I will be back in Indonesia next week covering Medan, Padang and Jakarta and this time I'll be much wiser .......

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Went to Utterly Art at South Bridge Rd today to attend the opening of Lance's exhibition 'My Sisters - Their Stories' and ran into alot of old friends and aquaintances.

Seems that Singapore is facing a renaissance of sorts in photography recently with at least 2 photography related galleries opening up over the past 2 years.

Among the many friends I ran into, I saw Ming. His works have been gaining momentum and serious depth. He'll be moving into Little India soon for the Artists in Residence project and is looking to hold 3 major exhibitions in 2005.

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The 'Crossing Bridges' exhibition, currently open at The Photographers' Gallery have been gathering momentum and I expect tomorrow (9 Oct) to witness a huge turnout of fellow photographers and friends at 3pm.

Last minute errands like getting flower leis for the VIPs, making sure that the food and beverages are on schedule and getting a ribbon together for the ribbon cutting ceremony have been keeping the few of us organizers busy. I havent even prepared my speech yet, I'll likely speak from the cuff.

The Straits Times, Streats and Zao Bao newspapers have kindly put up features on the exhibition and hopefully the photo magazines will put in a mention of the event as well. Kompas will run a feature in Indonesia on it as well.

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Ran into Arbain Remby, Chief Photo Editor from Kompas when he was in Singapore recently for a short vacation. He was in Athens covering the Olympics for the newspapers. He mentioned that the weather was a killer 40 degrees C almost daily and that security was extremely tight. He was registered as a photographer and not a photographer as it allowed him total and immediate access to stories and results.

He's switching over to Canon from Nikon.

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The book on Robert Capa, Blood and Champagne by Robert Kershaw that was presented to me as a gift by Carl Radford, has been angrily sitting in my study at home demanding to be read.

A character as colorful as Robert Capa will make for fascinating reading and I am speculating the adventures, trials and tribulations that await my eyes between those pages. I have been too busy with work to get down to it. The last book I'd read was a measly 235 pages thin with 15 pages dedicated to images....... it took me a disgraceful 3 months to finish. But I promise an honest critique of it when I'm done.

I still prefer a good read to watching DVD documentaries. The DVD on the life and times of one of Photography's Masters, Eugene W Smith almost put me to sleep....... the book documenting his biography kept me riveted for 3 days of intense reading and I'd felt gave me a deeper look into Smith as a human.

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In the past camera recalls by agents and manufacturers were based on defective parts like, film rewind crank, sticky shutter releases, faulty shutter curtains etc etc........ how times have changed.

Quoted from Dpreview ..... how they fix these problems nowadays ..... we used to rely on mechanical technicians and witchdoctors to have our cameras repaired in the past. Nowadays, thats being replaced by firmware.

Quote start "......Following several incidents of 'dead cameras' Canon pulled its 1.0.4 firmware update for the EOS 20D shortly after it was published. Today Canon has posted version 1.0.5 which includes all of 1.0.4's updates and should (hopefully) not cause any further update problems ......." Quote end

.................to be continued