Genre

Can one become a photographer who is versatile but yet also good in various genre of photography?

Recently, I read a photography article which contains a notion of something like - 'a photographer must specialize in something he likes and not tempted to follow the market trend as it would mean suicidal'. While I agree to the latter part of the notion, I'm more inclined to be versatile because that's what make photography exciting! I love capturing moments in wedding, scenes on the streets, landscape, sports, wildlife, portraiture, fashion, product, commericial. I love working with and also without strobes. I love elaborated as well as simple setup, both indoor and outdoor!

I simply love the fact that photography has so much to offer! Specializing in a single genre is like giving up the entire forest for a single tree! Perhaps being good in all genre is impossible, especially when different genre calls for a different skill set. A photojournalist operates in a ridicuously fast pace - capturing moments, while a landscape photographer is slow and steady, often working with perfect depth of field and well thought compositions. Hmm...there are so much to ponder over photography.

At the moment, I'm simply following my heart on what I like to do and experiment. After all, not relying photography for a living is a real advantage of an 'In-Between'. We can afford to experiment and horn our skills in various genre and most importantly enjoy it too!

Purple Dance

My experiment of freezing poster colour ended up with this image. Each drop of purple paint was shot individually and I simply stitched them up together with Photoshop (PS). The layering job was easy as the background was black in colour. This made feather selection easy for copy and paste. I didn't even have to use the extract filter in PS2 to extract the droplets. Then it was just a matter of placing the droplets to my liking on a 645 format.

The image ended up looking like super-sperm cells dancing luminously in water! And if you click on the image, you will notice the amazing twisting and turning of each cell. This was all captured on camera! No other filter effect was apply, except of the stitching, sharpening and pumping up the colour saturation.

Lately, I received a photography job to shoot for a corporate event which I happily rejected. Well, firstly, the client sounded really cocky on the phone and photographers definitely deserved better respect than that. Secondly, shooting a corporate event is the most degrading type of photography job to me. It is definitely a no-brainer. Anyone with a camera could shoot a prize giving, group photos, and a speech! And sometimes you get order around like a waiter by nasty client! Once I shot a banking conference organized by Financial Times during IMF in 2006, the editor-in-chief ordered me around like I'm lousy waiter! But I tolerated, since he was paying me $1000 for a 2 hours no-brainer job.

Thirdly, she can't pay my charges of $250 per hour which I had charged for several corporate events. Honestly, I felt that there is really no need to undercut anyone to get such a degrading job.

Fourthly, I wanted a real commercial job like product or portraiture. Just like the recent Banyan Tree job that I did, I really like it as it horned my skills and at the same time, I got more respect and pay! Fifthly, I'm lecturing full time, which means I'm not desperate for $$$.

Well, the reasons are endless when I don't wanna do something which I dislike :)

In or Out?

Is this watch jumping in or out of the water? Funny how our perception can trick us sometimes. Is this how visual artists manipulate with perceptions?

Well, this is how I did it. After my little experiment with splashing water the other night,...I decided to get bolder this time and had a little fish tank which I borrowed from my brother Roy.

I filled it up with water and setup the same lighting as the perfume bottle. But this time, I placed the fish tank on top of an old CD rack from Ikea, so that the height is high enough for me to stand comfortably. Then I tried threwing different objects into the tank to see how it works- listerine bottle, apple, plum, grapes, bottle caps. Then I finally used my Nike watch, since the bright yellow strap with the splashing water would stand out from the dark nicely.

I just kept dropping the watch while pressing the remote simultaneously. I must had shot about 50 photographs before I managed to get this one. 50? Not bad at all! Some would have shot a few hundreds before getting one right. Becoming systematic as an 'In-Between' is something which I learnt after countless of shoot and the tedious setting up of lighting equipment and camera. But the efficiency level just kicks in after I become more systematic.

This is how I work : First I had an ideal, then I experiment with the idea. Only after experimenting and feeling that it may just work, then will the lightings, camera and everything else be setup. Before this, I just jumped from step 1 to step 3, without thinking there could be a small possibility that my briliant idea might not work. And that was just plain stupid. It is no small feat to set up the studio equipment all by yourself and then shooting it. So since I'm my own assistant as well as the photographer, I need to be clever in doing things. In case you are trying out studio photography, take this advice seriously!

Back to the watch, I rotated the photo 180 degrees in Photoshop, and this is how it looks after that. I also colour corrected it and enhanced the dynamic range by adjusting the curve and sharpening it. The image is definitely cropped, as the 35mm format of a DSLR simply sucks in product shoot. Unfortunately, the focal plane shutter also couldn't freeze the watch completely and there are some blur, if you examine it carefully.

Euphoria

An hour after my first blog and finally I got a hang of the functions within blogger.com! I got the feeling that the site doesn't run well on Safari. It was kinda slow in loading the pages and photos. Well, at least I can get up to speed with the posting now that I become more familiar with the features.

As my disastrous idea of freezing motions continues, I became more ambitious with the idea of freezing water.Since it was terribly difficult to do a self-portrait (probably pressing the camera remote and splashing a bucket of water on myself at the same time!), I turned to splashing water on objects instead. First, I used a wine glass, but it turned out ugly after 20 shots. No matter how I composed it, the glass just didn't gel with the background and lightings. So I used a perfume bottle instead and tried several composition, before I decided to face it flat towards the camera.

Next I single-handed poured water from a used 1.5L of Pokka bottle onto the perfume, while the other hand was busy with the wired remote as I poured. It was night time, so I could take out ambient light completely. After 50 shots, I previewed it with Lightroom and I kinda like this shot most. With the selected photo, I removed the water flowing on top of the perfume bottle with Photoshop. Then I colour corrected it using the techniques prescribed by Lee Varis from his book - SKIN. (Yeah I know, the technique is meant to correct skin tone, but it works in this case too!)

As for lighting the bottle, I placed one strobe right above the bottle and surrounded white cards on the side and front. Since I am using a strip lightbox, I had to cut off excessive lights by placing black cards on the lightbox.

The speed of the water flow in this photo is definitely slower than my mom's spray! And I guess the motion is better 'frozen' this time, though it ain't perfect.

Hmm... what objects should I try using next?

Welcome to My Blog

Hello! Welcome to my newly setup blog.

Tonight, I'm supposed to catchup with a new friend whom I met during a photography trip to Malacca in June. Well, he stood me up, so now...I got no one to go out with! I was pretty excited when we finally managed set a date to meet up, as you will find out that I'm a lone photographer, without friends of the same passion. Most of the time its just me and my camera.... and well, my profoto strobes too. So getting to know a photographer friend is a BIG DEAL to me!

Out of boredom, I decided to create a new blog. I had a blog on yahoo but blogger.com is definitely more impressive.

My expression on the photograph above would tell you how I'm feeling after being stood up right now. And yes, this is me. This photo is taken by myself. Spraying water on my face with one hand and triggering the camera remote with the other. Double click on the photo and you can see every single details of the water droplets on my face and earlobes.

I have a ritual of doing self portraits at night. And something struck me to experiment stopping motions with strobes lately. So I started to test with my mother's spray, which she uses for ironing clothes! After spraying myself about 200 times, the water droplets still seem blurrish on the photos, I can't seem to freeze such high-speed motion with a focal plane shutter and the flash duration of the B2 (profoto battery-packed strobes) are probably not fast enough too.

Although the experiment wasn't a real success, I thought the water droplets on my face was fantastic. The strong side light picked up the details of evey single droplets. And I was kinda happy with it. Now it becomes a wallpaper on my mac!