After a Vesak Day visit to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, I was waiting in line for lunch when I noticed this young girl quietly absorbed in a freshly opened coconut while her father queued for food nearby. Taken candidly and unnoticed amid the lunchtime crowd, it was one of those fleeting moments that might easily have passed by unnoticed, but her complete concentration on the coconut, seemingly oblivious to everything around her, caught my eye.
Taken at the OCT Loft Creative Culture Park in Shenzhen on a holiday visit last November… A passer-by moves across a mural depicting bodies in motion. For a fleeting moment, the living figure seems to continue the painted sequence. The photograph explores the relationship between art and life, stillness and movement, and how we quietly pass through spaces layered with stories before us.
Lower Seletar Reservoir became one of my father’s favourite morning grounds with a camera. During his health journey over the last few years and through the quiet months of COVID-19 restrictions, he returned here often to watch the day begin over the still water. In the later years he sometimes left the heavier cameras behind and simply used his iPhone. By then, it was less about equipment and more about recognising the scene — the light, the reflections, the calm before the city fully wakes.
This photograph was taken just this past Sunday morning. I captured the moment with my Canon R5, though I also made an iPhone version at the same time. The R5 image feels a little more natural to me, less shaped by computational processing. But I suspect my father would have reminded me that what matters most is noticing the moment in the first place. A version made with the iPhone can be viewed here.
And on mornings like this, it is easy to understand why he kept coming back.