The new year is upon us and I’m finally starting what I kept meaning to do for the whole of last year – get a photography journal going. I plan to write a lot this year – covering technical info, experiences with various equipment, photo critiques and posting a bunch of my own photography here too. It’s probably more for my own benefit than for anyone else’s – committing my thoughts to paper has always helped me arrange my thoughts in a way that’s productive. So, anyway…

I mentioned that this is something that I’ve been planning to do for a while… It’s true – except inertia has always gotten in the way. “Get started, and the details will follow” – that’s always been the case with me. And with other things it usually worked well – except in the case of sitting down and writing this journal, getting started has always been distracted by one thing or another.

So, being that it’s the new year, which traditionally has been a time for reflection and resolution, I figure what better time to finally kick this off. And I’ve chosen to begin things with a year in review of my own journey into photography… So here goes…

2006 was the year I got serious about photography.

It’s when it moved from just being something I wanted to do, or thought that maybe I could do, to something that I did. And now it’s hard to imagine a week without it.

Influenced early on by some great work by other photographers who I am now fortunate to consider my friends, I managed to set myself the goal of starting a project. Recommended to me as a good approach for staying focused on a single topic, and then forcing yourself to become better at it, it tied in the way I’ve learnt other disciplines (i.e. by removing distractions and focusing on specifics one at a time), so I got started with “Negative Space”.

That lasted a month. It was my first serious effort at getting to know the community on Pbase also – something I’ve continued to invest in since. The project went well – teaching me about composition and framing. I have plenty of pretty pictures from that 30 photo project and in the course of it developed a taste for deliberately blowing out highlights… An example would be:

   

After that, I wanted to get my teeth into something bigger. Something which would not just cover the aesthetic value of a subject but would have some interesting meaning as well. In Singapore, what I would call traditional street photography is more limited than in Europe and some big cities of the US. It’s a difficult reason to explain (and potentially worthy of another entry here) but at least in my view, certainly is the case. So I decided to try to discover a work and develop a slightly different street photography – which turned into “Modern City Living”. Although not necessarily the best, the most popular image (and probably the most memorable) from that series as the shot below.

From the gallery Modern City Living

And from there, things pretty much took off for me.

As the year went on I discovered I had a love for abandoned buildings. The interesting thing about them here in Singapore is that there are a) many of them and b) they’re not full of squatters / graffiti / used needles / etc… So they exist in a kind of natural state of decay… Now it would seem I have developed somewhat of a reputation for this kind of subject so anytime anyone I know here finds an interesting place, they usually let me know.  A couple of my favourite shots from these places follow:

From the gallery  Escape – a four part story

From the gallery Outskirts

From there, I decided I wanted to make great use of these unique locations than just recording them and start putting together stories or photo essays told through images. This style or concept pretty much became a feature for the rest of the year for me – and will continue strongly through 2007 also.

That new train of thought, coupled with an increasing interest in people shots resulted in me producing what started to become my most popular work (popular in the Pbase sense of the word) to date. Some of my favourites from this sort of photography include:

From the gallery The Kitchen – Cooking with Light

From the gallery Wonderland is Dead

 

From the gallery We are Gathered Here Today

 

From the gallery The Forgotten

 
OK – so I’m nearly done… 2006 would not be complete for me were it not for mentioning that I discovered through the year a previously unknown passion for ballet photography. I managed to shoot ballet on just four occasions, but each time I’ve been amazed, dazzled and bowled over with the combination of beauty, power and grace that dancers exude. Photographing them in Singapore and the Philippines has been both a pleasure and an honour of mine. Choosing a favourite three from the year was particularly tough and I am sure that on another day I’d end up with another three images. But in the end I settled on:

From the gallery Ballet Under the Stars

From the gallery The Company

 

From the gallery The Company

Throughout the course of the year I hit a few high points also. I was asked to do commercial shoots on a number of occasions, was published in an online mag in Poland, won a Nikon Singapore’s quarterly competition and generally had a lot of fun.

However, as the end of the year closed in, I also wanted more. Feeling like I was moving in too many different genres, I wanted to distill all the different types of photography I was making and focus on just two or three themes. And on a trip home to London, I found my inspiration at the Victoria and Albert museum. There an exhibition called “Twilight” was on show, which included Gregory Crewdson’s work. I could write an entire post and more about the exhibition which was awe inspiring but the main thing I extracted from it were ideas and influence which I plan to use to propel me through 2007. Contemporary art, staged / planning photos, storytelling images – these will all be the dominant themes of my new year.

When I got back from London, realizing was something that I clearly was born to do, I immediately kicked off a new project called “Fragments” which I launched with the following image:

From the gallery Fragments

And that’s pretty much where I ended the year. With a half finished project of Fragments, and a whole series of goals I want to achieve for 2007.

As I said at the beginning – 2006 was the year I got serious about photography. 2007 is going to be interesting…