Category: Altered Reality

Candle Light

Lip Seng

Once a year, on the 8th day of the Chinese New Year, the photographers from Singapore would visit a temple at Devonshire Road to take picture of the long candles. This near mid-night event was very popular among our local photographers. Taken with high speed Ektachrome film, I montaged the original transparency later with a piece of blue-toned positive film to create the saturated blue flames with bias relief effect. This picture is another example of my colour derivations treatment with transparencies. It was considered very creative by many others during that time: I was fortunate to win the coveted Gold Trophy (Best Slide of the Show) of the 23rd Hong Kong International Salon, in 1968 with this picture.

A Sunny Day

Lip Seng


This image was set up and taken during one of my Sunday outings at the now-demolished Outram Park Flats, Singapore. Later, I montaged the original with a piece of lith film to create the bias relief effect. This is another image from my FRPS panel. I think one of most difficult tasks in photographic art is to develop your originality and individuality. I think I have successfully achieved this by 1970. The visual impact of this image is quite obvious.

Ship Painter

Lip Seng

This is one of my colour derivation slides that I converted into a colour print and which won me the best colour print (FIAP Gold Medal) at the 22nd Singapore International Salon (SIP) in 1971. In addition, this was also judged as the best local entry (Dato Aw Cheng Chye Gold Trophy Award) and was also selected for the Pewter Tray Award of the SIP. Some of you may get the impression that this was a set-up picture. Actually, this was one of many images of man at work that I captured during the Colour Group of the Photographic Society of Singapore regular Sunday outings. For this picture, it was taken during an outing to the Jurong Shipyard. The only colour that I added here was the shirt of the painter.