The Hakka Cemetery

I wanted to visit this place for a very long time : a cemetery enclosed in a housing block is the west of Singapore city center.

Hakka, are a Chinese population originating from the eastern part of Hunan, you can read more on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_people. They form about 8% of the Chinese population of Singapore.

The cemetery is home to about 3000 graves, below which urns of ashes are buried. Unlucky for me the place was closed when I reached there after a 40 minutes bus ride. I could still make a few shots, but there seems to be some very interesting views to catch so I will try to go back at a better time.

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  Tiong Bahru Qi Tian Gong Temple

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  The old station

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  Hock Teck See Temple

The Ying Fo Fui Kun cemetery as it is known, is part of a heritage trail that looks promising, I will dig into that in the near future. You can find further reading here https://lionraw.com/2014/03/18/the-hakka-cemetery/

Today’s pictures where taken on Ilford Pan F 50ISO film with the Hasselblad 500cm and 80mm F2.8. They were processed soon after in Caffenol using the batch I prepared last week, then scanned with the Epson v800. I had 3 shots left when leaving the cemetery, so I head back in town. I made a first stop at Tiong Bahru at QiTian Gong temple. It s the 100’s birthday of the temple this year and it has been renovated, but due to the Covid there are no celebrations this year. You can find pictures of past ceremonies there :

https://waex99photo.wordpress.com/2016/09/17/tiong-bahru-qi-tian-gong-temple/

or

https://waex99photo.wordpress.com/2016/09/17/tiong-bahru-qi-tian-gong-temple/

After this I head to the old railway station which is under work (no idea what is suppose to happen to it in the future) and finally to the small Hock Teck See Temple, a small Taoist temple surrounded by construction sites.

I hope you enjoyed the reading …

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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

 

Bukit Brown Cemetery – Singapore

Bukit Brown Cemetery - Singapore

Yesterday, we finally went to the Bukit Brown Chinese Cemetery, here in Singapore. A motorway will be built through it so a lot of tombs will be destroyed. This is causing quite a stir here as a lot of the founders of Singapore are buried in this place. It’s easy to get a cab and go there in 20 minutes from the city center. The place is buried in a forest, we even spotted a monkey.

My son Noé, now 9, shot this with his brand new Nikon coolpix 7100; as you can see on the left hand side I brought the hassie and shot 3 rolls : one Ektar, one Portra and one Elitechrome, results next week. Ah yeah I also brought the new(second hand) Olympus mju1 to finish the test film. (Noé managed to broke the old one, and I found one for 60Eur by compete chance shouting at me from the shop “buy me, buy me”).

On the Coolpix 7100: I chose this camera for my son because it has a viewfinder and offers a certain (very high) number of controls. I hesitated a long time with the Canon G12, the G12 seems better build in my opinion but finally I prefer the images produced by the Nikon. We did not use it a lot, but we are not disappointed with it so far. I would only say that that the viewfinder is not great and may not get so much use in the end of the day. Kids also have a tendency to play with controls and forget to reset them to a reasonable default so it’s better checking the settings before using the camera.