bring some detail back in the sky while retaining the detail and brightness of the building. Then I took the image into Nik HDR Efex with the express intent to use a single exposure black-and-white tone mapping technique on it, and the results were great. After a few minor adjustments once I took it back to Lightroom, this was the result:
Christ Church, Waterloo St., Georgetown, Guyana
Someone asked me it I “photoshopped” it, well, I didn’t use photoshop, I used no masks, no layers, nothing like that, just what I described above. Everything I needed was in the RAW file, if I weren’t in such a hurry and treating the action of taking the photo so lacklustrely, then I may have actually taken multiple exposures for a proper HDR 🙂
Click on the image to see it in the Gallery.
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.
I don’t often do HDR images, mainly because I think it’s a technique that has it’s uses in specific circumstances, and also because a basic RAW file out of the camera now has much more dynamic range than before and can be adjusted in post process to utilize that content without the need for multiple exposures.
But I like doing HDR images, to pull and prod at the dynamic range in a scene and get it looking as I remember the scene as my eyes could see it. Shooting into the sun is tricky, most times all you’ll get are silhouettes, so adjusting exposure to balance the scene is one way to try compensating for that great ball of light, or shooting multiple exposures and using HDR techniques after can also work towards the desired goal.
This one, I went for an HDR, but I didn’t want that wide a dynamic range, so I only bracketed very narrowly from 0ev. I wanted the colours from the sky and the city below to come through, and I wanted the light and shadow to be there but with more detail than the standard exposure was giving me.
I hope you like it.
HDR Image from 3 exposures.
Just about two years ago I had taken about four photos of a bird sitting on a branch, he was against the brighter light (sunlight) so the portion of him directly facing me was in shadow, not having a flash to fill-in with, I had thought at the time that I’d use post-processing with the sliders in Lightroom to retrieve the detail I wanted.
I was checking for some other images today when I came across the set and decided to process this one, I had now changed my mind slightly about the processing and was not thinking of a high-key style, giving some delicacy to the image, I think the light colour of the bird, the leaves behind him and the textured bark of the branch gave me the idea.
Click on the image to see it in the Black and White Gallery.
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