Category: photography

My costly hobby. Find all my photos Flickr.

Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the Dead Sea, Israel/Palestine, June 2022

Post date August 28, 2022

I’ve been visiting Tel Aviv for work since 2007 [confusion.cc], and despite the assertion in that first post that my wife would join me, my family has never been. So, in late May when my boss asked me to go again for work I decided to take the family. It was a bit last minute, but we were trying to decide what, if any, travel to do in the June school holidays. After more than two years of not traveling everyone in my family was itching to get out of Singapore. We travel a lot, Singapore is such a small place that you have to show your passport to go more then 20 kilometers in any direction from 0ur house. The last travel we did was in March 2020, we were two days in Bali [confusion.cc] during the spring school holidays when Singapore decided to shut the border so we had to rush back in the madness of early COVID.

So everyone was eager to get out and see some things, eat some different food, breath some different air. Israel has amazing beaches so I booked a place on the beach in southern Tel Aviv, not too far north of Jaffa. Expensive at that height of the summer, a side effect of the amazing Mediterranean beaches, and I didn’t even realize we book the week of Pride, so their is also that. I would have been an experience to watch the parade from our balcony, but for the first time ever the parade was not along the boardwalk. Any other year we would have been in an amazing space to watch the parade but this year they moved it due to construction or something. Oh well. We did try to get to the parade but the public transport was crazy and we were late so we eventually gave up.

Anyway, we didn’t go to see those sights. We hit key required first time in the Holy Land sights. We spent a day in Jerusalem, seeing the old city; the Western Wall and Church of the Holy Sepelchre, shopping in the markets of old Jerusalem. We even made the trip across town to Yad Veshem.

I have to say, Yad Veshem was not as interesting experience as I thought it would be. I think the impact of the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC was much deeper, as a non-Jew I found it much more moving. Yad Veshem came across as too sterile a history lesson, no the personal story that the Holocaust Museum felt like. Also, they would not let my younger daughter go to the museum, they don’t allow kids under 10 to enter, which I must have missed when I booked the tickets. She was 1 month short of her tenth birthday. They wouldn’t budge, so she and my wife had to sit out while my older daughter and I went through the main exhibit. So, maybe I was just not in the mood, I was a bit pissed, both my daughters have been to Anne Frank House, and I don’t see why this sort of history should be off limits to people of any age when accompanied by a parent. This is history, they may not comprehend it but history, good or bad, is not some Hollywood movie that should be hidden behind age restrictions and ratings.

We did the required dip in the dead sea. Mud bath that bobbing up and down for a while then getting the hell out of the heat. It was 35°C in the shade. We opted not to go to Masada where the forecast high was close to 50°C.

So we spent most of the rest of the week swimming in the ocean. My kids have been to the ocean in Bali and in Phuket before but the sand and surf in Israel is on another level, closer to Surfers Paradise in Australia —another place they have been but they were 4 years old and 6 months old so they don’t really remember, (mental note to self time to go back). The beach in Singapore is not worth visiting for swimming, if there were ever great beaches in Singapore they were sacrificed to the gods of commerce in the name of progress long ago. The sand is imported from Indonesia and Malaysia and is corse and dirty due to the flotilla of commercial shipping vessels constantly mored off the coast of Singapore. East Coast park is good for a BBQ or a bike ride but the beach is not something to write home about. A pity, we live less than 2 kilometers from a beach, in the tropics, but… C’est la vie.

All, in all, the kids enjoyed the trip. They enjoyed it so much they said, “lets go every June!”. I’ll have to work on my boss about that one.

One last note, I will get flack about the title and featured image of this post; “Israel/Palestine” will please no one and irritate some. But until there is a mutual peace between the people who call it one and the people who call it the other I’ll stick to calling it both.

