Darren Soh | Photographer

Darren Soh | Photographer Darren Soh | Architectural and Landscape Photographer. Singapore | Asia | All Images © Darren Soh

I'm currently putting the brand new Sony RX10V through its paces and yesterday evening, I decided to use it to photograp...
02/08/2026

I'm currently putting the brand new Sony RX10V through its paces and yesterday evening, I decided to use it to photograph the fireworks display at the National Day Preview II.

I dislike jostling with crowds, and the furthest distance I've ever put between me and the fireworks was from Changi to Marina Bay, so yesterday's location was still considered reasonably close.

The first image was made from the RX10V zoomed out to 24mm, its widest focal length and the fireworks image was made with the lens zoomed in to 600mm, the furthest the camera can reach.

All in all, very impressive images from an AIO (All-In-One) camera with a 1in sensor which is amazingly compact for the focal lengths it can cover.

I know most Saturdays are now dedicated to fireworks hunting for most photography enthusiasts but what do you do BEFORE ...
26/07/2026

I know most Saturdays are now dedicated to fireworks hunting for most photography enthusiasts but what do you do BEFORE camping for the fireworks?

Well, if you have some time to spare next Saturday 1 August, you may like to join Lauryn Ishak, Aloysius Lim, Charmaine and Wee Han of Tripeaksimagery and myself at Montage 2026, where we will be sharing about our craft and art.

There are four talks in total, starting with Lauryn’s at 1pm, followed by Aloysious at 2pm, then Tripeaks at 3.30pm followed by myself at 4.30pm. The location of the seminar is at NUS LT9.

Admission is absolutely free though registration is required for the talks. You can register your interest in this Google docs link: https://forms.gle/oMJJrfwtfCYV9qXh9

This year’s Montage is organised by The The Photographic Society of NUS - NUSPS and brought to you by Sony Singapore and Cathay Photo.

Hope to see you there!

While the National Day Parade may look different every year, there is actually a very strict formula that guides its pro...
22/07/2026

While the National Day Parade may look different every year, there is actually a very strict formula that guides its programme with some immutable constants - like the short blue hour fireworks burst that follows the conclusion of one of the early acts in the parade.

For as long as I have photographed the NDP, there has been this "blink and you'll miss it" moment and whenever I do photograph the fireworks, I try to capture it because fireworks against a blue sky are nicer than a black one.

In 2006, exactly twenty years ago, I was sitting in the audience at the now demolished National Stadium photographing the very last NDP that would be held in that stadium. I was using a rather special camera - a 4x5 large format film camera - a Toyo 45CF and had exactly 10 pieces of sheet film to last me the entire parade so I had to time my exposures properly - in more than one sense of the word.

In the end, the timing worked out and I managed to capture the blue hour fireworks which usually occurs around 7.30-7.40pm at every given parade.

Twenty years on, the blue hour fireworks still takes place - and will take place again this Saturday at the NDP Preview 1 as well as the next Preview and finally the National Day Parade itself on 9 August. Look out for it if you are at the Parade!

Even as physical changes happen quickly in other parts of Singapore, we shouldn't forget that the machinery of the massi...
30/06/2026

Even as physical changes happen quickly in other parts of Singapore, we shouldn't forget that the machinery of the massive project called the Great Southern Waterfront is very much in motion. Any structure along the southern coastline not gazetted for conservation will likely be redeveloped - such as the former Singapore Maritime / World Trade Centre now Harbourfront Centre that will close on 27 July and be demolished.

On the other side of VivoCity we have two historic buildings, one - the former St. James Power Station now gazetted as a National Monument and currently used by Dyson as its global headquarters and the other - the Prima Flour Mills and Revolving Restaurant. The Mills are actually still owned by Prima and in use today, though the restaurant stopped operating for good during the COVID-19 pandemic. The complex was built in several phases over the 1970s and is actually MUCH closer in age to Harbourfront Centre (1978) than St. James Power Station (1926).

As you can see in the distance, PSA's Keppel Terminal has already closed and is now temporarily used as a massive solar farm. What will happen to the Prima Flour Mills once its lease runs out? I am hoping it can be conserved and repurposed - that way we can show future generations of Singaporeans that the entire Keppel waterfront was once docklands with industries.

What do you think?

