shades of autumn: red

The beautiful blogs Bumbles & Light, Live & Love Out Loud and Project Alicia are hosting a photography challenge based around the shades of autumn. You can find out all the details by clicking on the button below.

At only 70-ish miles from the equator there's no traditional northern hemisphere change in the seasons here in Singapore. I thought this might be an interesting exercise in sharing the shades of a tropical Asian autumn; lush, vibrant and dripping with sweat colour.

Red is quite simply THE colour here. It's steeped in symbolism, enshrined in the national flag, and the country is occasionally even called "the red dot" (referring to the fact that on maps where city populations are displayed as proportionally-sized red dots, the entire country of Singapore is hidden by it's own dot). So here are some of the reds to be found in Singapore this autumn... with some pinks creeping in, I can't resist the red/pink combo.

lanterns in Chinatown

the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple

the wonderful Rochor complex

incense outside the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple

chillies in Little India

a little corner in my favourite little corner on the whole island, Papa Palheta coffee roasting house

These last three don't exactly meet the "contain 50% of the colour of the week" rule - okay they don't meet it at all - but red is certainly the focus (and they're my favourites of the bunch!).

mid-autumn lantern in the gloaming

faded glory - not only once red, but once neon too!

look, relak lah!

See my green, yellow and orange photos from previous weeks!

p.s. I decided to go square with most of these photos, cropping in round the most interesting aspects, purely because this blogger template (with photos in a long list) doesn't seem to do a mix of landscape & portrait shots any justice. Even at the "large" size, rectangular pictures are so much smaller and have much less impact than square, while "extra large" landscapes blow the margins and looks daft. Do you know what I mean? I quite like square pictures, but sometimes the composition suffers (it would never have worked in my last photo here) so I don't want to do it all the time. While I'm loathed to start tinkering with my layout already, if anyone has any recommendations for a better blogger template (wrt displaying photos) this novice would really value any help you can give! (for example - how do you get that lovely layout with a strapline menu across the top, under the banner, thus eliminating the sidebar?)