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It was a lovely morning when I made the drive down south to the MARDI research station. MARDI is a government agriculture research division.
Why was I going there? Well, I had a family portraiture session to shoot. Hafidha works at MARDI and it was a pretty cool location. They actually had horses but we didn’t get chance to shoot with them. Would have been fantastic though.
The early morning light and the luminous green grass reminded me more of temperature countries rather than hot, humid, tropical Malaysia. Of course the humidity was there and I ended up sweating buckets.
We did have a blast though.
It was a pretty hot morning (despite the rain the day before) at Lake Gardens but we still managed despite the eldest daughter throwing a fuss towards the end. That’s the main thing about children. Adults think they’ve paid for an hour or two and they want to maximize the time, get as many photos as they can. We also will try anyway and if you’ve been our client before, you will know that we don’t watch the clock and we always think about delivering what you want. With children, especially those younger than four but it still applies, they do dictate how the shoot goes most of the time.
My advice, don’t push too hard, give them time to relax, play around a bit and then resume. Worse case scenario is we call it off. Happy people get great photos. If you have a child bawling, nerves get frayed, everyone gets a bit flustered and it generally doesn’t work out.
Take it easy, have fun, let the children be children and let’s go with the flow.
Birthdays are always special and with the proliferation of digital cameras today, it’s rarer that someone would hire a photographer during a birthday party. Like a customer of mine said, if you hire a photographer, you are guaranteeing a level of quality results instead of depending on a relative who may or may not grab all the shots you want.
Anyways, Farah and family decided to swing by the studio instead. It was great timing too as it started to rain after they left. Zara Iman had lots of fun as you can see and she has some great moves & poses. My fave is the third shot from the bottom where she has this awesome expression that she just ran over the alphabet toy with her push walker. Simple wonderful.
The second last shot is also pretty cute. All the collection of toys didn’t really seem to excite her after a while (which is pretty normal for a studio session anyways) but then she was absolutely bowled over by my lens cap. Reminder to parents (myself included), don’t limit your child’s imagination with just toys — the imagination is more powerful that the toys we buy!
It was a lovely morning when Shee Nee and her boys (and husband) dropped by our studio in two cars. I was a bit surprised but then, when you have a convertible coupé, it will be difficult to pack in three kids and two adults.
Boys, being boys, are pretty tough in a studio environment. They love to act silly, disobey and more. Getting them to sit still is a challenge so we then adjourned to the nearby playground. They changed immediately and became totally animated, energetic and charged up.
As I was shooting alone, getting the car in motion shots were a bit difficult as I couldn’t hang out the back of my truck and shoot so we ended up doing circuits around the playground.
Babies are super fun to photograph and they are super cute to boot. I’m starting to do quite a number of little babies and they’re just super-duper fun!
Hilary just turned one year old and her parents, despite nursing a cold, swung by and dropped by our Studio for a session. She’s quite an animated little girl and has melt-your-heart cute expressions to boot. She really likes her favorite singing Barney but hats and butterfly wings didn’t really sit well with her. At least she’s okay with the bunny ears!
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