Gurney Plaza, Penang

Earlier in the week I posted a photograph from Singapore, taken on the last night of my holiday in that part of Asia.  Today’s post is of a photograph taken earlier in that same trip in what was one of my favourite stops of the holiday – Penang, in Malaysia.

I cited a lack of things to do in Singapore apart from shopping as one of the things I didn’t like about the city, so it is perhaps ironic I should choose a photograph taken in a shopping centre in Penang to represent that part of the holiday.  This particular shopping centre is the Gurney Plaza, and it was near to where we were staying (and also where I bought my 17-50mm lens).

There was a time when, growing up in Bishopstown in Cork, I could happily spend a full afternoon wandering around Wilton Shopping Centre, with all of about 20 shops (of which perhaps 3 were of interest – Porters, Golden Discs and O’Callaghans maybe) to keep me entertained.  Skip forward a decade, and I remember being astounded at the size of Liffey Valley and Blanchardstown shoppinng centres when they opened in Dublin, and indeed once almost got lost in a maze of interlinking shops in Jervis Street shopping centre.

Now I live within a stones throw of Dundrum Town Centre, which is apparently one of the biggest shopping centres you’ll find in Europe, and still growing, and I find I’m no longer so easily impressed by the vastness of other centres.  Although, the Gurney Plaza does make Dundrum seem as small as… well maybe not Wilton, but perhaps Liffey Valley.

[Note to readers:  Don't worry, this is a blog about photography and has not changed overnight into one about shopping centres... though I'm sure there's a niche market for one of those]

Having just purchased a 17-50mm f/2.8 lens (at a bit of a bargain), I was keen to try it out, and also keen to photographically try to convey the vastness of this place.  If you want to convey “vastness”, a wide angle lens is a good way to start.  And in this case a little distortion that it introduces can be your friend as it, in effect, brings even more of the scene into the frame.

I took this shot from the top floor of the shopping centre, looking down to the ground floor, paying careful attention to my framing to keep each floor below me visible, and using each almost as a frame itself for the one below it, which helps to draw the viewers eye into the shot.  The two sale signs make for some visual interest in the middle of the frame, and the scattering of people on the ground below both give the eye somewhere to go, and provide a good reference point for the scale of the other elements in the shot.

In hindsight I’m glad I didn’t have a fisheye lens when I took this shot, because I just know all the curved lines would have just been too much for me to resist shooting with the fisheye (remember, I’m a little addicted to it), and I don’t think that the end result would have worked as well as I hope this shot does.