This was the way we mount our photos

Below is a shot of the photo album which Russ Wickson was kind enough to send me last year. I used to have several photo albums like this one; but unfortunately I had thrown them all away. But thankfully, I kept many of the old photos. Do you notice the interesting way in which the photos are mounted? Each photo is mounted onto the photo album using 4 plastic self-adhesive corners. The pages are usually thick drawing block type paper and the pages are separated by a waxy transparent sheet.

The next generation of photo albums as far as I can recall had a sticky surface onto which you placed your photos. It is overlaid by a large clear plastic sheet. I regret using this type of album because after some years my photos got stuck to the pages. Any suggestions for removing them without damaging my precious old photos?

The next type photo albums came with individual plastic pockets. I still have several of them. But the ones I liked most were those which I bought in Japan. During my three-and-a-half month training in Japan in 1985, I took several photos and filed them in these albums. I liked the space provided at the side for you to write your notes. I bought a ten-volume set which came with a neat box file. I am glad to note that my 1985 photos are all still in good condition.

Today, in the digital age, I keep most of my photos as images on my hard disk. I find online albums like Flickr.com extremely useful for sharing large numbers of photos with many people. Unfortunately many people of my generation have not kept up with the times. For example, in my church I am in charge of sharing photos of important events with our members. When I uploaded the photos onto Flickr and emailed them the guest pass to access these photos; many did not know how to download the photos. I offered to teach them, but suggested that it was best that they consulted their children.

And here I have a complaint against our young people. They are often too impatient to teach their elders IT-related stuff. Have you forgotten the many hours your parents spent patiently teaching you the million and one things in your life?

Thank you for the photos (Part 2) - Arthur Poskitt

In my previous post, I mentioned that I received an email from a gentleman by the name Michael Frost who generously offered to share his photos with me and Peter. I must sincerely apologize to him for getting his name mixed up. Michael Frost was the name in the ‘Sender” of the email. But his actual name is Arthur Poskitt. I reproduce below excerpts of his emails to me first and then to Peter as well.

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Singapore Jan 1948 – Jun 1949

Hallo I would like to introduce myself.

Arthur Leonard Poskitt (80) I served in Singapore as a Signalman and ran a drawing office at a village called Yio Chu Kang for about eighteen months with the Royal Corps of Signals.

My main duties were supervising line parties to repair underground communication cables and service test huts as the location of all underground cable routes were destroyed at the onset of the Japanese occupation.

The handwritten notes read: “Strangely miserable picture a few weeks after arrival at Yio Chu Kang!”

While I was in Singapore I took the opportunity of taking several hundred pictures of the area through the eyes of a national serviceman. I covered the whole Island from the Causeway and the southern islands then known as Blakang Mati now known as Santosa, Paulu Brani and other islands in the area.

Pictures include army life under canvas and city street scenes which no longer exist!

I found your blog/website and thought you might be interested in the above.

The handwritten notes read: “Birds eye view of the island city from the height of the Cathay Building”

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Regarding army service, I departed from Liverpool on the White Star liner 'Georgic' (then converted into a troop ship) in December 1947 arriving at Nee Soon transit camp in Singapore in January 1948 and thence to join the Singapore District Signal Regiment at Yio Chu Kang and put in charge of the drawing office. My duties took me across the Causeway to Johore Bahru and further north until curtailed by the terrorist insurgency of 1948. This did not prevent me from taking leave in both Penang and Kuala Lumpur traveling by steam train. My close-knit group of army friends seem to spend a lot of time at the cinema. Does the Pavilion cinema and restaurant on Orchard Road still exist? Also the Cathay, once the highest building in Singapore! The Shackle Club will have long gone. We also spent some Saturday nights watching wrestling at the Great World arena.

Hereby lies the problem. I have no prints except an album with captions and very substandard contact prints produced on return to England in July 1949 and thus unable to provide a sample. Everything is digital these days!

You tell me you are interested in all things military in the late forties and this is all here, together with street scenes (ie: ancient tramcars on the Serangoon Road), country kampongs and rubber plantations in which we lived under canvas during the interminable monsoon. I also have pictures of the war cemetery at Kranji and the ancient graveyard at Fort Canning.

Not only do I have negatives but also kept a very extensive diary of army life. Even the original camera still exists!

Though now approaching my eightieth year I still travel extensively when my work as an advertising artist permits. Journalists with whom I have worked and count as friends say that I have enough material for a book and would hate to think that on my demise this unique and valuable archive might be lost forever.

Regards.

Arthur Poskitt.

