We live in a flat

A long shot. And for the birds, how near and yet how far from the sky. And how far away are you reader from Singapore where this picture was taken?

Phoneography Monday Challenge: Black and White
Pic #1 Apps used – Camera+, Gorillacam, Snapseed
Pic #2 Apps used – Camera+, Snapseed, Blendcam, Camera360 (Jelly), HDR Art (Red October)

Pic #1

This is a scene from my mother’s neighbourhood. Keeping birds seem to be more a pastime for elderly man. The birds get to go out on their “walks” and a bit of sun when the elderly men congregate at the bird poles to socialise and enjoy their feathered friends. Perhaps hanging them up high helps the bird song weave through the atmosphere further. I can’t really say.

I took a picture because there aren’t so many of such pole-dotted landscape nowadays. I imagine it would be quite a sight and soundscape should the poles have been filled to capacity.

Pic #2 (colour version on instagram, click.)

While the clear sky showed up the bird cages on the bird poles really well, I found the surrounding trees noisy and disrupted the pattern of the poles. I decided to disrupt the image further by blending in a previous picture I had taken of clouds over the surrounding landscape of blocks of flats. What you see is a triple exposure of two images only. Perhaps the ghosts of apartment blocks predict the future removal of this public interaction space? That is not impossible.

The colour filter I used for the picture (before conversion to black and white) has a pretty distinct signature to it which I do not favor. Hence if you look carefully, a bird silhouette added in photoshop helped to shield the number “5” that comes with the filter. In my mind’s eye, I could see a swarm of ghostly bird silhouettes building into a crescendo from the poles to the sky to create a visual image of bird song. That could be cool :P

I recently created a Twitter account for this blog. I was surprised to find people using the hash tag #unfiltered for their images. This makes me wonder, do you prefer your photos clean or filtered so that they become virtual/alternate versions of what exists in reality?