An afternoon in Kuching.

Went forr a trip into town yesterday (Sunday April 1st...no really!) with the intention of shooting the skaters and bikers who were in town for a 'convention / meet'. Sadly I had the days wrong and they were already packing up when I arrived. I decided to have a wonder around town anyway and take some shots. I had a few ideas in mind already.
One was the idea of a stage, e.g. find a location and shoot the people as they fill it, I already had the location in mind, which turned out better than expected as I was able to combine that idea with another of my favourite shot types...the reflection. I stood in the narrow passage called Jalan Mosque and pointed my lens at a conveniently placed mirror mid way down the passage.

I'm also fond of what I would call textures (usually of architectural features) and wondering round looking up gives one a different view of Kuching's architecture than if one purely focuses on street level, so I've included a few of those shots below too.

It's hard to photograph Kuching without the State Legislative building, with its golden top, being in there somewhere and the weather at the time was being very accommodating and providing a nice backdrop.
 
Then the weather took a turn for the worse in a big way, so I headed back to the car and saw the dark foreboding clouds highlighting the buildings near by, the Central Kuching mosque being the most prominent.

My first food shoot

A friend of mine, who owns a bar / restaurant, has been asking me for a while to photograph some of her food for a new menu and new look she wants to start doing. This being well out of my comfort zone, I was reluctant, but enticed enough, that I eventually gave in. I recruited the help of Mr Gerry Fox whose work can be seen here and here who has been an inspiration and great help during my recent adventures in photography.

We used a single off camera flash fitted with a soft-box and then used all manner of impromptu diffusers and reflectors to try to get the light right. We had arrived at the restaurant with three hours of afternoon daylight left, but sadly didn't get to shoot the food for a while. In the meantime Gerry took control of the camera in the kitchen and he got a few shots of the guys in action and I held the flash and other silly things to get some light in.

Eventually we got round to shooting some food but the light had taken a turn for the worse as bad weather had moved in. We did our best anyway and shot a selection of the new dishes from various angles. The owner was very keen on overhead shots, which I'm not a big fan of, but followed her wishes and then I shot some more that were more to my liking and style. Overall I suppose I'm happy with the results and and very grateful to Gerry for all his during shoot assistance and post shoot processing guru-ness. NB the shots below have been processed by me as I forgot to actually take a copy of the shots once we'd finished processing them round at Gerry's, so any amateurish post-processing is down to me. Here are a selection of the shots anyway. I hope they make you hungry. Please note, as mentioned above, that the man behind the lens for all the kitchen shots was actually Gerry, so while they've got my name on the bottom, they technically belong to him. Thanks again mate, much appreciated.