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.
This last week I took quite a number of photos, and the choice for the image for the deck was a little more difficult. In the end it came down to a choice of several from the Trip out west that Nikhil, Naseem and I took last weekend.
I will eventually process all my favourites from that trip and load up an album, but for now I will just give you the one I chose for the 2011 Deck as well 🙂
Of all the water crafts that were at the conservancy, one in particular caught my attention, it was a tug-boat (I think they’re called that), it was quite distinctive from the other shallow boats and canoes on the water, and definitely more appealing than the barge that was moored nearby 🙂 It reminded me of cartoons I watched as a child, and I fully expected to see either Bluto or Popeye on deck!
I often remark to Nikhil that he should start a collection called “A Touch of Colour”, or in his case “A Touch of Red”. He usually finds these scenes where there is one item of colour, usually red, that stands out in his compositions 🙂
While processing these two images I remembered what I so frequently tell him and decided to title this blog-post with this same concept.
The first image is an image that has been selectively desaturated to emphasize the Red, the processing is unusual for me but I rather liked how it turned out this time.
Red Cap - selective desaturation
The second image was not treated in the same way, it was of some gaily coloured flowers against an old almost colourless background, I went close with my zoom lens and worked to get some nice bokeh from the background.
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. 🙂
As I am going through some of the photos from last year I am finding images I like and never processed. This one was not the sharpest of the batch, but I liked the overall “feel”, the DoF and the smile on my daughter’s face 🙂
OK, most trees branch, I know. But I had a difficult time coming up with a title for the photo, and this one seemed appropriate somehow.
This is a tree on the northern side of The National Park, towards the Carifesta Avenue side. It possibly fell and continued to grow, growing across the waterway and then branching upwards and out. It creates a nice shady area, on this overcast day, there was very little light under the tree’s canopy, and I thought that an HDR would be a nice idea, I didn’t have my tripod with me, so I had to hand-hold the camera for the exposures. The re-alignment didn’t come out spot-on, but it has a softness to the image that I liked.
I’ve had this one since last September to process and finally got around to it, I did no pre-processing in Lightroom, simply carried it into HDR Efex Pro and did the merging there, then a slight crop and rotate in Lightroom, then some saturation shifts and clarity adjustments to finish it off.
It is not a spectacular HDR, but it was geared towards revealing more detail in a very gloomy area 🙂
Well, it’s not the first time I’ve had a photo used in a project, but this is the first time since I started a blog 🙂 I had two photographs printed in the 2010 Calendar for the Guyana National Trust.
Scotiabank (Guyana) did their 2011 Calendars through a firm called KRITI, who approached a number of photographers who had some local scenes with a slight emphasis on the skies above, be it dramatic skies, overcast skies or just beautifully clouded skies. Of the six photographs featured, there were five “local” photographers and one foreign photographer (who lived here for two years, so he’s as local as foreigners get).
Below are some snapshots of the calendar with links to the photographer’s pages that I could get. (Click on the photos to go to the photographer’s pages)
Starting of was Nikhil’s image along the LBI (La Bonne Intention) shore,
Nikhil Ramkarran: LBI Foreshore
Then Dwayne Hackette’s Sunset along the Berbice River,
Dwayne Hackette: Sunset on the Berbice River
Phillip William’s Earth Station photograph,
Philip Williams: Earth Station, Carifesta Avenue, Georgetown, Guyana
Rustom Seegopaul’s Georgetown from the Harbour Bridge crossing the Demerara River
Rustom Seegopaul: Georgetown in the Horizon, view from the Demerara Harbour Bridge, Demerara River
My Lonesome Tree photograph from the Hamburg (Tiger Island) in the Essequibo River (taken when I shot with a Canon S5 Bridge Camera
Michael Lam: Lonesome Tree, Tiger Island, Essequibo River
and to top it all off with James Broscombe’s Great Balls of Fire, from the Rupununi
James Broscombe: Great Balls of Fire
To be absolutely frank, the image of James’ Great Balls of Fire in the calendar does not do the original photo Justice, definitely click on the image above for a good look at the photo on his blog.
It should be noted that these cover all three major rivers of Guyana, the Georgetown Coastline and the Interior. If you are a Scotiabank Guyana customer, make sure to collect your copy 🙂
Thanks to Scotiabank and a special thanks to Sita at KRITI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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