a dive into the dusty-verse of old hard-drives

because old work is best work

I’m pitching for an opportunity to work on a potentially very exciting multi-country task. To prove that I’m up to the job, I needed to look for relevant images in my archives.

That’s always a dusty affair of rediscovering the evolution of USB technologies.

These drive-dives can be frustrating sometimes as I haven’t really archived my work in a consistent manner. But the result is always fruitful and nostalgic. And that’s really re-affirming for me — if I look back at old work and feel good about it, it means that all that time spent on work was worth something.

Anyway, one of the images I was looking for was this photograph of a Burmese farmer I shot during an assignment for EnterpriseSG. It’s an image that I’ve kept as part of my portfolio for a long time. Because of that, I always remembered only one version of the image (the one at the top of this post).

But… I found more!

I liked this version of the shot below, with a larger flower in the foreground.

I was also surprised to find a rare smile in the mix!

Technically, it was also nice to see the almost decade-old files responding well to modern-day LUTs — I am currently toying with Rebecca Lily’s Presets .

I’ll leave you with some little stories about other picks. If you’d like to see everything else, everywhere, all at once, you can head to this portfolio page i set up.

More farms. But this time Canola flowers at a field outside of Changsha. On assignment for SilkAir.

Also for SilkAir: Early morning group exercises in Chong Qing, which i remember to be a behemoth of a city.

Ramen diptychs in the small town of Ishinomaki. I was there with my students to work on post-Tsunami stories.

Penang, but make it Hawaii.

A chef and chickens for briyani at a wedding in Bangladesh. I was there with Juliana Tan and Tay Kay Chin to make a film about Salim Javed’s trip back home to see his first-born.

La famiglia in Chianti.