I hardly print photos any more. Not since I went digital five years ago. But on occassion, I still want to get a few prints – they are great for sharing around a dinner table (places where my notebook can’t fit). I once had an Epson photo printer which gave awesome quality, but for about 10-50 photos a year, it’s overly expensive and the ink kept drying up between uses. For my needs, using a photo printing service was the best option.

With the proliferation of photo kiosks, I felt that a simple 15-min visit would suffice. Finding these kiosks was easy enough – every supermarket or pharmacy in the Bay Area was equipped with one. Getting a proper print was another matter.

My first visit was to a Kodak kiosk in Safeway. Plugged in my CF card, stepped through the menu items and the printing started. It looked simple enough … except that it never completed. After 15 mins, I complained, and the store assistant shrugged her shoulders, saying ‘the Kodak guy will fix this when he gets here on Tuesday’. I asked for my money back and hunted for another kiosk. As I left, I saw a sign saying ‘Print Photos in Seconds!’

I found another Kodak kiosk in Rite Aid and the clerk was very helpful. But after struggling with the printer for 15 mins, he gave up. “But it worked yesterday!” was all he could say.

In the end, I used another photo-printing kiosk at Walgreen’s – success this time! Alas, a closer look at the photos showed up a lot of grain. I printed a 4″x6″ photo from a 2-megapixel film scan. This film scan was captured from a Fuji Frontier machine, which perhaps explained that it was probably optimized for output from these machines.

I’ve had really good experience with the Fuji Frontier machines – I’ll stick with these in the future, even if they don’t offer ‘instant’ photos.

One of the boons of photography in Singapore is the abundance of public high-rise buildings near downtown areas. These buildings are open to public access and offer open balconies from which aerial photos can be taken without too much hassle.

Look out for these HDB or URA flats that offer a bird’s eye view of the subject, then get the lift to the highest floor to a capture unique perspective!

If you haven’t visited my online photo album, you might want to take a look. Since I bought my first digital camera in 2000, I’ve grown accustomed to the convenience and features that digital photography offers. Yet, with all it offers, managing digital photos can be a pain.

After years of experimenting with various forms of cataloguing software (from plain text files to complex DB schemas), I’ve discovered that the photo metadata (i.e. information about the data object itself) must be distributed together. There are two standards that offer this: EXIF and IPTC.

EXIF holds technical information about a picture – like what camera, its exposure, aperture settings and time of exposure. Really useful stuff – most digital cameras now embed this data within the picture. You also need to make sure that any digital photo editor supports this as well (i.e. does not discard it when saving to a file). Well and good, but it doesn’t lend itself well to user-defined data.

IPTC fills that gap – it has several fields that allow photos to carry captions, categories and keywords. It was perfect because now the information will not be lost as I move these photos around. I now define a series of albums and IPTC helps me to associate sets of photos to these albums. In addition, captions and titles can be added to the photo that can be displayed.

With EXIF and IPTC, I now publish my photos using Coppermine, a PHP/MySQL web application. This free software supports the display of EXIF information, but not IPTC, so I supplement this with a Perl script that reads the IPTC tags and sets it in Coppermine’s database.

Photos are processed from Canon’s RAW format using BreezeBrowser, then edited using Photoshop and IPTC tags are written using Pixvue. These photos are uploaded to the website, and the IPTC captions are set in Coppermine using this Perl script. The files uploaded to the website are scaled down (to a max of 800×600) and I keep the originals on my PC.

What’s missing is that I have all these photos sitting in my hard disk (as of today: 1,400 files on 1GB of disk space) and I can’t easily find them (unless I know their filename and directory). It’s irritating, but I’ve learned to live with it.

I evaluated Picasa about three months ago (after Google bought them), and I was underwhelmed. The UI was pretty enough, but it didn’t read my IPTC or EXIF tags, and used a proprietary way of cataloguing the photos (which I’ve been trying to avoid).

This week, the Picasa team finally releases version 2. It looks like they have finally gotten their act together – the interface is still smooth, but the software now picks up EXIF and IPTC information from my photos directly. In addition it provides a great search that allows me to find keywords and captions. archiving capabilities, including integration with Google’s photo sharing site (not of interest to me).

It still has some ways to go (it doesn’t display all IPTC fields, although the search seems to pick it up), but its simply the best tool I have now for view photos on my PC. Great job, Google!

I am amazed how much I take the colourful multi-culturalism of Singapore for granted. For the better part of my 20 years living in Singapore, I’ve only seen Little India through the windows of a bus passing through. It was not until several years ago that I visited more of this little-known quarter where the streets are filled with Indian shops, Hindu temples and mosques.

Last Friday, I packed my camera and spent an hour taking photos in Little India, especially since next Thursday is Deepavali, or the festival of lights. I expected the street to be busy and crowded and I was not disappointed. Side alleys were converted into covered lanes where all kinds of spices, flowers, saris and knick-knacks were traded. It was an explosion of colour and music and the scent spices completed the exotic experience.

Street photography has never been my forte, and it stems from the difficulty of isolating objects of interest amongst the crowd. And there’s always the suspicious glance of vendors who keep an eye on any photographer taking an interest in their wares. But perhaps a more honest statement is that I’ve never been very much of a person who could connect to strangers. I have a preference for inanimate objects than live subjects, and it is a great handicap because I felt terribly uncomfortable eliciting smiles, not knowing if the subject approved or not of my photos.

