Photo Essay : "Retrofeeting"

My family came to visit me when I was on exchange in Shanghai. Halfway through, my dad's shoe threatened to do a "crocodile" on him and we had to find a cobbler to fix it. After lunch at the nearby noodle shop which impressed my family with its cheap, fresh springy and tasty noodles, we stopped by the cobbler just a stone's throw away from my apartment to do up the shoe.

It was somewhere in the late afternoon and the sunlight was just washing beautifully against the wall and the cobbler's face. The way the cobbler wore his cloak like shirt made him look like some master craftsman out of a wuxia show. The texture of the wall behind him provided the kind of background to complete the look and immediately, I took out my trusty Canon G3 and with the aperture wide open at f/2.2, started snapping away.

Though I own a Canon 350D DSLR now, I often still go back to using the G3. I realised that on many occasions, having the swivel screen and live preview was instrumental in getting me the shot I was looking for. I could take pictures holding the camera at waist level. and not be intrusive about it especially at close range. I normally turn off the fake shutter sound on the G3 so that all you hear is a very soft "click". With the 350D, especially on multiple shot mode, the world would have been looking at me. There in lies the beauty of prosumer digicams. It's a shame and perhaps an atrocity to some that the latest G7 actually dropped the swivel screen for a more compact camera. I hope Canon wises up and brings it back in its next incarnation of the G series.

Here's a shot of us waiting for the cobbler.


As you can see, I'm not a stickler for "minimal post-processing". I say, it all depends on the photographer's vision. There are times when I think it best to leave the picture as natural as possible. Other times, I feel that digital post-processing brings a whole new angle of creativity to photography. I typically shoot having in mind how the final product would look like. I try to frame my shots so that minimal or no cropping is necessary. When I really cannot decide, I take it at highest quality, and frame it loosely so that I can play around with it ont he computer later.

I'm no pro though. In fact, much of my post-processing work is often done on Picasa 2.0. I think it's a superb program that will be excellent if the people at Google would just update it with more refined features. There you go. Thought I'd share a little on how the pictures you see on my blog come to be what they look like. Enjoy.