The Age of Film (Part 3) – Slides

There is one type of photo that I often took during the 1980’s and 90’s because of my job as a management consultant. These are slides. I suspect many of my younger readers do not know what is a film slide. To them the word ‘slide’ probably conjures the image of a Powerpoint slide.

A slide is a film negative mounted on a stiff rectangular frame. To show the image to a group in a classroom or a conference hall, you need to mount the slide on a carousel and project the images onto a screen using a slide projector.

The film by the way is different from that for normal photography; although they looked just the same. You have to check the roll of film carefully. The method of processing is also different. I remember a very nasty incident with a shop located at Coronation Plaza. I brought my roll of slides there for processing but they mistook it for normal film. In the end the film was ruined and the images came out all black and yellowish. My precious effort in taking the photos at my client’s factory was all wasted. The shop was unapologetic and simply compensated me with a new roll of film.

In my work, I have to take a lot of photos of situations in the client’s premises that could be improved by 5S. (A Japanese technique for good housekeeping and workplace organisation. Please see my other blog to if you want to know what is 5S). But using slides was a very tiresome affair, and I am really thankful for the new digital technology. For one, not all the clients had a slide projector because it was very expensive. And, they are very heavy.

Using the slide projector can also give rise to many problems. If you placed the slide into the carousel in the wrong position, the picture would come up wrong; either upside-down or front-to-back. A trick I used was to draw a small stick figure at the lower corner of my slide. When the slide is positioned correctly, you should be able to see the man standing upright. Thus, at one glance, you can spot any slide that has been positioned incorrectly in the carousel. In 5S jargon, this is known as visual control (mede miru kanri in Japanese).

As a trainer, you had to get to the class early to set up the equipment and also to arrange all the slides properly and test the equipment. If possible, I would bring my own carousel with all the slides already pre-arranged. The carousel has a transparent cover and the slides won’t fall out. But some machines - usually the cheaper ones, used a straight tray instead of a circular carousel.

Another problem with slides is that they easily get jammed in the projector. This is especially so when you needed to tilt the projector at an angle to project your image upwards. Let me explain.

As I said earlier, the slides are arranged in a carousel with 80 slots. The first time you pressed the advance button, the carousel would rotate anti-clockwise by 1 position. The first slide would drop into a slot in front of the projection bulb. As you continued to press the advance button, the previous slide would be ejected, the carousel would rotate and the next slide would drop in and so on. If a slide gets jammed in the machine, you have to rotate the carousel manually to the beginning, remove it and eject the jammed slide and start all over again.

In the nineties, after I left the NPB to go into private practice, I did a lot of work in Malaysia. Can you imagine how tedious it was every time I went for an assignment outstation. Not only had I to carry along a heavy load of transparencies, I also had to remember to bring along my collection of 5S slides.

With a huge collection of film slides, I needed a good system of storing and organizing them. I used a special folder or album like this one. The slides are placed into individual pockets on a plastic page that can be filed in the folder.

So you can see why I took to digital photography very happily when the technology came along. But first I had to convert some of my slides to jpeg images. I remember paying a hefty sum for the service.

The Age of Film (Part 2) – Photo Studios

It’s been many years since I last applied for a job. I don't know if people still pasted a passport photo to their application forms, or do they just email a digital form to their prospective employers nowadays.

This is a negative of one of my passport photos. I wonder if kids born in this century even know what a negative looked like.

I still have in my possession several small envelopes containing passport photos of me taken years ago. The youngest photo was probably taken in primary school. Growing up as a kid in Singapore, we needed to go to a studio every now and then to have our passport photos taken. The studio would hand over the photos in a small envelope like the ones shown below together with the negative; in case we needed to order more copies later.

1) Golden Palace Photo Studio in Queenstown. I blogged about it previously here. Notice that they specified, "Opposite Margaret Drive Queenstown Library"?

2) Peking Color Photo Studio at Balestier Road and Toa Payoh. Some readers mentioned this studio here.

3) Snow White & Co at Serangoon Garden Way. This one must be very old. The telephone number has only 5 digits.

4) White Mount Studio at 4½ milestone, Bukit Timah. I think it was at the row of old shops between Cluny Road and Serene Centre.

5) New Columbia Studio at Alexandra Road.

Studios like these played an important part in our lives. At key milestones of our lives, such as graduation, or wedding, we would go to the studios to have our portraits taken. Other times, it could be just to take a family portrait. But I recall that my sister and our female cousins did go to the studios occasionally to have their photos taken.

