Author: Ethan Chua
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Captions & Cutlines: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing an Effective Photo Caption
A photograph freezes perhaps 1/500 of a second of someone’s life. The caption has to hold everything around it: who that person was, why they were standing there, what happened just before the shutter closed. I’ve found that the photographs I end up most interested in and care about most often depend on the few…
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Why I Sometimes Leave the Camera in My Bag
There are moments when my hand reaches for the camera and stops. Once, it was at a hawker centre late in the afternoon. An elderly man sat alone near the edge of the seating area, his coffee untouched beside him. The light coming through the open side of the building caught half his face. Behind…
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Landscape Photography for Beginners: A Complete Guide to Light, Composition, and Camera Settings
I once spent a long while watching light move across a single leaf. Nothing dramatic happened. No storm rolled in and no sunset flared. The light simply shifted, and the leaf changed with it: brighter, then softer, then almost flat. That small moment taught me more about landscape photography than any grand view has. Before…
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Singapore at 1 PM: In Defence of “Bad” Light
At one in the afternoon, the light outside a kopitiam can feel almost rude. It falls straight down, catching the silver edge of a table, bleaching the concrete pavement and leaving a hard shadow beneath every plastic chair. Someone walks past carrying a packet of kopi, and for half a second the white plastic bag…
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Depth of Field Demystified: A Beginner’s Guide to Depth of Field for Food and Cafe Photography
There is a particular kind of photograph I often notice in cafes: the coffee is sharp, the table disappears gently behind it, and somewhere in the background there is just enough suggestion of the room to tell me where I am. Nothing feels accidental. That, more than an aggressively blurry background, is what good depth…
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The People Behind Singapore’s Coffee Shops
Why do I keep photographing coffee shops when the coffee itself is rarely the most interesting thing in the frame? It is the people. Singapore’s coffee shops are built around small, repeated movements. A cup placed on a table. A kettle lifted from the counter. Someone wiping down a table before the next customer arrives.…
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Battery On Flight: Battery Must-Knows and Must-Haves for Air Travel
The first time I nearly lost a shoot before it began, I was standing at a boarding gate with a bag full of spare batteries in the wrong place. Nothing dramatic happened. No alarm, no drama. Just a quiet moment of doubt when airport staff at a security checkpoint glanced at my roller bag and…
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The Beauty of an Ordinary MRT Journey
Why photograph an MRT journey when millions of people make the same trip every day? Perhaps that is exactly why. Singapore’s trains are rarely treated as places worth photographing. They are practical spaces—platforms, escalators, fluorescent lights, tired faces, hands wrapped around phones. We move through them without really seeing them. But photography has always asked…
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The Photo Essay: How to Tell a Story With Photographs
One strong photograph can hold you on its own. You stop, you look, you feel something, and that is enough. But a photo essay asks a different question. What happens when several photographs are expected to work together, and what does a story told primarily through images rather than words look like? A photo essay…
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Photographing Singapore’s Void Decks: Stories Between the Buildings
Why photograph a void deck? It is easy to walk past one. The concrete columns, fluorescent lights, tiled floors, and rows of plastic chairs seem too ordinary to deserve a camera. But spend enough time beneath a block of flats and the place begins to change. You notice the uncle reading the newspaper, children cutting…
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