Welcome, year
» Written on January 1, 2008 at 9:25 PM «
You certainly bring with you good tidings. 2008 is finally upon us, and sinners, repent. You may yet receive the grace of forgiveness, if your luck so happens to favour.
For today, it is a time of celebration. Of what, I’m not exactly sure, but what I am sure of is that every New Year’s Eve, there are fireworks, and like any good fly will tell you, such things are analogous to fly destroyers: they attract humans of every race and intellect level towards their ultimate destruction.
Photographers are no exception in this matter. Which is why, at around 2130 Hours, UTC+8, I found myself walking along the waterfront of The One Fullerton hotel, scouting for adequate vantage points for my trusty D50 to make its quiet, yet bold statement of the year olde.
It all began, of course, with preparations: batteries were charged, lenses were cleaned and even shoes shined. Sort of, I guess: I had them cleaned the other day. This year, however, I wasn’t about to let myself suffer a repeat of what happened last year with the foam that overzealous spectators kept spraying around, bringing a military green poncho sorely to mitigate this very real concern. Insidiously, however, the poncho held a second purpose.
But I do believe that I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me elaborate on the day’s events in a more chronologically efficient manner.
It started with the eve of said day, seeing myself in front of the computer busy placing exquisitely aimed ammunition into other people’s head over a grand game of Team Fortress 2. This would continue until about 8am, when I finally decided that, for once, I wasn’t going to sleep in the morning promising myself to wake up in an hour or two and then ending up waking up at dusk, so instead I opted to stay awake through sheer force of will. Seriously, I don’t even take my customary mug of Milo in the morning these days.
Anyway, the day passed pretty much without major event until about 6pm, which saw me on the TF2 servers again instead of getting ready to head off to my aunt’s place, where I was to have my New Year’s Dinner with the rest of my relatives.
Say hello to my cousins. I assure you, I may have portrayed them with the demeanours of angels, but beneath those innocent exteriors lie rivers of unparalleled annoying.
The ensuing rush to get everything ready resulted, perhaps, in a slight oversight; I should have brought my laptop along in a separate carrier, since a PSP is generally a single-player-oriented experience: no, I’m quite sure no one else aside from me in our family tree owns such a device.
Dinner was well done, though this year, it seemed slightly muted by comparison, perhaps due to the lack of external relatives visiting. I was informed by a source that internal drama was once again to blame, worse than usual. One, she said, might even say it was infernal.
Ok, she didn’t really say that, but hey, vocabulary! It is my existence defined.
Anyway, I was disappointed at the lack of sweet, succulent ham. The rest of the spread was decent, but honestly, Christmas without ham is just not the same. It foreshadows doom. And honestly, turkey is meant for Thanksgiving, not to celebrate some higher entity’s birthday.
Also, say hello to my sister. Such a dreadful disposition she has. 
2100 hours rolled around, and I knew that my boredom had been allowed to stew enough. Also, I was anxious not to repeat the same mistake I made last year of heading off too late to find a good spot. I bid my aunt and uncle adios and made my way down to the Esplanade, the better to find a good vantage point and mayhap, ostensibly, to check out what 160, 000 idiots could accomplish with their sheer idiocy.
My mom had earlier informed me that she had a pass of sorts that would grant me access to the rooftop of the Esplanade theatre. Now, that’s very sweet and all, but frankly I was hoping that I would be able to find myself a good spot closer to the waterfront, as I believe a lower vantage point would have worked in my favour slightly more, even with the surrounding light and noise pollution. I figured that I’d be able to meet up with my mom later on, in any case.
It’s really amusing how you see people planning to celebrate the new year’s arrival. Some people choose to stay at home to party, getting drunk and perhaps catching sight of the celebrations on the telly. Some choose to set off sparklers with friends in anticipation of the real thing, trying fervently to recreate a holiday cheer of sorts. Me? I choose to shoot shit, in this case, fireworks. What is more telling, though, is the build-up to the event.
You see people queuing outside bars three whole hours before the magic moment, waiting to feast their eyes on cleveage and other nasty delights, you see people gaming with PSPs on the ground with their other punks (why doesn’t anyone like the Nintendo DS?), you even see people like me, tripods set up and at the ready, with perhaps someone holding a video camera or two preferring to record their memories of that night in full-motion.
I walked around taking a few shots of varying architectural nature for a while, before deciding on an acceptable vantage point, but all the while considering angles and vanishing points. I wasn’t able to gain access to the Esplanade Drive as I had the previous year; the crowd had already ballooned what was left of free space in that area, and this limited my options considerably. I decided to take my mom up on her offer, and managed to get through via a quick call despite the clogged bandwidth my phone provider delights in offering us this time of year.
The top of the Esplanade was, I had assumed, restricted for perhaps maybe a limited number of public patrons, those who had status. My assumptions were quickly put to a painful rest when I realized that the roof was occupied by classy people, people who had (some cute) waiters roaming around offering drinks of various sorts along with refreshments. I pretended to blend in with my polo tee and jeans (I was actually planning to dress even more casually at first, too) and hoped that my tripod would grant me untouchable qualities.
I was surprised, then, that just like last year, people kept requesting me to help them take their picture with their cameras upon noticing me and my own intimidating setup. I obliged, not wanting to get myself thrown off the roof by the various security personnel around, but you can safely assume it was under duress.
The fireworks display started a little differently from last year: previously, a brief appetizer display would commence around 15 minutes to midnight, followed by the 15-minute extravaganza at the proper time. This year, it started on the dot, and only lasted around perhaps 10 minutes or so. It definitely wasn’t as awesome as last year’s was, but hey, fireworks are fireworks, I guess.
I did get a few nicer shots that I was pleased with, owing to the new techniques that I had been thinking up since last year and waiting to try out; one of them was basically to use a zoom burst coupled with a gentle jerk of the camera before or after the exposure was about to end, producing a distinct style of fireworks trails. Another technique which I had tried last year but didn’t manage to pull off rather successfully was the shutter cover technique in which I would wait for a firework to burst before opening the shutter, then covering it with something while waiting for another burst, then repeating the process, thus capturing multiple bursts in one exposure.
Last year was my first time trying this out, and I was a little hasty in covering the lens, thus causing a lot of my shots to become underexposed and unusable. This year, I ended up overexposing quite a few shots because I kept trying to get as many bursts in my shots as possible, but, as the saying for shooting digitally goes, shoot for the highlights.
I’m working on the photos now (sleeping at 9am and waking up at 5pm today doesn’t really help much with my sense of artistic direction) but I have a shot that I’m really excited about, and I think I’ll actually use it as a portfolio shot. In the meantime, though, enjoy this one.
And here’s to a prosperous and merry 2008 for all you worthless peons out there.
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