The Goodman’s Blog: Lifelong Learning and Sharing

She was a participant in an annual parade in Singapore called Chingay, held during the Chinese New Year period. Her dress and hat were full of flowers.

She was sandwiched in a group of 50 other participants. Instead of shooting her with the others, I approached her and asked if she could step out of the group and I then asked her to pose alone.

While I was “directing” her poses, many other event photographers rushed to my photoshoot location and started snapping her. I was fortunate, though, that she only took instructions from me and gamely posed.

I’m so lucky.

Today I celebrate, along with four million others living here, the 42nd anniversary of the independence of Singapore. I first moved here, on a company posting in 1973, eight years after Singapore proclaimed independence. Since then, I have conducted management consulting assignments in seven of the ASEAN countries. I became a citizen in 1995.

Although we are referred to as a tiny red dot island, we have shown to the rest of the world how a dedicated political leadership and multi-ethnic work force can unite to transform this country from a developing into a developed country in less than  one generation.

Yes, we do gripe about a lot of things (mainly trivial) but, from the point of view of one who wasn’t born and did not grow up in Singapore, we have many things to be proud about our system of government.

I would like to compare Singapore with another great city-state in the Ancient World, Athens. The historian, Thucydides, documented for posterity a stirring speech made by Pericles, the legendary general and statesman of Athens, in 431 B.C. This was at the end of the first year of the Peleponnesian War which consumed many Athenian lives.

Here, then, are excerpts from that funeral oration. What Pericles declared almost 2,500 years ago bears, to me, an uncanny similarity to the Singapore of today.

oration-by-pericles.pdf

Babies are among the most difficult to photograph. They get easily distracted. You can’t tell them to sit still or to turn left, turn right, chin up, down, etc as you can with adults.

I was shooting this at a balcony, meaning I was stuck in one corner and could not move around. Her mother was holding her. I knew I had only one or two minutes to fire my shots. And so I did.

After reviewing the playback images on my camera, I knew that the best way to exhibit these was as a collage, showing her different facial expressions. I then created a digital frame, taking the colour of the frame from her lips. I used the photo-editing software, Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 (now I have moved up to Adobe CS3) to create this collage.

So, photo-enthusiasts: be creative. Think of collages even as you are taking your shots!

 By the way, she’s my first grandchild and her name is Ella.