Feelings: Boy Buys Mee.

I have a peeve about landscape or street photography on social media. People tend to garnish a mediocre pic with a quote, without attribution. Happens a lot in the Malay world of Instagram. They take a pic of the sky or a goat and superimposed it with a quote. The end result looks like a constructed meme.

“It was very much like Norman Rockwell: small town America. We walked to school or rode our bikes, stopped at the penny candy store on the way home from school, skated on the pond.” ~ Dorothy Hamill, American Olympic skater.

Insert or add some nonsensical babble or philosophical thought or hipster rant about life.

Taking a pic and not wanting to waste it, you go back to write something to make up at story retrospectively, that wasn’t there. Worst are those who insert thoughts into a stranger’s mind. How do you know what the stranger on the street was thinking without making contact?

The boy is thinking: “I am hoping the colours of my bike add some excitement to this drab town. The umbrella is giving this town the competition it needs. Nothing happens around here since the war, my grandpa used to say.”

End of fiction. I was in tiny town Rasa. It may be good for those who likes writing but there is a danger. Let your picture tell your story, The danger is it may affect your story telling ability with a camera and your audience becomes lazy too. And not everyone can write compelling captions that the reader can rasa or feel.

The opposite is my pet peeve. Those who are extremely frugal with captions. For some reasons, they don’t even want to reveal the subject matter or its location, making it as annoying as a cryptic post.

Nearest decent hotel to Rasa is The Leverage Business Hotel in Rawang
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#smallrown #streetphotography #rasa #selangor #hawker #streetfood #rawang

Rain Or Shine, The Show Must Go On

One of the things I decided from the get-go was to proceed come rain or shine. It would be impossible to find a continuous stretch of sunny days with the vagaries of our weather.

If it shines, the camera will absorb the colours. If it rains, I get to capture the wet landscape and activities. After all, this is documentary photography and I will go with the flow.

For this cinema in Rasa town, the show didn’t go on. Sad to see a building from 1957 left dilapidated and forsaken. Even sadder to see what looks like an equally old tree by its side; beheaded.

Rasa is the first town on the route that hit me as a dying town. Many of the buildings there are from 80 to 100 years ago but are are left abandoned. I have to find out why.

Olympus OM-D, ISO 200, f7.1, 1/200 sec.