There is a certain audacity to the Marina Bay Sands that captivated me. It seems like it should belong to that category of building "This Shouldn't Be Possible". Yet there it is: three tall towers with an immense deck laying across the top, not to mention the far end of that deck extends well beyond the edge of the third tower. That detail in itself is a pretty remarkable engineering achievement if you stop to think about the weight of that extension and how it must be accounted for in the design of the building. But while the Marina Bay Sands is perhaps the most obvious example of such imaginative and futuristic architecture, it was but the crown jewel in a city full of such buildings. There is even a second example in this image in the form of the twisting Helix Bridge, which itself was quite the experience to traverse. But the rest of Singapore constantly had me looking up and stopping to marvel at the construction of one tower or another. In particular, one feature that struck me was how many buildings employed open spaces, void decks, or otherwise empty spaces within the upper reaches of the tower that were often filled with gardens or groves of trees. It is something else to look up 30 stories and see a mini arboretum above you. I didn't even know quite where to begin photographing that. Thankfully though the Marina Bay Sands itself is rather photogenic, so like a lot of photographers before me, I started there.

Pentax 6x7
Kodak Tri-X

Tags:   Kodak Tri-X Pentax 67 Singapore film Medium Format Southeast Asia travel film photography nighttime cityscape urban futuristic Marina Bay Sands Helix Bridge zaahphoto

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I haven't posted much from Singapore since I got back. A big part of it is that I have not gotten around to wrapping my mind around what I want to post and why. This in turn may be the result that the trip itself was only a week long and I never fully got over tourist photographer mode while there. So I made a lot of images I liked, and had a good time making them, but I am not sure what I want them to say... if they say much at all. There is a lot of chatter and noise to the pool of images one swims through in regards to social media, so I usually try to set a medium high bar for myself in terms of at least trying to share something that adds something interesting to the overall conversation. But I don't always succeed. Sometimes images are just going to be the equivalent of filler conversation. And that is fine too.

I can tell you that this image gets at least two things that are distinctly Singapore: the Merlion and the Marina Bay Sands casino. All that I am missing here is the Singapore Flyer and the Super Tree grove. Just kidding, there is a lot more to Singapore than that short list.

Pentax 67
Kodak Tri-X

Tags:   Pentax 67 Kodak Tri-X Singapore nighttime cityscape urban Southeast Asia long exposure black & white famous casinos mythical creatures zaahphoto have film, will travel architecture

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In a city as futuristic looking as Singapore, a bridge like the Cavenagh Bridge really stands out. It is one of the oldest bridges still standing in Singapore and looks out of time against the towering skyscrapers. The nearby presence of the Fullerton Hotel helps this bridge not feel completely alone, but the juxtaposition with the rest of the city is pretty remarkable. This was largely what attracted me. Singapore has many other bridges, and most of them complement the modern architecture of the city (I'm thinking of you in particular Helix Bridge). Walking across the Cavenagh Bridge, even though it is "only" 149 years old, feels like stepping out of time for a few yards.

Interestingly enough, the Cavenagh Bridge is also unlike any other suspension bridge I have come across. Instead of the more traditional cables holding up the span, the bridge makes use of these strut-like beams. I was unfamiliar with this type of design, so this image was both an attempt to isolate that feature of this bridge as well as show some of the juxtaposition with the nearby modern nature of Singapore.

Pentax 6x7
Kodak Tmax 400

Tags:   Pentax 67 Kodak TMAX 400 Singapore Bridgeworld Cavenagh Bridge suspension bridge bridge night cityscape Southeast Asia 120 film zaahphoto cropped! architecture black & white nighttime travel Medium Format

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Meeting a new city is like meeting a new friend who brings a bevy of exotic perspectives to the conversation. It is one of my favorite parts of traveling to step into a foreign city and begin to learn about the way life flows there, the ways it is different from what I am accustomed to and even the ways it is the same. We all live in bubbles, wherever we are, and those bubbles with their transparent walls are hard to detect, we often don't notice them until we are out of them, confronted with something new. It is healthy then to occasionally put yourself into that position, to see the way others live and compare or contrast that to your own methods.

With that in mind, it is often what I try to learn and absorb from traveling. Sadly I don't feel like I was in Singapore long enough than to just barely begin to notice the subtleties to the city. One aspect that was beginning to draw my attention is where people live in Singapore. While there are towns/communities outside the Singapore core, many residents live in these towering apartment blocks, often publicly-governed and sold on 99 year leases (also regulated by an ethnic quota to prevent ethnic enclaves forming). These towers are everywhere and are as populous as the steel and glass skyscrapers housing the many businesses and financial institutions of downtown Singapore. While Singapore does have neighborhoods, these buildings themselves are almost like vertical neighborhoods. The bottom floor seems to often be called a "void deck", a space left open for community gatherings, then shops, parking and apartments grow up from there. Courtyards house exercise stations or hawker centers (some of the best cheapest food you can find in Singapore). If I had a year in Singapore I would do a photo project focusing on these towers, exploring all of them and getting to know them better. As it was, I only really started to take note of them a few days in, and while I wasn't able to explore the interior of any other than the one I was staying in, I did begin photographing their exteriors. Many of them are built in a brutalist style but show individual characteristics, such as the pink and blue highlights on these two towers.

