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 week, I complete my Project for the year, the 2010 Deck, 52 Photographs, one for each week of the year. There were times when I thought I would have to upload a photograph of my shoes, that was when a week was tough, and other times I had difficulty choosing from the ones I had taken, so taking too many is just as bad as taking too few photographs.
I am not sure that I have grown as a photographer over this year, but I do have a better appreciation of the photography of others as my blogging has introduced me to many other wonderful photographers, many of them with superior talents and images, and others learning as I am, as we take our photographs whether daily or weekly.
Although the sun sets on this year’s project, I look forward to renewing the project next year and hopefully finding a new perspective on photography through the inspiration I gain from the works of others and the encouragement of my family and friends, online photographers being a new and integral part of my new friends.
I hope 2010 was filled with as many learning experiences as you could handle, and I wish that for 2011, you see the world with fresh eyes (or lenses) and appreciate each passing moment for what it is, whether it can be captured digitally, on film, or just in your heart.
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.
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.
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.
This week was fairly good as photography goes, I took a lot of photographs, 311 of which I’ve downloaded, the remainder were from a wedding that I was helping my bother Andre out at.
Choosing an image for this week’s deck proved more difficult than I would have thought, but that is mainly because the image I wanted to use, I decided to relegate to another blog-post for tomorrow. The image I eventually decided upon was chose for the unusual perspective, at least for me, I am usually more of an angular person when it comes to the direction from which I generally point the camera, Nikhil is usually the one who goes for “head-on” views.
I had the Sigma 10-20mm Wide angle lens on my camera, and I thought that the image would look good from a head-on view facing the horizon, unfortunately the shoreline and the horizon were not exactly parallel at this point, but I think I got the image to where I wanted it 🙂
This was taken along the seawall somewhere between Montrose and Le Resouvenir on the East Coast of Demerara.
I decided on the name before I realised that I have one that was actually taken in October, but since I am unable to come up with a new creative sounding name, it remains as September Monochromes.
I want to start off with a Sepia image, it’s not necessarily a great image, but I liked the elements; seashore, people – young and not-so-young, and a fishing rod.
Afternoon After-school
The next is the first of the Black and White images, it is one that I recently entered into a DP Review challenge called Clouds, I was experimenting with a borrowed Canon 80-200mm lens and most of the images came out very low contrast, so like the Sepia one above, most of the rest I’ve rendered in monochrome. This one came out much better than expected, I had to give it a title for the challenge, so that’s how the title came to be.
Sail-winds and Silhouettes
Along the seashore, you are sure to find a coconut washed ashore by the waves, this one was partway up a concrete sloped walkway on the seawall, maybe washed there but probably kicked there by some youngster.
Coconut
The final image is the one taken in October, after our Robbery ordeal and we daringly went right back to the Kingston Promenade, I like the clouds in the sky and thought that the lighthouse silhouetted against it would look nice 🙂
They were doing some renovation work to the lighthouse, so you might notice the scaffolding on the sides of it there.
I took photos on three days of the last week (from last Friday to this Thursday) but most of it is not worth even processing. The day that I took this photograph was eventful, so I will mention some of that after I put the photograph up. I was going to just put the photo up and leave the rest of the story out, but many people are expecting the story, so I will put some of it up.
The photograph is one of those Sunsets where the area around the sun is now warming up (so to speak) and the remainder of the sky is a cooler blue.
Kingston seashore, Georgetown Guyana. 5:37pm, September 28, 2010
Nikhil and I were out on the Kingston seashore photographing driftwood, waves, and whatever else caught our eye, including the setting sun and the resulting effects in the sky. Approximately 10 minutes after I took this photograph, we were back on the Promenade area around the area by the “Roundhouse”, there are usually some homeless men living in the Roundhouse. We were looking in that area for other things to photograph when we noticed that the sunset had changed to a much more orange and red cast and decided that we would return to the end of the promenade to photograph it. Just about this time two young men on bicycled passed us and stopped their cycles on at the end of the Roundhouse and disappeared behind the wall there. As we approached the end to photographed the sunset, we noticed that they were urinating and we naturally averted our gaze and concentrated on the sunset.
We were focused on the scene before us when they finished their business and walked behind us towards their bicycles, the next thing I knew I was falling to the ground and being attacked about my body by one of the men who now had a piece of wood in his hand. We were being robbed. My spectacles had fallen off and I could barely make out the man now shouting at me and hitting me, I told him to stop hitting and just take whatever it was he wanted, we were not going to fight them. It seemed he didn’t believe me and shouted to his companion to throw the gun. I repeated myself and seemed to get through to him, he searched my pants pockets and took all my cash and my cellular phone. He threw my wallet and licence on the ground and demanded that I not get up and try to follow them.
Nikhil helped me to my feet and also to find my spectacles, I really am useless without them. Some of the homeless men were returning to the Roundhouse after their evening bath in the sea and were shocked that in the short space of time that they had gone, we were attacked and robbed. Of course, we then called for help using the cellular phone that I had in my shirt pocket which they missed, we went to the Police and now one of them men has been captured. I learnt from NIkhil that although he was not assaulted with a piece of wood, the man who robbed him had a pistol. Amazingly, I still had my camera, but Nikhil’s camera was gone.
Fortuitously, one of the photographs I had taken earlier had captured the two men when they had passed us, that photograph assisted the police to identify the men and thus far apprehend one of them.
We are both fortunate to be alive. I have always been told by people wiser than myself that in a robbery, do not be a hero! Give them what they want and live. Some of that advice must have sunk in since that is what I did after the initial resistance. Of course, a few blows to the back of the head and neck puts one in a more submissive mood.
The photograph may not be great, but it certainly is not the last Sunset that I have seen.
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