Nine years ago in 2017, Sony launched the fourth iteration of its AIO (All-In-One) Bridge Camera - the RX10 Mk IV. The R...
28/06/2026

Nine years ago in 2017, Sony launched the fourth iteration of its AIO (All-In-One) Bridge Camera - the RX10 Mk IV. The RX10 had the same 1in sensor as the RX100 series of compact cameras but was hardly compact. It did however have something the RX100 did not have - a 24-600mm equivalent zoom lens. Like the RX100 series, the RX10 saw regular updates - until the RX10IV.

We don't know why Sony stopped updating the camera - to be fair, it also stopped updating the RX100 two years after in 2019. It could have been a shift in devoting R&D resources toward the Alpha line of interchangeable lens full frame and APS-C cameras or as some rumours speculate - that Sony had a lineup of compact and bridge cameras so advanced already that they did not need to be updated.

This was of course nine and seven years ago respectively and photographers like myself have all but given up hope that Sony would ever update either the RX100 and RX10 series. I still sheepishly recommend both the RX100 VII and the RX10 IV to people who are looking to buy an AIO compact or bridge camera.

However, just last week, rumours surfaced that Sony would indeed be refreshing the RX10 with a RX10V, much to the surprise of almost everyone I know. And the icing on the cake was that the camera would arrive in the next TWO WEEKS!

I for one am very excited by this because the RX10IV was an excellent camera already and if it could be updated to 2026 standards (better AF, better Electronic Viewfinder, more pixels maybe) etc... it would sell like hotcakes.

Meanwhile, here's an image I made using the RX10IV in 2018, less than a year after it was launched, a view of the Taipei cityscape made from the top of Taipei 101.

Played tourist yesterday afternoon and took the cable car to photograph some last images of Harbourfront Centre, the for...
27/06/2026

Played tourist yesterday afternoon and took the cable car to photograph some last images of Harbourfront Centre, the former Maritime Centre and World Trade Centre before it closes for good on 27 July.

The HDB announced on Sunday that it would be launching 6,900 BTO units in its June BTO exercise, of which around 2,520 h...
09/06/2026

The HDB announced on Sunday that it would be launching 6,900 BTO units in its June BTO exercise, of which around 2,520 have a waiting time of less than 3 years.

Everywhere we look, it appears that the HDB is building more and more BTOs and one will inevitably wonder - how many flats is the HDB building at any one time and how many flats get completed since the pace seems to have picked up tremendously since COVID.

Well, thankfully we have statistics that can enlighten us and the numbers are... not really that shocking.

In 2025, the HDB completed 19,600 flats including the final ones that were delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic like Punggol Point Cove.

In 2024, the number was 20,294 and in 2023 it was 18,450. As expected, the lowest number of HDB flats completed in recent years was 2020, a year we would all rather forget where only 8,234 flats were completed.

So it appears that the HDB is working around a rough figure of 20k flats being completed every year moving forward and this seems like a sizable number especially with the seemingly large number of HDB construction sites all over the island.

And while we are certainly building a lot more flats than we did twenty years ago when the HDB building programme ground to a halt due to oversupply in the late 1990s, we are actually NO WHERE near the peak production of HDB flats. For that, we have to look to the 1980s.

In late 1979 early 1980, the HDB embarked on its fifth five-year building programme where it said it was aiming to complete 85,000 - 100,000 flats from 1981 to 1985. It also said (in the HDB’s 1979/80 Annual Report) that it would have completed 127,600 flats in the preceding five-year building programme (1976-1980).

By the end of 1985, the HDB managed to DOUBLE the number of flats it was initially aiming for the 1980-1985 period, delivering a whopping 185,266 flats.

In 1984 alone, the HDB built 73,231 flats. That number is nearly four times the number of flats completed in 2025.

In Tampines, 10,064 flats were completed in 1984.

In Bukit Batok, 11,963 flats were completed in 1984.

And in Yishun, a mind-boggling 12,617 flats were completed in 1984.

The HDB may still be Singapore’s largest developer, but it isn’t building even a quarter of what it was at its peak.

This image is a new one I just made this evening for my Unfinished Business project and it shows the cranes operating at the HDB Urban Rise BTO project next to Causeway Point which will yield 848 flats when it is completed in 2028.

It's been awhile since I managed any kind of decent lightning photos, so it was a big surprise this evening while I was ...
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!

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

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

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