You can see the full Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the Dead Sea, Israel and Palestine, June 2022 [flickr.com] photoset on Flickr.

photography

My Best Mobile Photos — 2018

Post date May 15, 2022

Back in November [confusion.cc] I finished my original plan to make it though all my mobile photos up to 2017, when I started to really use Lightroom mobile for most of my on-the-phone photography. I said then that I would go on… It’s taken 6 months to get 2018 done. Partly just because the world has opened up again from COVID so there was more going on. But also because there just more photos, I took a lot of photos and videos in 2018 on my iPhone 8 Plus; both in the native app and in Lightroom mobile. I traveled a lot in 2018 is part of the reason – Tokyo three times (twice for work), lots of trips to Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur for work, a trip to London for the summer holidays. Basically there were a lot of photos.

The photos taken with the iOS native app were all unseen, never posted before, like all the photos in the previous entries in this series (actually, that’s not strictly true, some were posted to Facebook but not public). The photos taken in the Lightroom app however, some of them were posted directly to my Flickr account. So it took a bit more work to make sure I was not double posting as there was not record in the Lightroom library if they were posted or not.

But I made it through them finally, and posted quite a number of photos, so here are a few I would call “my best” for having been taken with the mobile phone.

Lets start with Tokyo. I visited several times for work. I had high hopes that we would land the major project we were trying to win and I already had an agreement with my boss to move to Tokyo if we did. It’s still a dream of mine to live in Japan one day, and while I would prefer Kyoto to Tokyo beggars can’t be choosers… and in this case begging didn’t work out. We didn’t win and I didn’t get to move to Japan. I did take a few nice photos though.

On my first trip I was lucky enough to be there at the tail end of the Sakura Blossom season. It was amazing in Tokyo, wondering around and visiting the various spots to see Sakura. Asakusa was beautiful. And crowded:

But where are the Sakura? Ok, ok, ok, here you go. It’s not actually one of my best pictures, but it’s ok, and I do think we must have Sakura in this set.

I visited Japan again a few months later, staying further out in Futako Tamagawa, where I took this shot of the sunset:

And to contrast that I also took a nighttime shot from the top of the Tokyo Tower:

Ok, we are almost done with Japan. I know I’m obsessed. But this shot is from my Holiday with the family in December, taken at teamLab’s Borderless [teamlab.art]. this room reminds me of one of Yayoi Kusama’s [yayoi-kusama.jp] Infinity Mirror Rooms. The lamps slowly cycle through Green, red, orange, blue and purple:

Ok. Let talk about somewhere else. I took a very cool photo in London in June. At the Tate Modern, we were leaving just as the museum was closing after seeing the Picasso exhibit and I took this cool shot, the light and shadows were so strong that it was almost black and white, so I went ahead and made it black and white:

Here’s a random one from Singapore that I like. The fact that you can go the Lego store now and buy individual pieces is cool, but the container of Minifigure heads is a the best:

I also added to my “Looking Up at Lamps” photo collection on Flickr. Some where posted at the time in 2018 but I found a few during the cleanup process that were never posted. I picked two as part of the “best” collection. First this shot of a lamp in a pizza shop in Genting, Malaysia:

Second, this shot of a lamp in a Sushi restaurant in Singapore, with one of the bulbs out:

And I will leave you with this shot of a lotus growing in the pool at the ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore:

That’s it for 2018. Not sure when I will get to 2019… Probably the last post with many images in it till we get past the era of COVID.

photography

Green Wall

Post date January 30, 2022

photography ranting

My Best Mobile Photos — 2017

Post date November 28, 2021

In the first post in this series [confusion.cc] I said:

I started using Lightroom mobile to take photos on my phone sometime in 2017 so that’s a logical place to stop… let’s see if I can get that far.

Well, I made it, here we go, 2017.

I started the year with the iPhone 6S but, as it’s an odd year I upgraded to the iPhone 8 Plus, the last of the iPhones sans notch. The camera was mostly similar to the iPhone 6S in terms of specs, enough that I didn’t notice that much difference. It did take better low light photos, less noise.

