#087: I have the high ground

Last time I was up the KL Tower, I was still in uni in Australia; it was the year-end break, I think, and I was back in Malaysia. The main thing I remember is going up there with some friends who were from out of town. I have no other recollection of it. Back then, if I had any photos taken, they were all on film or a small point-and-shoot digital camera, which I need to dig up from somewhere in my vault of photos.

And so, I went back up mid-morning on an overcast day last month, family in tow, mostly to see what the city looks like from up there after twenty-odd years of me shooting it from down at street level.

Which is the thing: almost everything I shoot is street level. Eye level, arm's length, from the hip, sometimes lower when I crouch down… close enough to see what someone's carrying or how they're standing. Inevitably, craving the light and shadow scenes that the tall buildings provide in a city environment. Going up 300-odd metres and pointing a camera down is a completely different exercise. Taking my street photography to a higher level, pun very much intended, and not a subtle one.

There's no decisive moment in a cityscape shot from a tower. No gesture, no expression, no one about to step off a curb. Just rooftops, glass and concrete structures, cranes, and the grid of streets which I usually photograph from inside. It's strange seeing Petaling Street reduced to a strip of rooflines with no people visible at all. The same place I've photographed a hundred times from ground level, unrecognisable from above.

The overcast sky didn’t do the shots any favour. Flat light, no harsh shadows fighting for attention, which meant the shapes did the work instead; glass towers stacked against older low-rise blocks, construction cranes scattered across at least a few different sites within view. Twenty years of a city adding floors to itself, since I last saw it from this vantage point. I am not much of a landscape photographer, nor a cityscape photographer, so apologies if these photos do not look as stunning as some on social media. Just me tinkering around with subtle colours and contrast is what you get. Also, shooting through thick glass windows didn’t help much.

I wasn't up there with an agenda; the trip up was an impromptu idea for the day, beyond documenting what this version of the skyline looks like, right now. Whether it's a good habit or not, I don't shoot cityscapes often enough to have opinions about how to do it well. This was just an excuse to try, and to serve as a reminder of how much I default to shooting closer to the ground. It was fun for the kids too, but that excitement lasted 20 minutes or so before they got bored and wanted to go somewhere else. We did start the day with a lovely walk through the park at the base of the towers, which is a fun thing to do in the city, if you haven’t done so already or are just visiting.

So let’s see if it’ll be another twenty years or so before I make my way up there again, and hopefully this photo blog will still be around for me to do a proper comparison at that point in time. I'm guessing a lot would have changed by then.

All photos taken with the Nikon ZF + 28mm.

Cheers.

p.s: KL is currently being swamped by terrible haze, the worst in years. These shots would look unrecognisable in these current conditions. Let’s hope it gets better soon.