I’ve been writing in this Journal for about two months now, and I’ve often visited other people’s blogs for inspiration or out of curiousity. Today, I discovered a photoblog – where you tell your story with photos.

Photoblogging is a natural extension of a journal for photographers, and I’ve even made an abortive attempt at it. It involves carrying a camera almost everywhere and making a concious effort to look through the lens and snap the picture. Not to mention downloading it to the computer, then post-processsing it and uploading it to the server. A monumental task, especially if attempted on a daily basis.

Well, David Nightingale’s Chomasia.com is an excellent example of how this art form can be executed to near perfection. He’s a skilled photographer with an excellent eye for composition and subjects, and his photos are a pleasure to browse. I found myself poring over his photos, amazed at how someone can be so consistently good at this art.

This is one website I’ll revisit often.

I’m cleaning out some of the old photos that I’ve taken but not had the time to process and upload. I’m coming to terms with my procrastination!

In September, I came across a quiet little cemetery just off Yio Chu Kang Road. The Japanese Cemetery Park sits in the middle of a private housing estate, near Serangoon Gardens. Because it is off the main road, it attracts few visitors. Even though I had lived in that area for several years in the early 90s, I had no recollection of hearing about this place until this year.

The cemetery was used by the pre-WW2 Japanese community, and later by the Japanese military itself for some of the casualties of war. Perhaps it was because of the unpleasant memories of the Japanese Occupation that this site has remained relatively unknown for half a century. Few of the tombstones carried photos of officers in the uniform of the Imperial Army. These are some of the rare artifacts left behind by the Japanese from their occupation of Singapore.

The garden itself was in immaculate condition. The lawn was carefully tended and the tombstones were clean. There was a small Shinto temple in the middle of the park that looked relatively new – perhaps it has been recently renovated. There were two gardeners at work on a Sunday afternoon weeding and tending to the flowers. It was almost like one of the many small gardens in Tokyo itself.

There was a tablet that acknowledged donations from Japanese corporations and individuals toward the maintenance of the park. It may have been forgotten by the host country, but it has certainly not been forsaken by the Japanese people. I wonder how Japanese history remembers this place?

The previous weekend found me in KL for my cousin’s wedding. Although I’ve been to KL many times before, I have not photographed the Railway Station as a proper subject. So, in the 15 minutes before the NICE bus departed to Singapore, these are the few photos I managed to capture.

The station itself was built in 1910 and was designed by A.B. Hubback (Hubbock?) whose previous posting was in India. The result was a building capped with beautiful Moorish towers, domes and arches that takes its place as one of the most recognisable landmarks of the city. It still stands as a colonial monument from an era that has long passed.

Today, the station lies unused. Only local commuter trains serve this stop. All inter-city trains now head to KL Sentral, and the Railway Station’s empty platforms provide ample opportunity to take photos. The vast interior hall is girded by steel beams that are now lined with cobwebs. The station hotel still serves curious visitors who stop by for a drink in its quiet bar. Empty timetables preside over the silent ticket counters, having served nameless passengers through the course of history.

For those interested in more information about Malaysian railway stations, Keretapi.com has photos and articles.

Geylang remains of the few areas of Singapore that have escaped the clutches of urban redevelopment until now. Perhaps part of it is due to its less-than-reputable status as a seedy district where the undesirables still ply their trade.

Nevertheless, it retains some of the pre-war shophouses that housed most businesses in Singapore before independence. Many of these are still in their original condition, albeit very much run down. A fraction have been carefully maintained – retaining some of its nostalgic charm (even if its a little garish).

At the junction of Lorong Bachok and Geylang Lorong 19 lies an ornately decorated shophouse which boasts colourful motifs on its exterior walls. Its an eye-catching piece of architecture with anachronistic touches that recall an era that has passed. An example is the motif of Sikh guards at the entrance which harkens back to the days when turbaned soldiers were commonly found protecting banks and institutions.

The Mission Church of Santa Clara de Asis is one of the many mission churches that remain from the days of Spanish colonisation of California which started in the 18th century. There are numerous mission churches which string up the coast of California, following the path of early missionaries who founded settlements and churches in order to evangelise their faith.

Unlike Mission Delores, Mission Santa Clara de Asis has an opulent interior and is surrounded by lush gardens. The church itself was rebuilt many times after it was destroyed first by floods, then by an earthquake and finally by fire. In 1926, the current building was rebuilt in the image of the earlier 1825 church.

The advantage for getting jet-lagged for me is that I am forced to wake up at odd hours before sunrise. Catching the sunrise is a rare happening for a habitual late-riser, and I had precious little time on Saturday morning to take some photos before my flight home. So I drove down to the church with great hopes, which were unfortunately dashed as the sun shone briefly before being being clouded over. On a clear day, the morning sun would have illuminated the facade of the church and that would have been a perfect shot. Well, maybe another day.

This trip to the USA, I was travelling light, with the EF-S 18-55mm lens. I had not previously used this lens extensively, and was hoping to see how it performs. It’s wide coverage was helpful, but it was quite slow, which made it difficult to get good shots indoors. The lens contrast and resolution were also a touch poorer than I expected, but that could be because of the poor lighting conditions. All in all, its a cheap and light lens – I’d take the EF 24-85mm over this any time.