If you look at the words in the envelopes you would notice that one or two emphasized “air-conditioned”. This means that not all studios had air-conditioning in those days. Without air-conditioning, it could be quite uncomfortable for the customers. The men could be formally dressed in coat and tie whilst the ladies had their make-up. Such photography sessions could be quite long and the bright studio lights added to the heat.

Below is another of my negatives. This one was taken during my university convocation. It was held at the National Theatre and the university commissioned a studio located at Block 112 Depot Road called Ideal Colour-Photo Laboratory Pte Ltd to take all the shots of us receiving our scroll from the guest-of-honour. At that time, I didn’t even know where was Depot Road.

I doubt any of the above-mentioned studios are still around today. Would my readers know?

The Age of Film (Part 1)

In his 2006 national day rally speech, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke about the ‘great digital divide’; referring to the big difference between the lifestyles of today’s youth and those of my generation. Recently, I discovered that one area where this divide was quite marked was in the way we dealt with photographs.

During the June holidays, I attended a church camp in Kuantan where our trigger-happy photographers took hundreds of high resolution photos. After we came back, I was put in charge of disseminating the photos to our members. In the old days, the way we would do it would be to first bring the negatives to the studio to print one set of the photos and then display them on the notice board or circulate them in an album. Members would then fill up a form indicating which photos they wanted to order, and then I would bring the negatives to the studio to get them printed. I would then sort them out, distribute them and collect the money.

But when the number of members runs into hundreds, this was obviously a very tedious affair. And so I wanted to do it the modern way, which of course is to upload the photos onto a photo-sharing website like Flickr or Photobucket, and then simply direct members to the website to view and download the photos for themselves. But to my surprise, I found that many of the older adults did not know what was Flickr. Frankly, I believe if I hadn’t taken up blogging, I probably would not know what was Flickr either. I grew up in what can be described as the golden age of film.

Up to 1970, all the photos my family took were black and white photos. You have seen many of them on this blog. But in 1970, I used my first roll of colour film which I blogged about here. The film I used was Kodak of course. At that time, Kodak was the dominant brand. I remember when I came back from my holidays, I brought my precious roll of film to the Kodak Centre in Alexandra Road (near to where the Performance Motors Centre is located) to have my film processed and printed. I think each print cost more than $1.

But soon another brand burst onto the scene to challenge Kodak’s dominance. That brand was Fujifilm. From the seventies onwards, the cost and speed of processing colour films came down rapidly. Two other brands of films also became popular. They were Konica and Agfa. At the same time, ‘idiot-proof’ cameras with auto-focus and built-in flash also made their appearance.

The demand for films and film processing sky-rocketed and many photo shops and kiosks sprang up all over the island. Some famous names that I can recall off-hand are Standard Colour Centre, Singapore Colour Centre and Joo Ann Foh.

Thanks to this technological advancement, my dad who was retired and who loved to travel, was able to leave behind several albums of photos after he passed away. Likewise, I was able to capture many shots of my children as they grew up.

This is my very first colour photo taken from a ferry to Penang in December 1970. At that time the Penang Bridge was not constructed yet.

This is a full-page advertisement by Standard Colour Centre in the 1993 street directory. They had branches all over Singapore.

This is my last film camera (left), which I believe is still in working condition. It’s a Canon EOS 1000F. I have placed it sided-by-side with my new EOS 400 for comparison. Many happy moments with my wife and kids were captured by this trusty, (and now dusty) Canon. The next shot shows the film loading compartment.

Related posts:

1) My cameras
2) Through the years
3) Gather moments while you may

Next time I will blog about the photo studios which played such an important role in our recording the key milestones in our lives.

Share your photos @ NLB

I think many readers of Good Morning Yesterday like to take photos of places and plants of Singapore. Besides those you post on your blog, I am sure, like me you have many other photos in your collection. Why not share them with other Singaporeans?

Here is one neat place where you can do just that. It is the National Library Board's Just Share website. It was introduced to me by my fellow Friend of Yesterday, the Rambling Librarian, Ivan Chew. Ivan incidentally was the first Singaporean blogger to recommend Good Morning Yesterday to the folks at Tomorrow.sg labelling me 'Singapore's oldest blogger' back in 2005 when I had just started this blog.

I have just begun to share my photos. For a start I will limit my photos to what I labelled "Peaceful Singapore". I will focus on places that are quiet and peaceful (and green), such as Lorong Semangka in Choa Chu Kang and Old Jurong Road.

I have one complaint though. How come they did not have a category on Heritage or Yesterday's Singapore?

Oh; I forgot to mention - you may even win some prizes through your photos. You can't get more Singaporean than that, can you?

