Night Photography with a Mystery Guest

Hereafter

© Martin Liew Photography

In early July, I received a message from a friend via Facebook. I was informed of his second trip to Singapore in early August. Yes he was in town last week and I showed him around. To my surprise, he discovered this abandoned dilapidated house (shown above), near the hotel he stayed. Make the jump and find out who our mystery guest is.

Troy Paiva and friends

© Calvin Huang

Did u guess it right? Yes the mystery guest is the celebrated American night photographer, Troy Paiva. Troy was invited by the local TV station, MediaCorp to come back for their second season of The Big Shot reality TV photo contest show, as one of the guest judges. Same as before, he got one night available for some night photography and this time round he stayed at a different hotel, which is located a few bus-stops away from my place. In case some of you have missed my blog about our first meet-up, click here.

We did not stay up too late for this time. The guys at the TV Station would picked him up early next morning and it would be good to rest early. Or so did we? We went on to 2 locations; the first location was discovered by Troy himself which is quite near from the hotel he stayed. It's an abandoned dilapidated house located right outside a charity hospital in the Novena district. The hoarding board gate is opened and we just walked in and do our light-paintings. We were lucky. Despite the heavy rain in the morning, humidity is still high at 100% but it's cooling in the night.

We did not stay too long at the abandoned house. I did a few exposures and here's one.

Inception

© Martin Liew Photography

We got on a cab and headed to our second location. I didn't do much there except helping my friend Calvin on creating his portrait shots while Troy went exploring the place and did his own photography. Before we left at 12 mid-night, we did a group photo shoot, as shown above. We were lucky again to hail a cab and got back to the hotel. Troy decided to buy us beer as a token of appreciation. Calvin and I certainly welcomed his offer. So we chatted for 2 hours and finally called it a night. It was a quick fun night outing and we all enjoyed it.

In case you want to view Troy's work, he has posted some images in his blog, The Lost America Blog and a few street photos which he took with his iPhone during his exploration around the hotel area and recording at the TV Station.

By the way, the TV show, The Big Shot 2 will be broadcasted on every Wednesday night 9:00PM (local time) Channel 5, starting on 14 September, 2011.