Darren Soh | Photographer

01/06/2026

It's been awhile since I managed any kind of decent lightning photos, so it was a big surprise this evening while I was on a roof garden at the newly opened Bishan Ridges photographing something else in the opposite direction when the flashing in the north started. For a whole 30 mins, it was very intense and this is the result of some 60 strikes, stacked into one image. Go Big or Go Home!

31/05/2026

Eighteen years ago, I got an assignment from a US-based food magazine to do a story on "street food" in Singapore.

You don't have to be Singaporean to know that there isn't really such a thing anymore in this country so we ended up going to Lau Pa Sat to photograph the satay sellers and went to a more "internationally known" hawker centre like Maxwell and threw in some Toa Payoh and Geylang for good measure.

But the one location that was memorable for me photography-wise was the East Coast Seafood Centre where Jumbo Seafood is located because I had to borrow a tall ladder from the restaurant in order to raise myself above the dining crowds so I could make an image where there was some depth in the image instead of just a sea of people mashed up against each other eating their chili and pepper crabs.

I don't eat crab, but I do enjoy crunchy deep fried baby squid.

Did you ever take eating Singaporean seafood right by the sea for granted? Because I did.

31/05/2026

I used to remember misty mornings were commonplace in the 1980s when Singapore was a lot less built up than it is today.

Going to school in the early morning meant seeing wooded areas shrouded in mist.

As the country got more and more urbanised, many of these wooded areas made way for housing and other developments, and with that, the misty mornings also dwindled.

However, it is not impossible to find, see and appreciate mist covered areas in Singapore today, you just need to know where to look.

I photographed this in Sembawang this morning, on the way to Sembawang Park, near where Nelson’s Bar, another historic institution, is located.

29/05/2026

I have been a longtime collaborator of Sony Singapore having used the very first Alpha full frame mirrorless cameras (A7R and A7) launched in 2013 till today.

In my work with Sony, we sometimes partner other organizations to do creative work as well, and one of these projects was the "Discover Mandai" campaign with Mandai Wildlife Reserve.

Today, one of my images made for the campaign was used in a full front page advertisement in The Straits Times as Mandai celebrates the opening of new attractions in the Reserve.

For the record, this photo was a single exposure image made on my Sony A7RIV camera paired with a 24-105mm f4 zoom lens (the SEL24105G). It was a spontaneous capture and no the orang utan was not posed 🤣 nor added in post.

It remains one of my favourite images from the Discover Mandai campaign and I'm glad to see it used so big on the front page of our National Broadsheet. Thank you again to both Sony Singapore and Mandai for these meaningful projects and also, thank you for adding my photo credit! 🙏

24/05/2026

In 2014, the internet (in Singapore at least) was abuzz with an image published in the The Guardian of an eerily familiar yet largely forgotten scene that was unmistakably Singapore (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/picture/2014/aug/07/summer-night-singapore-photography).

Almost no one I know had seen this photo before and it came with a simple caption “Residents of an apartment block cool down in the night air, Singapore, 1962”. The photograph was by Winfield Parks / National Geographic / Getty Images.

The captivating image showed the silhouetted bodies of several individuals standing outside what was presumably their flats along a porous common corridor that any Singaporean would recognise as a Housing & Development Board slab block. If the year in which the image was made is indeed accurate - then this could be at only one of two locations - either Old Airport Road or the Tg Rhu estate at Kg Arang / Kayu and Jalan Batu as these were the only areas in Singapore that had completely porous grilled common corridors in 1962. In 1962, there was also no void deck yet, so the ground floor consisted of homes as well.

Regardless of where the photo was made, we do know that it DID NOT eventually make it to a large National Geographic story on Singapore published in August 1966 - titled SINGAPORE, THE RELUCTANT NATION, written by Kenneth MacLeish and photographed by Winfield Parks. It turned out that Parks had visited Singapore from his native US many times in the 1960s in order to photograph for this story and as it was common in those days, much of what he photographed did not make it to the magazine. Parks was only 30 when he made that image of the HDB block and alas, he would pass on too soon at the age of 45 in 1977 from a heart attack.

