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.
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
Click on the image for a better view in the Gallery.
I’ve been delinquent in my posts recently, but I have a really really good excuse…. no I don’t, I’ve just been busy. I can’t even conjure up a plausible excuse that might fool a school teacher on this one.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the past and the future, for this post I’ll deal with the past. As you know I recently posted a photo of St Barnabas, a church that will soon be just a memory, and in my case a few thousand pixels worth of data, and on a recent walk with Nikhil (during which I think I accomplished a grand total of three shutter actuations) I took a photo of a piece of architecture that always fascinated me, for one reason and one reason only, the tower!
I’ve always dreamt of having a tower on my dwelling that I could climb into and see the world around me, and since I’ve taken up photography, probably capture amazing sunset and sunrise photographs from it. Of course, I don’t have any such tower or photographer’s perch, so I just admire the ones that exist.
Of course, this building also has other “architectural” interests, like the Demerara Shutters, the wooden louvres and the shingled outer wall.
Partial remains of the Globe Cinema, demolished this year, 2011
It recently dawned on me that there may be only one functional cinema left in Georgetown, possibly only one left in Guyana. While the television and computers, handheld media players and the internet have certainly impacted on how we watch our movies, the cinema has always had a big draw for people, however the cinemas in Guyana have steadily gone into disrepair and certainly some have disappeared. While we can place a lot of blame of the modernisation of media viewing, the owners and promoters of our cinemas have to take some of the blame, even when I was much younger, and the cinemas were full of moviegoers, I remember the sordid states of the seats, the persevering smell of urine, and the sound of the rodents running around the aisles.
Starlite Cinema, Pouderoyn, West Bank Demerara. Closed and abandoned
They never did the little things that made you WANT to go to the cinema, why suffer through all that when you could wait a few months and see it in the comfort of your home? It was the experience, it was the “event” of going to the cinema with family or friends to watch a new (or old) movie in the company of others there to enjoy the experience, the camaraderie, the joy of the big silver screen, unfortunately the experience was not always a good one. And the cinemas are disappearing, one by one, by one…
The Astor Cinema, still functional as of this year, but attendance makes it hard for the proprietor to keep it up.
I was re-reading an article written by Godfrey Chin on the Rise and Fall of Guyana’s Cinemas, I believe this was part of his “Nostalgias”, and while I am not old enough to know of some of the cinemas or even the movies he mentions, it hits home. He, of course, goes back to even before we gained our Independence, back to the days of British Guiana, and he brings us into the modern era, where instead of Cinemas modernising to keep up, they just kept going, stagnated in time, except for the titles of the movie releases 🙂
What prompted this blog-post was the sudden nostalgia I got (I am probably getting like Godfrey) when I was processing a photo I took of the partly demolished “Globe Cinema” and an image of the abandoned Starlite Cinema. Both of those images are included in this post. As the Astor is the last remaining cinema, I think that I should make an effort to get permission to do some photography in that establishment before it too disappears.
Formerly the Strand Cinema, now the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God
There are at least two other Cinemas that I know of which have been converted into places of worship, it seems to be the thing to do 🙂
Click on each image to see them larger in their respective galleries.
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.
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.
Although Nikhil is no longer pressured on a daily basis for a photograph since he completed his first 365 project, we still manage to go for a photo-walk every now and again. One of those walks took us into Campbelville, and although it was mostly for him to get some Nas-inspried photographs, I came away with a few goodies 🙂
One was also somewhat inspired by an image I once saw from a controversial photographer called Ken, although my photographs may never become as “professional” as Ken’s I learnt a lot from reading his blogs and rants 🙂 So, I titled this one “Ken”, it was taken at the corner of DeAbrue and Duncan Streets (north-west corner)
Ken
The second one, I wish I had spent more time on, the scene reminded me of a photograph I once saw from Errol Ross Brewster, and I am ashamed I let the rain chase me away from this spot without getting more out of it, but there you go, the Canon T1i isn’t weather-sealed. This is at the corner of William and Middleton Streets (north-east corner), it is a single image, but I used HDR Efex Pro to recover some detail in the clouds, in the shot it was totally blown out.
Something has changed… although I am not sure what it is, it has affected my photography, or maybe it has affected how I see my photographs. I was very disappointed with this last week’s photographs, either I have lost the zeal or I am more critical of the images, or I have simply taken bad images this last week. Of the one hundred and five images taken over the last week, there was one that I was somewhat pleased with, a location that I had photographed before, but never posted an image of it for The 2010 Deck.
We revisited the Kitty Market Square, and I took this image, I liked it in colour, but I also liked it in monochrome… after some consultation, the monochrome edged out the colour 🙂
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