I have known Martin for quite a while and we have been talking about running the Night Photography community, and finally we do. We have just started the community - Night Photography Asia Community(NPAC), this community is aimed to promote Night Photography so as to inspire and create awareness in Asia regions.
Why are we doing this? The answer is simple, both me and Martin have seen many night images from US/Europe but in Asia, we hardly see any serious amateur who spend their time on Night Photography crafts, and hopefully this community will encourage more people to do Night Photography and share their beautiful night photographs especially in Asia. Even though Night Photography is never a mainstream, but I don't think we are alone in this, for sure we can find more like minded people once there's a community to hang out.
It's not my priority to do night photography over there as this is my holiday trip to Lake Toba and Medan, Indonesia, however I can't resist to do so, I'm keen to go back there again for the purpose of night photography in future because there are so much to explore.
I don't have many takes but 3, there you go -
The Majestic Gate
Zed's Horns
The Traditionalism
You can obviously see the roof of the house has very unique design, it has very strong diagonal shape, which actually symbolizing the horns of buffalo. If you ever visit there, you may also find their graveyard is just built nearby their home, which I have never seen in any other place thus far, I did ask the local about the graveyard, they call it "Future House". I would like to pay respect to them and making a series of night images if possible next time. Another worthy look is church, there are so many churches you can find around the area and all of them are unique in their own way.
As my work needing me to travel to Myanmar, I have been coming back and forth to this beautiful country since 2010 and have been photographing Yangon at night - 仰光之夜 for long period of time. For people who never visit this country, majority of people are very poor, but they live happily with what they have and surprisingly the criminal rate is very low, therefore I have no problem wandering alone at night(just beware of stray dogs, you have been warned). Communication is not a problem even though they don't really speak English, I have learned a little bit of Myanmar language since my stay there, added up with body language would do just fine.
To be honest, if you are into street photography, it's a must-go country, most of life activities are happening on the streets, and they usually greet you with smiling face when you are photographing them.
This year, I commit myself to the solo art project called Dwelling 居(the word dwelling, refers to a shelter in which people live), aimed to produce a body of work showing and documenting the living environment of Myanmar people at night, avoiding all those fancy tourist locations at all and rather stick to the places where they actually live, which allows me to talk to the locals, encountering drunken masters(if drinking everyday makes them a master) and listening to guitar(one of the cheapest music instrument that they can afford) music at night. One of the thing I notice is we never actually look at the house in detail(even our own home), often time we just walk by any houses and never stop by.
About architectural design of their houses, I don't have single word to describe them(spontaneous style?), you can find bamboo/wooden/brick houses in their housing area so each of them is unique in their own way, there's no room but just partitioning inside most of the houses, with windows wide open without proper curtains. With the country opens up to the world, I'm not sure if I'm going to see the same thing 20 years from now, I can't tell if the transition is good or bad but definitely it will create great impact to their surroundings and affects the way they live.
If I have to describe how I feel about their current living environment - tranquillity would be the word.
Here's the video I have created for this project with total 32 images. The whole set of images can be found in my photography site.
My gratitude goes to those people who I have met during the journey of photographing in Myanmar, and thank you for sharing life stories of yours. I wish I can spend more times with you guys.
The lovely uncle and aunty who invited me to their house for light supper
The handsome group of people who tried their best to explain to me about their living places even though they don't speak English well
Last but not least, the drunken masters
To the people of Myanmar, good bye and see you next time!
While there are differences between art of painting and photography, it has so much similarities that photographer should learn to think like a painter. Therefore it is important to study the artwork of painting artists, there are so much to offer in term of imagination, composition, story telling, mood creation, clever use of the colour palette and many other elements that they put together.
Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928
Edward Hopper, the american artist summed up his work by stating "The whole answer is there on the canvas" tells exactly that. I won't discuss much about his work here and let you interpret yourself, I would like to share what I found in youtube -
I know that's a lot to swallow, just take your time slowly when viewing his paintings, each of them are created with a lot of thoughts from Edward Hopper. I really hope someday I can see the real paintings of him in exhibition.
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