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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.
Finally got around to posting on the blog after a super long hiatus.
Product shoots can be exceeding time consuming – you’ve got to watch for reflections, little bent edges, creased lines, boxes not lined up and finger print marks!
Anyways, back to what I love shooting most: people. Farizah and friends were a super awesome bunch and we shot on a weekday which meant that we almost had Lake Gardens to ourselves!
As you can see they were coldplay fans and had to include their album and being English teachers, I suddenly had hope that the next generation of Malaysians would be able to at least speak close to the level of English our parents could. When we reached the crossing, we couldn’t help re-enacting the Beetles. Of course, less famous, but no less fun.
Mira are Hairi make a fun couple and they swung by one morning to have some engagement photos in studio. Looking at their characters, I was thinking to myself that it wouldn’t really suit them to stand in front of a white backdrop. It just wouldn’t make much sense and it wouldn’t be much fun either.
So we changed plans. I just packed up my beautiful EF 70-200 2.8 IS Lens and my 5D Mark II body, a couple of speedlites gelled with a 1/2 cut of CTO (it was mid morning and the warm light was just lovely) and off we went to a nearby park about half a kilometer away. For the last couple of shots, we had it back in the studio grounds but yeah, no boring white backdrop needed with lovely weather like this!
We had to reschedule this shoot a couple of times due to weather and kids’ illness but finally, on a bright, cheery Sunday morning, we made it to Taman Metropolitan in Kepong. This park is also known as Taman Layang-layang or Kite park as you would see plenty of people, both young and old flying kites in the evenings when the weather was good.
There was some initial mix-up at the entrances due to the main entrance being unmarked. Typical Malaysian situation however. Even my GPS directed me to the second entrance. Anyways, there were a lot of people but as the park was quite big, it wasn’t too difficult to find a clearer spot. You can’t get away much from people in the background though as it’s a Sunday. Points to note for future family shoots in outdoor parks — weekdays are emptier obviously. I just finished one on a Friday and we had the entire playground to ourselves. Secondly, 10am might seems like a nice time but it gets pretty hot quickly and everyone starts to look ragged with all that sweat.
Anyway, we did have plenty of fun and kids, being kids, just become alive when placed in a playground.
It was a lovely blue sky and clear morning that greeted us when we arrived at Putrajaya’s Taman Botani park. Hasya just turned one and she’s a lovely cutie.
We had quite a bit of fun around the park and even though it got hot, we soldiered on for a bit more before calling it a day. The challenge is very small children is that they can only last so long before they just lose it. You have to pace them and you need to frequently have the parents carry them, calm them and just let them switch off for a while before continuing.
She’s a real sport.
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