Category: Prize-winning

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.

The Frame

Lip Seng

The image was a montage of three films altogether. The original colour transparency was sandwiched (in the middle) by a piece of high contrast ortho film (the image of the frame) on one side, and another piece of blue Diazochrome film (for the image of blue sky) on the other. During the mounting process, the blue Diazo film was adjusted out of registration to create the outlines. All these years, contemporary style has been one of my favorite creations, now made much easier with the advent of digital imaging and Photoshop.

This image was awarded the PSA Gold Medal for the best contemporary slide of the show and the Wellington Lee Award of the 28th Singapore International Salon of Photography in 1977. This is one of the National Gallery, Singapore, Permanent Collections.

Candle Light

Lip Seng

Once a year, on the 8th day of the Chinese New Year, the photographers from Singapore would visit a temple at Devonshire Road to take picture of the long candles. This near mid-night event was very popular among our local photographers. Taken with high speed Ektachrome film, I montaged the original transparency later with a piece of blue-toned positive film to create the saturated blue flames with bias relief effect. This picture is another example of my colour derivations treatment with transparencies. It was considered very creative by many others during that time: I was fortunate to win the coveted Gold Trophy (Best Slide of the Show) of the 23rd Hong Kong International Salon, in 1968 with this picture.