I was struck by the notion that to know Singapore, you would have to both spend a lot of time wandering its streets, but you would also need to spend a lot of time indoors, often in towers such as these two.

Zero Image 2000
Kodak Ektar

Tags:   Zero Image Kodak Ektar 100 Singapore Little India travel film pinhole Medium Format 6x6 housing Street photography urban cityscape zaahphoto Southeast Asia around the world

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Well hello Flickr, it's been awhile. A combination of work and travelling has encouraged me to take a bit of a break from Flickr for a while, which I have approached with mixed feelings. On one hand the pressure caused by constantly producing work makes me feel like I should do something with it, on the other hand being busy enough to not have the appropriate amount of time I would like to put into making posts on here causes me to balk at the practice of just throwing images up for the sake of posting. But I'm going to try to work myself back into the habit, which means posting along with some degree of writing, because it is the two together that I honestly enjoy. Sidenote: I have a week off coming up in October and while I intend to use some of that for day trips to see some fall color, I also intend to use some of it to sit down and work on a more tangible photo project (wishing myself luck).

Anyway, I just returned from a trip to Singapore. It all sort of came together obliquely. Southeast Asia has been a goal of mine for a couple of years now, but I expected it to be Japan. Tokyo and Kyoto are still top of my list, but I recently had a museum in Singapore reach out and request the exhibition of four of my images for inclusion in a larger exhibit on the intersection of humankind and technology. So when a planned trip to Japan was rescheduled, Singapore became a destination of opportunity.

I'll write more about Singapore in a later post or four, but for this one I wanted to talk a bit more about bridges. Going into a foreign city is always tough. It is not so much the foreign aspect as it is the unfamiliar nature of the new location. And tough in the sense that I think as a photographer it is always tricky to go into somewhere you are not familiar with and be able to speak with your own personal voice. It is easy to go somewhere and make the standard touristy photos. All you need for that is a few hours on Google or Instagram to find your locations. That type of photography is easy, and can be fun in the sense that the spots photographers gravitate toward are cliche for good reason. Find the right location, wait for some good light, and you have the formula for quick and nice photos, even if they tend to be a bit generic in variety and not necessarily indicative of your own personal voice.

But the alternative, making photos that are more unique to you, is also much more difficult. Generally to do so you need either time to get to know the area you are visiting so that you can speak with more familiarity, you need to do your research not just on locations but everything you need to know such as culture, history, etc so that you can speak with greater insight and authority, or you need to go into that location with a specific topic with which you have spent time working and developing. For me, that has been bridges. While my knowledge of Singapore's bridges is surface level only, and I will supplement that with further research, my familiarity in photographing bridges all over the world gives me a foundation to build on even when I am in an unfamiliar city. It definitely helps me to look at even oft-photographed bridges, such as the Helix Bridge in Singapore, in a variety of ways.

When I first started this bridge project in my hometown of Portland, Oregon about a decade ago I never expected that one of its benefits would be this notion I could carry with me as I traveled, giving me a direct when the newness of the area left me feeling a bit visually overwhelmed.

On a different, but still related note, I did not take my Hasselblad with me on this trip. For reasons I'll not bother explaining I chose instead to use my Pentax 6x7, a decision I am not regretting at all. I love that camera. But all my bridge work has been done on my Hasselblad, thus it is all square. I actually intend to keep it that way, so I had to compose my images imagining a square viewfinder with the intent to crop down later. I found this really difficult to do since I compose so intuitively with the scene through the viewfinder. I really push back against the notion of having "extra" stuff in the frame I am exposing that I am going to crop out later. Weirdly enough, if I had just taped in a square mask in the finder itself, it would have solved this mental problem for me. But I had not expected to struggle with this so much. I am kind of meticulous in my framing and not being able to see exactly where the edges of my imagined square frame would be threw me a bit. This image is one example. I shot it with the intent to crop it square, but I still composed it to fit the 6x7 frame. I am curious to see how well it crops down and whether such a crop bugs me. We shall see.

Anyway, Singapore is a cool city and one I would definitely recommend to anyone wanting to head to Southeast Asia. It is an easy city to travel in and through. Super safe and clean. Photogenic. Hot, but photogenic. My exhibit comes down on the 20th, so if you are reading this and heading in that direction soon, you'll likely miss it. But it apparently will be getting a second run starting in December or January. So if you are passing through Singapore early next year, look up the Red Dot Design Museum (it's right down in the waterfront area right next to Marina Bay).

Pentax 6x7
Kodak TMax or Tri-X

Tags:   Singapore Not quite Bridgeworld, yet Pentax 6x7 film 6x7 cityscape Helix Bridge black & white Medium Format Asia long exposure night crowd zaahphoto architecture futuristic

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