Oh my Noordin what have they done to you.....(Day 10)

these 2 pics are late editions.

Noordin Beach note the fence.
Ubin, for me always a place of memories. I first ventured to the island almost 22 years ago when i was a mere boy of 12, my brother had booked a chalet in changi and on one of the days i skipped school, pinched my dads binoculars and off i went. Little did i know that it would be a 22yr love hate relationship with the island of granite. Today Ubin is a very different place from what i remember, the old school is no more, the island clinic is now a seafood restaurant and where homes used to stand the jungle has reclaimed the land. I used to love Ubin for its peace and quiet, the sheer pleasure of having a beach, a pristine beach all to ourselves. I hate it now for what it has become a dumping ground of litter and refuse a place where fools go and do things they would not on the mainland. Kampung Noordin or Noordin beach as it is known now is awash with litter, the trash of campers too stupid to clear up. The beach itself resembles nothing of the clean brown sand i spent many happy hours sitting on during my many camping trips there, the water while still peaceful and calm is now the colour of black tea, penned in by a fence to keep the illegal immigrants out, but allow their refuse in. Tracks have been paved over, jungle fenced in, buildings put up and others torn down. The paradox that beauty shared becomes beauty lost has not completely eroded the charms of the island and with some help things may change for change is inevitable but let them change for the better. Of course the question will always be posed "change for whose betterment" the answer for now is NO ONE.

Phalanta Phalantha Phalantha (Leopard), note the stink bug below the butterfly. For want of a macro lense....

Buildings.

Blue Skies

C is for Cookie.

Sidebar-for day 9 refer to TLOML's blog

Day 5,6,7,8

Sandpiper

Water Monitor(Juvenile) Varanus salvator

Arowana

Water Monitor Varanus salvator

Window

Bougainvillea

Heliconia

Salt water Crocodile Crocodylus porosus- I got a real kick out of seeings this baby, second time in two trips to buloh and close to the same spot. woo hoo

This looks like a golden web or an orb spider..not really sure. Note the silken thread coming out of her spinneret, and it is a "her" the males are tiny compared to the females.

A weird mix i know, but what could i do its been a weird couple of days. I havent had a chance to do any bloggin so i am late and i figured it didnt really matter....

Day 4

Day 4 saw me taking stroll from my office to Katong Park which is a short 5min walk. My daily look through the view finder of my camera showed me beauty aplenty as always and i really did not have to look very hard to find things which appealed to me, the difficult part is always taking the picture, composing the shot and adjusting the settings till that little sigh of satisfaction is allowed to escape ,y mouth only to be replaced with a sharp intake of breath and a curse when i see my poor attempt at capturing the beauty of the natural world...but i love it, i love trying, failing and trying again i love the whole idea of trying to freeze a moment in time maybe its a Peter Pan complex i don't know but i do know that i derive tremendous joy from this hobby of mine, and on day 4 i am well pleased by with work(such a horrid word i know but used in a positive manner here). The question i get alot is "what were you supposed to be taking a picture of?" Well my version of photography is just that my version, i take what i find beautiful i take what i find has the potential to move me in anyway be it the joy of photographing my daughter or the pleasure in photography animals or even the desire to try and do something different for anything else i have done like trying to photograph the void deck of a block of flats. So i will muddle along and hope that i don't confuse to many people with the photographs i post and maybe just maybe i might have taken something that moves someone else in a similar way, if not cest la vie.

In the first picture, which is of a frangi pani tree, i felt the light filtering through the confused jumble of branches was a very interesting pattern if that is the right word to use. The blue sky contrasted nicely i felt with the darkened branches.

Above, a nail driven hard into the tree, i wouldnt know where to begin explaning what I see when i look at this image.
This gnarly tree really requires more patience to photograph and i reckon i may spend more time trying to capture a good image the next time. I couldnt decide between the above and below photograph so i have posted both..

And so day 4 on my little quest ends.
if you have noticed any typo's or gramatical errors do write them down and when i am reborn i will promise to work harder in school.

