Saturday, July 12, 2008

Abba Mania!

I was at the Esplanade last night when I saw this big standing poster promoting "ABBA Mania", a tribute concert to ABBA. I am very excited over this event; after missing "Mama Mia!" and "We Will Rock You", I swear that I'm not going to miss it this time round.


Yes you're right, I'm an ABBA fan. In fact, ABBA's my most favourite band after Beatles (all seemed beyond my time right?). I'm not being retro, but I think I just find Europop and Britrock more appealing. Having said that, I have to admit I have not listened extensively to Europop nor Britrock. It just happened that I listened to their songs more, as compared to other bands of the same genre.

The most expensive tickets for this event was priced at $95, a bit expensive for a poor student like me, but there's still quite some time away from the event, and hopefully I can save up that amount soon, before the tickets got sold out!

Friday, July 11, 2008

Photographs, Photographs and More Photographs!

I was clearing out my photo albums to make way for new books when I realised that I have a lot of hard copy photographs of Zhangzhou City Xiangju Opera Troupe's performances; one big stack as shown here:

That's horribly a lot, considering that those were just for about 10-odd performances which I had watched, and this stack here only comprises of selected shots which I feel is good enough for print. Imagine how many photographs were there for Xiamen Municipality Opera Troupe, which had performed 3 times at Lorong Koo Chye Sheng Hong Temple!
My shelf of photo albums; more than half of which are Chinese opera performance shots!

It's no doubt I love photography, though not exclusively for Chinese opera performance. My passion for photography became so intense that I just bring my digital camera along whenever I go out. And it's not that slim-body type, but those bulky digital EOS kind! Basically I'd take pictures of whatever I find interesting. (Luckily, I didn't develop them into physical photographs as I was too lazy to organise them into different albums.) Of course, my notion of "interesting" may not be interesting enough for the average people; I like scenes with strong sense of lines or repeated patterns (for those who're into art or design, does that remind you of EPAD: Elements and Principles of Art and Design?), or anything that has a rich history and is hard to find in present urban Singapore. However, as my photo-taking are rather impromptu, hence many of them do not have the feel and mood like those professional or artistic photographs. I do wish, though, that one day I can have my own artistic photography portfolio, provided I have the time and energy to do so!
A shot of a stairwell at Raffles Place over a decade ago; I just find the repetition of lines in this shot interesting (though not technically nice enough)