McPherson “Lego”buildings

This is a set of pictures of the colorful public housing blocs situated on Circuit Road in Singapore.

Circuit road is accessible via Mc Pherson MRT, and is located in the east part of town, 20 minutes ride from Orchard Road.

This estate dates back from the early 1970’s and has recently received a face-lift, becoming the Lego or Mondrian estate. Apparently the “upgrade” as we say here was not only cosmetical as the area used to be a bit shabby from what I gathered.

The outing was organized by Low Che Eng from the “Lets Shoot Film SG” Facebook group. We were nearly  a dozen freaks walking around the estate, with cameras ranging from various Leicas and medium formats to a view camera (Chamonix ?).

I carried around the Hasselblad 500CM  and 80mmF2.8 loaded with a slightly expired roll of Portra 160vc (nearly two years I think) shot at 200iso and the Leica IIIc with the Voigtländer 21mmF4 loaded with a roll of Rollei retro 80s.

The film was processed at the usual lab and scanned at home with the Epson v800.

I did a bit of post processing in light room but even without it the film turned out quite well.

 

Finally meet a resident, this gentleman used to a be a guitarist at the raffles hotel back in the days where hotels had musicians and is  now keeping fit in his old age. This is the last shot of the roll hence the slight issue on the top of the frame.

The hassie keep on having problems shooting 12 complete frames, but this time I got lucky.

 

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Singapore Photo Walk – March 2016 – Rochor Center

I joined Bernard Goh’s Singapore Photo Walk outing of March with my son.

Rochor Centre is group of buildings built by the Housing and Development Board of Singapore. It was built and completed in 1977 and consists of 4 blocks painted in vivid colors yellow, green, red and blue.

This is an iconic building in the east side on Singapore center that can be seen by tourists going to Arab Street or Little India.

The buildings comprise habitations, shops and hawkers ( food stalls). On the ground floor you still can find some religious artefacts.

The center has started closing as later this year it will be torn down to give way to a motorway joining the north to the south of the island. A lot of the shops have already relocated, but some are still open. The habitations seems to still be occupied if I can judge by the drying laundry.

The void desk is a classical feature of the HDB blocks, an open area for inhabitants to congregate and do activities.

Our friend Long Siew Leng aka Jumping girl.

Pictures 1 and 2 : Hasselblad 500cm+80mmF2.8, Rollei CR 200 slide film

Pictures 3,4,and 5 : Leica M6, summaron 28mm2.8, Kodak Portra 400

Pictures 6 : Hasselblad 500cm+80mmF2.8, Rollei RPX 100 film

 

Chess players – chinatown – Singapore

Chess players - chinatown - Singapore

A couple of weeks ago, I went back to Chinatown to finish my third film roll and make a few shots of chess players you find there. This is a nice subject, I think, people not camera shy, a few other folks looking at them and a couple of tourists. Of course as soon as the last picture was taken I put another film and made this final shot. Now I had a nother film to finish !

Camera Hasselblad 500cm, Planar 80CT
Filmkodak TRIx 400
Scannerepson v500

Film 2011-Hassie-04

Chess players – Toa Payoh – Singapore

Chess players - Toa Payoh - Singapore

The second film shot with the Nasselblad is baack from the shop (Ruby Photo in Excelsior building, Coleman Street Singapore).
Only 12 shots, and this is the best one, surely another 2-3 keepers at least.
This is shot in Toa Payoh neighborhood, older folks playing chess in the entrance of their buildings. You’ll probably see more on these in the future.

I had a quick calculation on the cost of film: 1 Ektar film is 8 SGD and processing 6, a couple of bus rides to to to the shop that’s another 2 bucks, so all in all 16 SGD per film, near 1.5 per shot good or not (1.2 USD or 0.85 EUR). Well film isn’t that cheap after all.

Camera: Hasselblad 500 CM
Lens: Planar 80mm CF T*
Film: Kodal Ektar 100
Scanner: Epson V500
Processing: LR3+PS Elements 4.0