Two nights ago, on a similarly hot and humid night, some 64 years after Winfield Parks made his image, I stood in a 33 storey stairwell in Bishan with a 200-600mm zoom lens attached to a 1.4x teleconverter and my Sony A7RV pointed toward Toa Payoh, and made this image thinking of Winfield Parks’ photo.

I’d like to think of it as a tribute to Parks’ work on Singapore, and wondered what he would achieve with the technology of today and also mused a little about what he might have thought about the Singapore of today.

11/05/2026

34 years ago in 1992, the first Cineplex in Singapore opened in Yishun Central. Named Yishun 10 because of its ten cinema halls, something unheard of at that time, it quickly became a hit with young people, my schoolmates and myself included.

Designed by the late Geoffrey Malone who was also a co-founder of the Singapore International Film Ferstival (SIFF), the cineplex underwent extensive changes in 2010 which saw most of its garish neon fixtures and partially bright red facade removed in favour of a more sombre (and I must add boring) outlook.

Some of the original design remains however - like this spire-like signage spotting both the Golden Harvest and Village Roadshow logos - signifying the joint venture between the two leading to the formation of Golden Village Cinemas - of which Yishun 10 was its first cineplex.

In the last 34 years and especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, the cinema industry has struggled and I guess the writing was on the wall for GV and Yishun 10. Last week, it was finally publicly announced that Frasers, which now owns the building, was going to demolish the cineplex and redevelop it into yet another mixed-use development.

I live near Yishun 10 and am sad to see it go mainly because it was such a large part of my teenage years but also because of its role in the history of cinema in Singapore.

16/04/2026

A big thank you to Helmi Yusof and The Business Times for taking time to talk to me about my 20th year of practising as an architecture photographer and sharing 20 images that are special to me.

Top architectural photographer Darren Soh revisits 20 years of documenting the city’s vanishing landscapes Read more at The Business Times.

05/04/2026

“19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”

Ephesians 2:19-22

He is Risen! It is Easter Sunday and I thought it would be appropriate to share these images I made nearly three years ago of the St. Mary’s Cathedral in Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan that I’ve never really shown in this number and sequence before.

Designed by none other than the great Kenzo Tange, St. Mary’s Cathedral was completed in 1964 and serves as the seat of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Tokyo. A concrete structure clad in stainless steel, the cathedral is a sight to behold and possibly the most stunning modernist church standing today.

A little known fact is that Kenzo Tange converted to Catholicism later in his life and took on the name of Joseph. When he passed away in 2005 at the age of 91, his funeral was held at the St. Mary’s Cathedral. His remains are also interred within the Cathedral.

31/03/2026

Apple turns 50 tomorrow on 1st April and the company has (like many others) had some really amazing highs and the lowest of lows, at one point becoming the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization. It also nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s before Steve Jobs was brought back to the company to turn it around.

I am the same age as Apple and while I was a relatively latecomer to the Apple ecosystem (in 1999), I have seen how Apple has innovated, grown but also sometimes stagnated.

in 2019, I was honoured to be the only photographer from Asia to be included in a list of ten global winners for Apple's inaugural photo contest. The following year, I was asked to be a judge in the same global contest.

In late 2020, when pandemic restrictions were still very much in place, I had the opportunity to preview and photograph the stunning Apple Marina Bay Sands store before it opened to the public. The store remains one of the most beautiful and unique Apple Stores anywhere in the world.

Less than month ago, Apple once again sent shockwaves through the industry by launching the MacBook Neo, a low cost notebook computer that is poised to redefine the meaning of low cost portable computing for years to come.

Call me a fanboy if you choose, but I cannot wait to see what else Apple has lined up for the next few years!