Through the years

Have you seen the latest TV advertisement from Nikon? They adopted a technique that has been used ’through the years’; namely to simply play a nice song without saying anything about their product. The song of course is Kenny Rogers’ THROUGH THE YEARS.

It brings to mind a few other memorable tunes:

The first is Louis Armstrong’s WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD used by Fuji Film some years ago. I believe this ad won an award for the Viewer’s Choice at that time. Viewer’s Choice was a competition where viewers chose their favourite advertisement. (I think you will like this version)

Another one is The New Seekers’ I’d LIKE TO TEACH THE WORLD TO SING used by Coca Cola. This advert used to come up during the Christmas season. It showed a group of young people from different countries holding lighted candles and singing the song. As the camera zooms out, you see the picture of a Christmas tree formed by the candles. In this case, they modified the song a little to include, among other things, Coke’s famous tag line, It’s the Real Thing. You can see this ad here.

But my favourite is still Paul Anka’s TIMES OF YOUR LIFE for Kodak. Not only are the lyrics so meaningful; Paul Anka’s soulful voice adds a certain melancholy to the mood. I remember seeing this ad at the old Cathay Cinema. The snippet showed Paul Anka singing the song in a recording studio with headphones and all. The year was probably around 1975. You can listen to it here.

Some years ago, Kodak did a brief re-make of this advertisement; but the song was sung by someone else. I felt that it was a complete flop. Viewers who knew the song would automatically compare this version with Paul Anka’s and the obvious result would be disappointment. I think what Kodak should have done and should do is to show the original advertisement scratches and all. The age of the images, the old seventies fashion and even the scratchy sounds would themselves provide the nostalgia and remind the viewer about the brand name, Kodak.

In fact, I actually made a suggestion to Kodak to do just that. On their website, they have a feedback/suggestions section where they will reward you if your ideas are adopted. My suggestion however, was not adopted. I suspect there were some copyright issues involved. Too bad. Young viewers of today will not able to see for themselves what I try to describe here in words.

A view of the beautiful landscape outside our camp in Chien-Pu, Heng Chun, Taiwan, in March 1977


Whenever I hear Times of Your Life, I am reminded of my time doing army training in Taiwan on what was called Exercise Starlight. It was the culmination of our nine months of Officer Cadet Training. One day, my friends and I were moving along a dried river bed near our camp in Heng Chun. It was summer time and the river was quite dry. By the way, we were not supposed to do that. It was cheating and if caught would have certainly earned us some punishment. Anyway, as we passed a village, I heard this song coming from one of the houses and it made me terribly homesick.

Here’s another 'Ad song' I stumbled on while surfing around on YouTube - Kodak’s 1960’s advertisement using the song; Turn Around.

Do you have a favourite song like the ones I mentioned above? Please do share with us.

Gather Moments While You May

In writing this blog, one of my biggest frustrations is that I do not have the photos to illustrate the places I try to describe. For example, I wrote about the cemeteries of Pek San Teng or Kampong San Teng before it was converted into Bishan new town. How I wish I had some photos of what it used to look like – the hills with rows and rows of tombstones, the pavilions and even the traffic jams that took place every Qing Ming.

Many young people of today have no idea what Singapore looked like one generation ago. In his National Day Rally speech, PM Lee Hsien Loong announced exciting plans to transform Singapore. Add to that the ongoing Enbloc madness, and I fear that the next generation of Singapore will also have little idea of what Singapore looks like today; especially the many lesser known places.

Let me give you an illustration. I was at the Queenstown Library the other day and parked my car at the multi-storey car park next to NTUC Fairprice supermarket. I noticed that the car park was practically empty. The reason was obvious. Many of the nearby shops have either disappeared or shut down. Before long this place will be transformed beyond recognition. Fortunately, I had my camera with me and managed to capture some shots for you to enjoy. But unfortunately, the batteries ran out after a while.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is this. Take the advice from Paul Anka’s song, Times of Your Life and “gather moments while you may”. Take out your digital camera and take some photos of places in your neighbourhood that you think will be gone soon. Better still; do what my friend Kenneth is doing and document them in your blog. Your children will thank you for it.

OK. Enough words. Here are some photos of Margaret Drive in Queenstown, taken on 23 August 2007. Enjoy them because they will be gone before you even notice it.


PHOTO #1 – Hawker Centre


This signboard is next to the Hawker Centre. Three of the 6 items listed are no more: the emporium, shops/bank and restaurant.

This is a very old hawker centre. The most famous stall here is the fish ball noodles stall. On the upper floor, there used to be a POSB branch.


