Sights of UK: Street Musicians

Note: High resolution images of some of the following photos are available. These photos are marked with [HiRes] tags in their captions. Click on the photos to view their higher resolution images.

Begging is a bad issue in Malaysia. Beggars are everywhere, and they may be of all ages, sporting different "life difficulties" such as loss of limbs or sight. They can be found along the side walk, draped in dirty clothes. Outside the shopping centre, hoping to attract the richer folks. Some pedestrians even prefer to risk their lives than to use pedestrian bridges to avoid beggars.

In UK, however, things are different. I've been here for months now, and I don't remember seeing a single beggar.

Doesn't mean that you're dead if you don't have a single penny to spend, though. Just pick your own brain and go busking. Because here, if you can entertain strangers, they'll pay. And sometimes that doesn't even require any tools, except one -- brains.

Most of these people will opt for music. Street musicians are extremely common in Nottingham City Centre, especially during weekends.

The concept is simple. You get a harmonica. And a cup. And a stool. You choose a corner in busy streets of the city. You sit down on your stool. You put the cup in front of you (it'll be helpful if you have some pennies in it). You put the harmonica to your mouth. And you play.

And they pay you. Simple enough, right? You play, they pay. If you're good enough, that is.

[HiRes] A violin! I have that! This violinist was lightyears ahead of me though. Paid him a few pence for this photo.

If you're good, you'll gather big crowds (remember Mr. Bean's Holiday?). If you're bad, you're invisible (and inaudible, apparently). There's no harm in trying.

[HiRes] Organist at Nottingham City Centre.

Take this Muslim lady, for example. She obviously had no knowledge of music whatsoever. She was strumming a guitar randomly, her left hand stopping arbitrary strings. I wasn't even sure her guitar was tuned -- her chords were so jumbled up that even my absolute pitch hearing failed me. She got mad after seeing me with my camera and yelled unintelligible words at me. I hastily paid her a few pence before running away, trying hard to hide my amused look.

[HiRes] The Muslim lady with no musical knowledge. At all. Ah well, at least she knew a guitar when she saw one.

To reach out to more people, some invest on the big guns. Like this electric guitar player down here.

[HiRes] Big speaker with volume turned up. Who will miss that?

Some team up with others, get sets of elaborate costumes and perform tribal dances. And got quite successful at that too.

[HiRes] Red Indians? Beside the Nottingham Parliament House. They always get a lot of attention from the public the few times I saw them.

But sometimes, simplicity is best. I saw a female singer in London who was so loud (and good) that it was so hard to believe that she wasn't using any microphones at all.

The singer in London.

But you didn't know music?

Who says you have to?

All you need is a little creativity to gather crowds.

Like this headless man over here.

[HiRes] Simple, but effective. See how much the girl beside him was enjoying herself.

Or you can dress as Ironman.

Or Plasticman.

Or Junkman.

[HiRes] Junkman in London.

So what are you waiting for? Get your Hallowe'en costumes out and start scaring people out of their skins.

Gone?!

I just can't believe it.

Where are the days when I used to trade Pokémon games with my friends in school?

Where are the days when we brought all sorts of junk food to school someday in October to celebrate children's day?

Where are the days when mathematics was literally as easy as 1+1?

Where are the days when paper, scissors, rock could entertain us for hours at a time?

Instead of eating candies, I now drink beer. Oh dear!

Instead of chatting about games online, I now talk about girls. Oh my gawsh!

Instead of doing nothing at home and getting frowned upon by my parents, I now do nothing at home. And don't get frowned. What the hell.

Why has time passed by so fast? I haven't finished enjoying my life as a young, innocent, cute and irresistibly adorable boy yet. It's not fair!!! I want you to go backwards, Time!

What? There's only 4 more weeks before we conclude this decade? 10 years passed? Already?!!!

Oh, that, and my cousin's getting married.

Already??!!! Damn, I AM getting old.

Oh by the way, congratulations to Yue Fang on her wedding.

Can I grow younger now?

Photo Editing: Behind the Owl's Eyes

Note: High resolution images of some of the following photos are available. These photos are marked with [HiRes] tags in their captions. Click on the photos to view their higher resolution images.

Photo editing is now almost always synonymous with professional photography. Like it or not, we have to accept the fact that most commercial photos have been digitally nursed to perfection before released to the general public. Smooth-skinned models, mobile phones with irresistibly glossy screens and burgers filled with incredibly golden patties are so commonly seen. Even the smelly yellow material used for the newspaper failed to degrade the quality of the photos.

