Maxby and Photosafari has conducted a Penang Heritage Photo Walk for CAFFA Asia in conjunction with the Georgetown Festival. He is featured in this article written by Vivian Chong for Malay Mail Online
Photo taken by Miss Vivian Chong
GEORGE TOWN, Sept 12 — At 7am, the Nasi Kandar Beratur restaurant was serving the last of its customers; the pots and trays that were filled to the brim with curries when they opened at exactly 10pm the night before now practically dry.
A few diners were focused on their plates of rice coloured with fiery reds and oranges, while another group that had gathered in front of the popular eatery was there for a different reason.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and each with a camera slung around their necks, they are participants of the Heritage Photowalk & Cafe Crawl, part of last month’s George Town Festival (GTF) 2014.
The rest of George Town was just waking up, whereas this group was raring to go and continue where they had left off about 12 hours ago. The two-day event was designed take photography buffs through the city’s architectural and artistic gems, found among its labyrinth of small lanes, historical buildings and traditional businesses.
All of that translates into veritable photo opportunities, making this UNESCO-listed zone an ideal subject matter for one to point and shoot.
Organiser Caffa Asia is a Kuala Lumpur-based company that specialises in coffee-related branding and marketing events such as the Coffee & Art Fringe Festival Asia, which debuted at Publika last year.
Co-founder Karen Khoo had seen the potential in George Town’s booming coffee cafe scene and being a Penangite, she jumped at the opportunity to be a part of GTF. Her business partner Sasya Ahmad suggested roping in respected street photographer Maxby Chan to lead the walk.
Sasya had met Maxby on a Photosafari Experiences (PMPE) trip, one of several that takes place each year among members of photography forum PhotoMalaysia.com and are open to shutterbugs of all levels.
On top of being an administrator of the forum, Maxby teaches, writes and gives talks on photography, film processing and printing. He also conducts street shooting walkabouts and leads the PMPE trips, usually in far-flung locations involving off-the-beaten-path sojourns.
Coincidentally, Maxby is also a Penangite so things fell into place comfortably. On Day One, the walk began at Yeng Keng Hotel and moved to Lorong Stewart, Jalan Muntri and Love Lane — a hunting ground for murals and wire art, steel rod caricatures by Sculptures at Work that capture each street’s history.
The cafe crawl portion of the walk also covered several cafes that were supporting GTF 2014, including Mugshot, Twelve Cups and China House. The group split up after lunch, to rest and recover from the heat before reconvening for sunset watch at Fort Cornwallis, Malaysia’s largest standing fort that was built in the late 1700s along the promenade.
You can click and view the whole article Exploring Penang Through the Lens here.