Day 2 and 3

In our society it is becoming increasingly common to use items and throw them away when we feel they have out lasted their usefulness. Hand phones are replaced yearly because they decrease in value or so we are told, pets are chucked once they are not as cute as they used to be, buildings left to rot and people......aigh the people. I took this picture and at the time did not notice the sign behind the lady, it could almost be in reference to her and our throw away society..
The last picture didn't turn out as i had planned ....but i am pretty pleased with it none the less.

day 2.

Thursday.

Its common name is "painted gum" and the first time i saw it years ago i felt that it was the canvas for a pastel loving artist. You cant look at it and not be moved by its beauty of which the natural world abounds from the soft iridescent wings of a butterfly to the scaly scared hide of a monitor lizard, nature is full of beauty all we have to do is look. So today i share with you a thing of beauty.

In the background my office.
I took two very similar pictures one in colour and one in black and white, the colour pictures to me shows how vibrant and vivid the different shades of green are. The black and white i feel draws out a more textured feel to the image.

Someone told me today that they admired me for my optimism, i have always felt i was more of a realist and the realist in me says that you cant find something beautiful everyday, the optimist in me says I can and the pessimist in me says you may be able to find something beautiful everyday but you wont want to photograph it cause you wont be in the mood. So what i propose to do is this i shall try and take a picture of something i find beautiful everyday for the next 30days, be it natural or man made there are no rules to beauty. . Of course i will still do my regular nonsense blogs but this is a little side project to see which of the 3 "ist" shall prevail.

An explanation.

So my last post got a couple of comments, on and off the blog. When i posted the photograph i wanted to leave it untitled at first and just leave the "if you look you will see it" comment there but i also wanted to express what i saw looking through the lens without forcing my own views on everyone else so i titled the picture.
Let me explain why i called it "Tai Chi" . Looking at the two trees they seemed at first glance to be flowing together in some kind of dance, like two proponents of the ancient art of Tai Chi.
It doesnt matter if you dont see what i see, someone told me their saw a pair of headphones in the picture! So it doesnt matter what you see....as long as you look.

Thanks for taking the time!

Look.

If you look, you will see it.

Serious.

Sunday.

Godma

:)

just 2

i saw the above and i thought, sometimes thats how life feels.

My first attempt at a texture type shot. Its my current windows wallpaper...will try again

Wallpaper/

I really like the way this turned out, i took a pic from my jaunt to katong played around with it in photoshop and i got this. My current wallpaper.

Books.

I have actually wanted to do this post since the start of the month but for some reason i haven't seemed to have the time. Over Christmas i got some great gifts and i wanna mention the 3 books i got, all 3 relate to Germany and world war 2 but more importantly they relate to the people that surrounded Hitler and examines in some detail their relationships with him, with the ideals of the Nazi party and everything that came with it. I recommend these books to anyone but let me warn you you start to get a warped sense that some of these guys are not as bad as we thought but this a flawed premise as some of them were not as bad when compared to others, Goering is not so bad when you compare him to Heydrich but that is like comparing death by hanging to death by firing squad they may seem different but the end result is the same. It is entirely possible that in another time and under different circumstances some of these people would have become great statesmen but in the end they were all responsible for "that which rendered the largest loss of life known to man"


I have two passions(outside family) reading and photography, i love to read its as plan as that. Growing up we always had books around the house my father had a great range of books as did my brother and its these two that my love of reading began, through my brother i discovered Lord of the Rings by Tolkien and Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle till today Holmes is one of my fav books and i still read Lord of the Rings every year. From my father such great books as "war of the running dogs" by Noel Barber and "The undeclared war" by Harold James & Denis Sheil-Small a book which i would like to add was confiscated from me in primary 6 as i was caught reading it during Chinese class!
Here in our humble abode Tloml and i have assembled a little library and i spend my nights selecting books that i have already read and re-read more then once or twice. I tend to read 3 books at the same time 1 at bedtime, one for lunch at work or when travelling and one is normally just hanging around. At present i am re-reading John Simpson's "News From No Man's Land Reporting From the World" and while he does have an inflated sense of himself it is a rather good read, i am also reading Michael Dobbs "Winston's War" a fictionalized account (with heavy factual events) of the year 1939 and Churchill's re-entry into government and war.

Sidebar-because i read rather fast i have found that it has not helped my spelling or grammar one bit. i urge you to speed read through the errors in this post.