Before: Trent Building.


[HiRes] After. One of my earlier attempts at more drastic photo editing -- I was trying to improve the dynamic range of my 5-year-old compact camera. And one of the edits that turned out not-that-much-better than the original.

I'm not a real supporter of digital photo editing, but it didn't take me long to realise how a quick tweak here and there can drastically enhance the attractiveness of photos.

The least controversial edit one can make is cropping. It 'cuts' out the sides of the picture, zooming it in and can be easily done even with the most basic software, like Microsoft Paint.

Before: children playing with the fountain at Old Market Square.


After: cropped to give more focus to the children and the water instead of the buildings behind.

While I do not have access to Adobe Photoshop, the holy grail in raster image editing, I do have GIMP installed in my computer. While it isn't nearly as powerful as Photoshop, it has the most important features bundled, and is legally free.

One such feature significant to me is the ability to adjust the picture's brightness/contrast. It does so in three ways -- the basic two-slider, input/output levels and a more advanced brightness curve. This is useful in helping to save so many of my shots with poor dynamic range.

Before: Jubilee Campus from Triumph Road Entrance. It was dark at night and I didn't have a tripod (I never had one).


After. Foreground slightly brightened, with the sky reduced to a more interesting shade of blue. If you look carefully you'll also notice that this picture is slightly rotated and cropped.

I can even select a certain part to brighten, leaving the others in relative darkness.

Before: Jubilee Campus. The subject of this photo, the banner, was rather dark. If the sun were stronger, I could have used the flash to brighten the banner up, but it wasn't and doing so would probably cause visible reflection on the banner.


[HiRes] After. The banner has been brightened, with the other parts untouched. This averts the eyes towards the banner, and along with the (albeit slight) bokeh has thrown the rest of the photo into the background.

Of course, not all of my photos here at my blog are edited. Some escaped relatively unscathed (editing is considered destructive) as they were already good enough.

Before: sunset at University Park lake.


[HiRes] After. Slightly oranged, nothing much.

A photo editor can also easily tune the colour balance of photos. This is useful when the camera's white balance setting is set wrongly when the photo is shot. For example, a scene filled with yellow incandescent light may look whitish on photos. Yellow tint can be added to restore the correct colour balance.

Before: Parliament House, Nottingham City Centre. This was shot in the afternoon.


[HiRes] After. Yellow and red added, making the building look as if it were bathed in golden light.


Before: The Atrium, Jubilee Campus.


[HiRes] After. Brighter and more contrasty with more saturated colours. This edited photo actually has poorer dynamic range than the original, but throwing the grids into complete shadow over the internal lightings has created an interesting effect.


Before: a bench in the park. Taken in late September.


[HiRes] After. Red and yellow added, giving the entire picture a golden orange glow, all causing the scene look more autumn-like than ever.


Before: duck paddling in the lake, evening. The blue of the water makes it look more like night, though.


[HiRes] After. Orange light to the rescue again.

But of course, photo editing leaves marks, especially from less-than-professional editors (like yours truly).

Before: a gate in the wall. I purposely overexposed this shot, hoping to capture as much detail in the shadow as possible.


After. Split the photo into three sections and applied different colour balance, brightness/contrast settings on them, making it one of my most heavily edited photos to date. Very satisfied with how the wall turned out to be. Took me almost an entire hour on this photo alone and it has editing marks yelling all over.


Zoomed comparison of edit scar. Notice how the brightness of the ground differs in front and behind the iron gate.


Before: Trent Building seen from University Boulevard entrance. It was in the evening, the sun was setting behind the Trent Building, throwing everything (except the sky) into the shadow. A challenging scene for cameras.


After. The sky was slightly darkened, making the colours more saturated. The foreground brightness was tuned up greatly, giving the photo more balance between the sky and the earth.


Zoomed edited photo. Imperfect selection during editing has caused some pixels' brightness to be tuned incorrectly. Some sky pixels are brighter instead of darker.

There are still tonnes a photo editing software can do. One common technique is vignetting, which darkens the edge of the photo to give more attention to the centre. I'd personally like to try HDR (high dynamic range) tone-mapping, which combines several photos of different exposures into a single shot, enhancing a photo's dynamic range significantly. Unfortunately, GIMP isn't able to handle HDR natively, and even if it does, I'll still need a camera with bracketing function and/or full manual mode (preferably an SLR) and a tripod, both of which I have access to only in my wildest daydreams.

Looks like honesty is still the best (and easiest) policy after all.