Category: Decisive Moment

Pelican In Flight

Lip Seng

In 1986, I was invited as a guest speaker of the Australia Photographic Society Annual Convention, Adelaide, South Australia. I had the opportunity to visit Kangaroo Island during the pre-convention tour. I remembered taking this shot on the island before the actual tour programme started in the morning. As they say: The early bird catches the worm! I used a shutter speed of 1/250 sec with a Telyt 250mm lens on my Leicaflex SL. The image was captured on Kodachrome film.

This image won me another PSA Gold Medal for the Best Slide of the Show during the 26th 35mm International Salon of Photography held in Hong Kong in 1988. This is one of three PSA Gold Medals that I had ever won from the same international salon.

Final Heat

Lip Seng


The South East Asian Athletics Meet at the Singapore National Stadium in the early 80’s provided me with an opportunity to capture this decisive moment image.

In this day and age, you may think that I might have used the motor drive to take a series of exposures (and then chose the best picture). Actually, I had only one shot of this right moment. For such a picture, your timing really had to be right on the dot. Incidentally, this image was the Grand Prize winner of the Canon Photo Contest, 1984. The prize included a Canon new F1 with motor drive unit and two lenses with focal length from 50mm to 210mm. On top of that, I enjoyed a free stay at the Mandarin Hotel with my family.

Only One Is Free

Lip Seng

My last outing in Bali, October 2003 was another successful one (photographically!). Besides photographing other subjects, I came across this interesting image. Cockerels in Bali are reared for cockfight and are considered as precious commodities! Since cockfight was declared illegal, they can now only be seen during the temple festivals. Obviously, this freed one was not one of those that was reared for the cockfight.