But I started the year with the 6S so lets go back to that. First photo is this beautiful shot taken on an unexpected trip to Antalya in Southern Turkey. On the way to Israel for a work trip in early January my flight was diverted to Antalya due to a snow storm in Istanbul. More info in this post [confusion.cc].

It was only one night, and by the next evening I was sitting on the rooftop lounge of my hotel in Tel Aviv, where I took this shot:

Fast forward 6 months and I took this next shot from a plane on another work trip, this time to Jakarata. This is one of the photos that I think is in my top 10 mobile photos ever. I used it as a background on my phone for a long time.

Up next is another photos from a plane, on yet another work trip, this time to Australia. But this time it’s our first photo taken on the iPhone 8 Plus:

Next up, jellyfish, at the S.E.A. Aquarium in Singapore:

My last two best of 2017 mobile photos were taken in Lightroom Mobile. I started taking photos in Lightroom in June of 2017, but not very many initially, it took a while before it started to replace the default camera app as my go to mobile photo tool. But by the end of the year I was taking them in Lightroom regularly if not most of the time. Today almost any photo I take is done in Lightroom, except for quick shots that I share and then delete over things like WhatsApp.

First up for Lightroom, this car, I think it was in Paragon mall’s underground parking:

And finally, almost at the end of the year, December 28th, this shot of the light show put on nightly by MBS:

So that’s it for 2017. 13 years worth of “best of” mobile photos. Will I stop now. Don’t think so. I’ve had fun looking back, now I will switch over to the photos taken in Lightroom but I think I will go on to 2018, and beyond. But once I catch up to now I’ll have to slow down, once a year post in January? We’ll see if I can stick to that.

photography ranting

My Best Mobile Photos — 2016

Post date October 27, 2021

On to 2016! I used the iPhone 6S the whole year so not much new to say about the camera. Looking back at my iPhone 6S photos on Flickr [flickr.com], There are a significant number of photos of sunsets, so why fight it? Let’s start by picking a few of the best sunsets, and let’s go in chronological order. Starting in March, this shot was taken in Phuket, Thailand at Mai Khao Beach:

Next up is this shot from August, taken in Batam, Indonesia. If you squint you can just see the Singapore skyline in the low haze in the center of the horizon:

Next up, this shot taken in Singapore. It’s not a nice as the others but I like the feeling for some reason with the street lights on and the pink fluffy clouds:

And lastly, from December, back in Phuket, Thailand again and at Mai Khao Beach again:

That’s enough sunsets, there are more on Flickr, not sure why I took so many in 2016. But while we are on the subject of Phuket, here is another shot that I like the feeling of:

Another shot from Phuket, is this crazy cool caterpillar:

I started taking the time to cleanup and post my mobile photos due to the extra time the COVID19 pandemic forced us all to take sitting around the house. In one way it’s depressing to look though all the photos that were taken while traveling when I’m stuck at home and at the same time it’s a bit of therapy for the same thing; living vicariously through reviewing the photos and remembering that trip, that place, that scene. I love to travel and while I can’t complain about being ‘stuck’ in Singapore, a safe, clean, easy place to live companies to so much of the world. Even in the midst of a horrible second wave of the Delta Variant, Singapore must be near the top of the list of places to ride out the pandemic. But Singapore is small, you can’t go more then 20 kilometers from my house without needing a passport, I can’t jump in a car or on a train and go out to the country… I have to go out of the country to do that and international travel is severely restricted if you don’t have a very good reason. C’est la vie. Enough of my first world problems for now.

Before we move on, one more travel photos, this time from Sara, Vietnam, is panorama of the rice paddies taken on a cloudy morning hike:

Lastly, staying ‘at home’ in Singapore, is a shot of on of the places I can go during the pandemic, at least when things are not so bad we are in lockdown. Here’s a shot of the super trees at Gardens by the Bay:

Next stop 2017…

Share the love?

Share the love?

Share the love?

Share the love?

Share the love?