2011 Deck – Week 39

On December 13, 2011December 13, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography10 Comments

A Return to the Scene.

Last year Nikhil and I were unfortunate enough to be robbed, I did a post on it back then, although we were quite traumatised and our families admonished us to stop walking “all about the place” taking photographs, we haven’t stopped, and in that year we’ve made many more friends in the photographic circle in Guyana. Thanks to Fidal and his idea of a Group on Facebook, we have been fortunate to meet other local photographers of varying expertise and different visions, just seeing what they’ve been doing has emboldened us to see a brighter future for photography in Guyana.

As a symbolic gesture we returned to the scene of the crime, this time, with more caution, and I was armed with a monopod! 🙂

The afternoon was not ideal for me, but I decided to try an HDR looking towards the spot where we were attacked and robbed.

Return to the scene — Return to the Scene

Click on the image for a better view in the Gallery.

2011 Deck – Week 38

On December 12, 2011December 12, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography2 Comments

On this week, I only went out to take photos on one occasion, and on that occasion I took 45 photos, and I was way odd that afternoon, most were very underexposed. It wasn’t that I wasn’t feeling in the mood, I was fairly enthusiastic, I was enjoying the fresh air, the brief walk, and the scenery, but I never once looked down at the screen to check my photos, no chimping.

I was fairly disappointed but one of them had to work 🙂 I chose one that appealed to me in a general sense and felt that it would work well in monochrome, after playing with the processing for a while I found I wasn’t getting what I felt the scene needed, so I took the file into Nik’s HDR Efex to try a single image BW tone-mapping, and amazingly got what I thought was a good final processed image. I would never consider this a true HDR, since I only used one image, but the tone-mapping of the HDR software helped bring out the details that I wanted in this image.

2011 Deck – Week 35

On December 8, 2011December 8, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography8 Comments

Making Time. If anyone has ever figured out how to get more hours out of the day, please let me know 🙂 Once in a while you just have to stop, and slow down. Back in August (yes I’m writing this blog several months late) I was visiting with my in-laws and we decided to take a drive/walk out to the seawall at Lusignan. I took some photos (many left to be processed) but I processed two sequences that I had intended for HDRs, and was somewhat satisfied with this one.

I think that I was still standing in the village of Lusignan, but I was looking towards Annandale, I was told that somewhere ahead of me was an area known as Courbaine Park and (probably more to the left) is an area called Sand Reef. As usual, when taking outdoor HDR images I tend to go for the clouds, there was a very nice layering and depth (or height) to the clouds.

I used Nik HDR Efex to merge and tone map the image.

I’m hoping to sneak in a blog post or two to catch up before the end of the year 🙂

2011 Deck – Week 34

On October 18, 2011October 18, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography8 Comments

Although I had quite a variety of shots in this week, I couldn’t help but do a Sunset, a variant of one I had uploaded to the Guyana Photographers FB Group for a Photo Walk 🙂

This was an evening when I was heading into Good Hope on the East Coast of Demerara, as I crossed the bridge into “Good Hope South” I noticed the sunset down the canal, so I decided I’d stop and try a few photos. I had often noticed sunsets or similar scenes in the evening, but because its one of the only ways into the village it is always busy and I never stopped. This time, I determinedly stopped the car, grabbed the camera and walked to the bridge. The bridge is wide enough to hold a car and a pedestrian to either side 🙂 As I stood on the bridge, vehicles passed by and I was hand-holding a low-light shot, it took some patience, but I think I came away with one or two good shots 🙂

World Photography Day

On August 19, 2011August 19, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography9 Comments

Thank goodness it’s not World Bloggers’ Day, Id feel miserable! Even though I have been taking photographs I have not been blogging enough, but this gives me an excuse to do a quick blog 🙂

Since it is apparently World Photography Day (which I had not heard of until today), I thought I would get out of the office for at least a few minutes to catch a quick photo-walk and post a photo 🙂

So here it is. Let photography be a gateway to greater things, to brighter ideas, to more interesting paths!

2011 Deck – Week 30

On August 16, 2011August 16, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography9 Comments

It is not every week that I can come up with something that pleases everyone, so this week don’t expect something that pleases you 🙂 but if it does, hooray!