PHOTOs #2 and #3 – Emporium



On the left is a wet market and on the right is the hawker centre. There used to be a 3-storey building (Block 40B) in between. Top floor was a Chinese restaurant famous for its tim sum. I think it was called Golden Crown. They were relocated to the Safra branch at Bukit Merah. They had an outlet selling tim sum on the ground floor. I used to buy from them when I had a gathering at my home. On the second floor was a Chinese emporium. On the ground floor was a coffee shop and a Mont’ Dor cake shop. Here’s another shot taken from the hawker centre.




PHOTO #4 – Cinema and Bowling Alley


This building is just next to the NTUC Fairprice supermarket. It used to house 2 (I think) cinemas – Queenstown and Queensway; Plus a bowling alley and a KFC restaurant.


PHOTO #5 – Churches


On the left is the Fisherman for Christ church and on the right is the Church of Our Saviour. Do you know that both buildings used to be cinemas? The one on the right was called Venus; but I cannot remember the name of the one on the left.


PHOTO #6 – Banks



This photo shows the hawker centre at the top. Previously there was an HDB Block 40 blocking your view. On the ground floor, right hand corner was a Standard Chartered branch. To the right, at right angles to Block 40, next to the car park was Block 39. On the ground floor, at the corner was a Maybank branch. I used to have an account with them. Further to the right, on the other side of Margaret Drive would be my favourite National Library branch; the Queenstown branch. Along that stretch of road, there used to be many HDB apartment blocks. They have all been torn down. There are now only 2 blocks left. One of them is Block 39A.


PHOTO #7 – Block 39A



There used to be many shops at the ground floor including one photo studio called Golden Palace. Notice that their telephone number has only 6 digits.


Please feel free to download these photos and add them to your collection. You may want to show them to your grandchildren one day.

About My Photos

Ever since Ivan Chew submitted this blog to Tomorrow.sg, I have received many visits from young Singaporeans. I am truly heartened and encouraged by their kind remarks. I particularly love this one by yl; “wahhhhhh!!!!!!! Uncle!! YOU ROCK!!!!”

I think I need to explain a bit about the photos you see in this blog. You will notice that many of the old black and white photos had people posing (cham - my daughter is going to call me a ‘poser’). Please don’t think that people of our generation are so vain. It’s just that camera films those days were quite expensive; and thus it would be considered a waste if we took pictures only of scenery or buildings. It was thus customary to pose with the scenery as background.

Let me tell you a bit about the cameras we used those days. The earlier pictures were taken with our first camera - a Kodak Brownie. It was an ‘auto-focus’ camera, meaning you don’t need to focus - because there was no ‘focus’ function! It had small circular window behind for you to read the number of the photo you are taking. After taking 1 picture, you have to wind the film slowly till the next number appears in the window. Now if you forgot to do this, then the next picture you take will go on top of the previous one, and you have wasted 1 valuable photo plus whatever you took earlier is lost.



Our second camera was a Minolta Hi-matic. We bought it around 1969 (not 1967 as I said earlier). It of course had more features like focus, aperture etc. This time, to advance the film, you need to push a lever. But if you forgot to do it, there is an ‘idiot-proof’ mechanism that prevents you from taking the next picture. Interesting eh?

The photo below is my first colour photo. It was taken around end-1970 just after my HSC (A-levels) exams. I went on a tour to Malaysia with my parents and my elder sister. We brought along 1 roll of colour film. During the ferry ride across to Penang, we came across this beautiful scene of the setting sun and we decided that it was time to use our precious roll of colour film.

An interesting thing happened in Penang. At the hotel we stayed in, there was a stir in the evening around dinner time. It turned out that an up-and-coming teenage a-go-go star was also staying (or performing) at the hotel. Some of the girls in our tour group got very excited and wanted her autograph. Can you guess the name of the singer? Answer - Nancy Seet.

Today we are in the digital age. I am proud to say that this ‘uncle’ is quite familiar with digital photography. I was probably one of the earliest 'ah laus' to invest in a digital camera. My first digital camera was an Epson which cost about $700+. It didn’t come with an LCD screen, so I paid extra for an attachment; which was a mistake because I never got to use it. The reason was, the 4 pieces of AA batteries get used up so quickly, it was not practical to use the LCD screen; plus it was a bit clumsy to have a separate attachment. I have also learnt how to take and edit my own digital videos. I did all these not because I am a camera buff, but because my job as a consultant and trainer requires it. Actually I quite enjoy learning all these cool gadgets – only problem is people our age learn such things very slowly.