I always wanted to play with this idea of long exposure photography along the a tuk tuk ride but did not get a chance to do it in until the Thailand trip last year.

On the way to dinner in Khao Sarn Road area, I decided to get a tuk tuk from Pratunam. It was not the best decision to commute around Bangkok at the time when everyone was stuck on the road but it was quite perfect for the shooting, I found. To get a tuk tuk in that scenario was a tricky task. Some drivers simply said no to the destination or called incredibly high fair price

When I hopped on the first tuk tuk in at least six year, my camera was ready to shoot. Few test shots were taken as we slowly crawled in the traffic. I found the best shutter speed setting was 6 second at f14. The variation of 192 images were shot throughout the ride until the last shot when I was getting off the vehicle.

The idea was to stay with the sequence of the shots so there was no hard work of editing these image. Digging the right sound was more important at this phase. Initially, a world techno track from Rama IV was laid as the background and quickly arrange the images as Sticky Tuk Tuk. I left that work for a while until I decided to create the original track for it to avoid copyright issue and enter the local art exhibition. In Mac-ready audio editing software, GarageBand, I found some good royalty free samples to loop and put them together.

Sticky from ApostrophePong on Vimeo.

This work is awarded as Commended in Marrickville Contemparary Art Prize (MCAP’08) for CALD category (artists from Indigenous of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse background). And I will be at the Artist Talks on Sunday 21 September (last day) at At The Vanishing Point Contemporary Art, 3-5 pm and the following Sunday at Chrissy Cotter Gallery, 2-3.30 pm.