I went to the Essequibo Coast a few weekends back for a wedding (photos from which I don’t have permission to share as yet), I took photos other than wedding ones, so here is one from the first day there, which happened to be the last day of the 30th Week of 2011.

It seems that from the North-West region to the Corentyne Coast there is a common theme on the shores of our land, Jhandi Flags! You can’t seem to walk the beaches, sea-walls or the coastline in general without seeing them.

2011 Deck – Week 23

On June 11, 2011June 11, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography5 Comments

Sometimes a photo is just a photo, nothing more, right? Wrong!

Every photograph, yes, even snapshots, tell a story, not everyone can understand the story since the language might be different, the concepts are alien to some of us, and often the message is so subtle that it eludes many of us, but a story is there. It might be a story in a single sentence, it might be a paragraph, it may even be a few chapters. It is up to the photographer to tell as much or as little of the story as they like, and it is up to the viewer to read and interpret not what the photographer is trying to say, but what the image is saying.

Art is interpretive, and it is unlikely that two people will interpret any given photograph in the same manner, similar maybe, they may even draw on each other’s observances and add them to their own, but the act of viewing a photograph is personal, it is between the viewer and the image, and sometimes, the relationship is profound, and others it can be negligible.

Some photographs make an impact and keep you looking back at them and seeing more than you had noticed in the beginning, others you may look at once, and never be drawn to them again, that’s just the way it is.

For many people, their snapshots tell more of a story than the “artsy” types of photos than others tend to like taking. The story told by a snapshot at a family gathering is more personal than that told by most “professional” photographs, The story is not more nor less important, just different and more personal, and no one should seek to belittle one or the other, that’s just the way it is.

2011 Deck – Week 22

On June 8, 2011June 8, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography8 Comments

Although when I first started trying my hand at Photography (you know, snapshots that looked awesome, even though they were probably mediocre) I was never inclined to monochromatic images; the black and whites and the sepia-toned images, but as I learnt more about the art, and as I came to appreciate the works of others, there has always been scenes that seem to render better in monochrome than in vivid colour.

I have found recently that I like to work in “special” fields of photo processing, I like playing with Panoramas, HDR (High Dynamic Range) images, tone-mapped images (using the same HDR software but on a single image and not using bracketed images as in a true HDR), and monochromatic images, more towards black and white or sepia-toned images rather than cyanotypes and the other tones available.

At any given period of my photography, you’ll probably notice a certain “type” of image popping up, so don’t be surprised by today’s monochrome. This was taken on the Georgetown Seawall towards the Kitty pump station, the building is Celina Atlantic Resort (I am not sure how the word resort got in the name, but its more a Restaurant and Bar)

2011 Deck – Week 21

On June 2, 2011June 8, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography14 Comments

If you’re going to do a project then you should at least make every effort to keep it up, right? I seem to be lagging behind too much, something’s got to give! Anyway, I found a few minutes and I decided to post my image for last week before it got too late.

Finding the time to post on the blog is one thing, but apparently things are getting to the point where finding the time to get the photograph itself is becoming a challenge, definitely not good. Last week I took four photographs, yes four, F-O-U-R, 4! and three of them were of the same scene, so that left me with a choice between two images. Bah! I can’t let this happen again.

This is not a great image, it probably isn’t a good one, but it’s what I have and since I am sticking to the rules I made myself, I have to choose one of those images I took within the week, 🙂 I beg forgiveness in advance.

2011 Deck – Week 19

On May 19, 2011May 19, 2011 By themichaellamcollectionIn 2011 Deck, Photography12 Comments

City Hall.

I can’t seem to ever get enough photographs of this building, a heavy weight descends upon me when I go closer to it and see the effects of the neglect, the signs of disrepair, and the toll that the sun and rains take from this glorious wooden structure.

For last week I had not taken a single image for “artistic reasons”, I did do a snapshot of some newspapers for a Road Safety blog for The Alicea Foundation, but that’ wasn’t very artistic 🙂

Most of my HDR images usually use a fairly static scene, no moving elements, this week I decided to try one that included some movement, and try out the “ghost reduction” that Nik HDR Efex has built in, I think it worked very nicely.

Take a look at it larger in the gallery.