Because of the resumption of interest, I have been glancing through quite a few photography blogs recently, especialy those with the theme of Macau.
Some of the bloggers are apparently advocate, or even, professional photographers themselves. With their super-wide-angle and super-long-focus lenses, the watcher can often enjoy breath-taking extrodinary sights of landscape, cityscape or things that are normally present in our everyday life. This is the magic of photographic technology coupled with the creativity of the human mind. You can never imagine those things could be seen in such angles with your own eyes. The appearence of our streets, our buildings, our landmarks, our memorials etc are greatly beautified and savored with color and light. I love those photos too. Nevertheless, I feel a little uneasy about the subtle surrealism in some of them.
Those bloggers, I presume, are mostly locals. They are too familiar with the sights around them in life. Without exaggeration or modification techniques things are just too ordinary to their eyes. They always look for legendary or dramatic sparkles in those mundane realities, trying to reform them into fairy-tale delights for any eyes, sometimes by distorting them with their expensive high-tech photographic equipments and computer software.
As I passed by a shop this morning and saw a cat crouching on the counter, something stroke me of a missing sentiment that most of these photos lack. It’s the localness in the eyes of a stranger. A stranger is immune to the pale boredom or over-zealous nostalgia of a local resident, and thus would look at things more objectively and judge them with raw and original emotions, which are most precious in the image-forming of a city.
I am a local too, but from now on I will try my best to be a stranger when I see through the view-finder of my camera.
