Here’s another one of those shots with Adelene.

I wasn’t too sure about the light in the evening since Sean did his shoot in the morning. But we drove around till we found the perfect spot. And we couldn’t have asked for more! A big open field that gave us space to move the car and a great clean background! I was all prepared to setup my speedlites but thank goodness, the lighting was just amazing!

We started the shoot with Alex and Delia with the car. I wanted a more lifestyle approach to the shoot and I drove my car next to theirs to get the shot from high. Now you know why I loved the location. Plenty of space to move two cars around. This shoot definitely made my day. Until England lost to Germany. But that’s another story.

Here’re a few of the pics:

And a few production pics taken by Lydia.

Getting the height for the first shot

Looks like the paint is going to coat the lens. But carefully positioned car made sure the winds prevented that

The last shot for the day. Alex and Delia with their handiwork

The place was beautiful, so I wanted to bring out the character and the intrinsic designs so thoughtfully incorporated here. We were shooting a series of portraits of four employees for an advertisement. So in this place, the employee would pose with the different chemicals that are mixed for each customer. Pretty neat stuff considering it’s open for everyone to see and admire. In this shot, I used one key light to camera right, with a softbox, and one highlight to camera right also but behind the subject. Of course it didn’t work out. In the final shot, the highlight was left outside the room shooting through the glass. The final shot really worked.

We had a few rooms to shoot the portraits and one of them was a room designed to serve the guests tea. Liz was of course the lighting model of the day and here’s the test shot. One key light in a softbox and one highlight behind shooting through and umbrella, and making sure the vertical strips of wood had enough light to differentiate it from the back while throwing a bit of light on her. The final image was from a slightly different angle but an even stronger image.

What’s that blurry thing in front? This is what it looks like under the same lighting, taken by Liz

Image taken by Liz

Will post the images after the ad is released.

The idea was to get a series of shots to superimpose them onto a life-sized panel. I don’t know how that will turn out. We’ll have to wait and see when the YOG exhibition opens.

I have this fascination with images made in the early 1900s. I can just stare at old images, trying to relive the period it was taken in, imagining myself in that scene. I just had a similar experience in the toilet of Grand Copthorne on Saturday. While peeing, I was staring at images of Singapore in early 1900s. No date was given but talk about entertainment while relieving yourself!

Back in the days of Cartier-Bresson, Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and other famed photographers, a good image was one which captured a slice of time, ‘the decisive moment’, social issues. We see these iconic images every now and then which may not pass our modern definition of a good image in terms of the basic techniques mentioned earlier. So it’s the purpose of photographing that makes a good image, what goes through your mind, what do you want to say with your images. Stopping at the basic techniques just provide a pretty image, visual satisfaction. Don’t stop there, carry on.

So back to the modern day where rules of composition, lighting, patterns, colour, contrast, etc are presented as essential, I learn to push that boundary. Who says you can’t shoot an image in this particular way or that? The images on top are all shot against the sun which breaks the ‘preferred’ rule of shooting with the sun behind the photographer or at the side of the subject. Who says I can’t shoot against the sun? I like the dramatic lighting shooting this way presents. I don’t quite care about flare…I make it a part of the image. I keep honing the skill of getting the exposure perfect such that the subject comes out the way I want it to, whether as a silhouette or well lit, with the background completely washed out.

The important thing is to shoot the image that excites you. Use the techniques (or break it) and get images that hold people’s attention longer, make them think, make them cry. I had someone cry when she saw the picture of her and her fiance. Good thing it wasn’t because it was bad..but it just evoked so much emotion from her.

Your skill is required to deliver the output, it’s a link between your mind’s eye and the viewer’s eye. Keep shooting to get it right. Learn from other photographers, study film directors’ work, look out for interesting ads when out shopping. Every photographer is constantly absorbing visual input and you should too.

More of such images can be seen in my Wedding Photography webpage or in the Pre-Wedding Photography category of this blog.

A very memorable part of the wedding dinner was the part when Poh Huat and Siew Len formed a train by pulling friends and relatives along, as they went table to table to greet guests. It was impromptu and they didn’t have any alcohol in them! In all my years of shooting, this has to be the first for me.

More of such images can be seen in my Wedding Photography webpage or in the Wedding Photography category of this blog.

Normally, I’ll have an assistant hold up the flash high above the camera and subject, with the infra-red receiver pointing towards the camera with the ST-E2 attached. I used to fire into an umbrella but nowadays, I feel the difference is negligible if the flash is positioned far from the subject. In bright daylight, the range of the ST-E2 drops since it uses infra-red to trigger the flash. If it fails, I replace it with another flash since that will give me more range.

I’ll leave the flash on E-TTL mode but I usually adjust the exposure compensation on my camera (usually set to aperture-priority) to control the amount of ambient light coming in. In most cases I’ll drop to -2EV just to have the effect of the flash more pronounced and give the background a bit more colour. You can play around with this setting to get the feel you want. You need a lot of flash output to shoot outdoors, so I use the 580EX flash with the highest guide number available.

The images below with the triathletes was for promotional material for Tribob.com, while the images of fishermen were taken on a fishing rig (palong) in Aceh. The picture of Khanh in swimsuit was to demonstrate the use of the flash in a brighter environment. Any brighter that this and the flash output will not be enough to balance the sunlight. I would have to depend on more powerful strobes.

So if you want to try creative portraits, both indoors and outdoors, consider getting the ST-E2. It’ll be a worthwhile investment.

My guitar is going to be famous. For my keepsake, I didn’t DI away the pick mark in the full body portrait We did the shoot to her music, blasting away from her phone. Awesome stuff, look out for her CD! Her voice is so rich and I can’t wait to hear her music on a proper sound system.

Alila, I thank God for your talent!

Technically, it’s a very simple lighting setup. The idea was to just shoot against white to leave the CD designer a bit more creative space. Alila had not engaged a designer yet and decided to go ahead with the photoshoot first. So I set up:

1. One 80X120cm softbox on camera right for most of the shoot.

2. One light with a diffuser to light the white backdrop. If you don’t do this, you won’t be able to get a completely white background. The trick is to adjust your light ratios.

3. One light with diffuser at camera left, slightly behind her to light her hair and give the edgy light on hair and part of the face. I don’t use this all the time though.

These were essentially the lighting setup throughout most of the shoot. Of course I played around with light output and direction of the key light quite a bit for visual variety.