ba.les.tier

Spent the afternoon walking around balestier road with yuwen and our trusty SLRs. (Ok HER trusty SLR and my borrowed one... :p) Trigger-happy jan managed to finish up 2 rolls of 36 film easily in about 4 hours of walking! I suspect I will feel the pain in the pocket when I send everything for developing, but right now I'm just feeling very accomplished and satisfied with my afternoon's workout. I just hope the photos turn out fine, considering how I'm such a newbie with all these SLR stuff... I don't even know how to adjust the silly apperture! And this is my first time ever shooting slides+ b/w. I've come to realise that street photographers need to have really thick skin and be able to "hong" the people they meet along the way (ie. make them happy so that they'll relent to the idea of you taking a photo of them/their shop/anywhere near them).

Some highlights of the photoshoot:
+ getting scolded by a fruit shop uncle for taking a photo of his bananas hanging outside his shop (I know this sounds gross, but alternate meaning here not intended at all so WASH YOUR BRAIN!)

+ eating yummy bak gu teh and getting refills of soup occasionally from the friendly uncle who kept asking saying that we should have come to take photos when Chow Yun Fatt dropped by his store

+ walking in the slight drizzle and wishing the clouds would dissipate and that the sun would stop hiding its face

+ kneeling down on the floor countless times in search of that perfect angle

+ walking into many forgotten alleys and backways, fueled by a curiousity to find the treasures that lie in nooks and corners, waiting to reveal their glitter to those who are willing to spend the time to search, or to pause for a second look

+ finding 3 famous tau sar piah shops along a short stretch of balsetier road in direct competition with one another, and all whose wares look equally tantilisingly delicious

+ getting scolded (again) by a petrol station attendant who threatened that his company would sue me if I took a pic of the intriguing old-school petrol booths (like whatever.*rolls eyes*)

+ chancing upon a barber shop preserved from the 60s by some invisible bubble that protected it from the outside world- complete with very funky retro barber chairs and lovelylovely washbasins. Oh gawd. I'm in love with that place. If only I had more shots left and didn't waste 2 of them with the flash due to my incompetence when handling the SLR. And how I wish the silly annoying customer didn't keep trying to annoy us even more that he already had just by possessing his ugly face. How positively annoying. Some people should just learn to shut up. Especially when they already don't look good. (At least the indian barbers were nice, and the other customer was a rather-good-looking guy who didn't give two hoots about the girls who were making huge fools of themselves taking photos in a barber shop. Haha. Ah but I digress.)

All in all, it was really enjoyable experiencing Singapore in a different way and viewed from a different perspective. It almost seems ironic that I have been attending church at Balestier Road all my life but have never ventured further than 100m from the immediate vicinity of my church... until today. There ARE places in Singapore that are imbued with a unique character and distinct flavour, all worthy of documenting before rapid change and progress demolishes them with an iron fist.

Sone photoblogs courtesy of yuwen:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/desafino/
www.ephemera.org
www.shift.org/shutterbug
www.hchamp.com
www.chromasia.com/blog
www.chromogenic.net (supersuper chio photos ok... can die)
www.quarlo.com

I think it's so amazing that there're so many talented shutterbugs out there- people who aren't professional photographers but who possess the passion and technical skills to become one, laymen like you and me who photograph for their own pleasure. I'm pretty certain some of the links above are those of pros, but still, it doesn't become any less inspiring... I want to be a bug. A shutterbug. Bugger.