Darren Melrose Photography

This week’s Alternate Take comes from the Dongmen street market.  Some fresh corn for sale, taken with the iPhone using Hipstamatic.

My (late in uploading) Alternate Take for the past week comes from the iPhone and I believe was processed through instagram. A shop in the Gonguan area of Taipei uses water filled milk cartons, both as decoration and as ballast in preventing their awning from being blown away in the case of wind.

This week’s Alternate Take is from my iPhone and was created using both the ClassicINSTA and Instagram apps. A guy strikes a James Dean pose on the streets of Taipei.

Earlier this week, Craig had a post showing some of his images of faith in Asia.  Craig’s post was in response to Steve McCurry’s A Matter of Faith posting, which was followed in return by David Sanger, who posted Images of Faith.  David called for other photographers to make similar blog posts; this is my contribution.

I have to admit, I was quite enthused to start up this post; Faith has been a pretty constant subject in my photography and religious faith is something that I find inherently beautiful.  Finding images was not the issue, even a very cursory run through my photo library came up with way, way too many photos to post here.  Even as I write this post, I really don’t know how many photos I will include.  Doubtless it will be too many; editing things down is difficult.

For some photos, I will simply give titles, for others, I will offer some details or an opinion.  I hope you will wade through all that I post and I do hope you will enjoy. Thanks for your indulgences in what will be an overlong post.

To my mind, one of the greatest things about houses of worship in the East is how they are not simply places to pray, but they serve as community centers.  People visit, eat, play chess and just generally live in and around the temples and mosques in Asia; I am much more drawn to the community center feeling of these places than I am to the more single use churches in the west. Here at Jama Masjid, the men spend hours socializing between prayers.

Similarly, I don’t believe that you would find someone both washing his shoes, then laying them out to dry on a church’s steps, as I found at this small temple in Taipei.

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This week’s Alternate Take upload comes from my iPhone, using the LomoLomo app, with the tilt shift camera option.  Not really what a tilt shift lens would produce, but I like the effect nonetheless.