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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’s not often you get to shoot magazine covers so of course I jumped at the chance. The thing about magazine covers is that it’s never boring, unknown or obscure. The cover sells no matter what people, your parents, your boyfriend/girlfriend, teacher, BFF tell you. People do judge the book (or in this case, magazine) by the cover. So if a magazine wants to survive in today’s mostly digital, online world, the cover has to do its job.
So obviously, this contemporary Christian magazine still has to do what other magazines do. Put someone well-known on the cover versus someone else. Anyways, people who make magazine covers usually don’t have time for photographers to fuss over the shots. They give you thirty minutes and you better nail the thing down or it’s bye-bye, and you’ve got tons of P&P (Photoshop & Prayer) to save the crap you just shot.
For Winnie, my appointment was 5pm and I showed up at her Mid-valley studio at just a quarter past four. Ten minutes to introduce myself to the receptionist, scout around. She’s a genuinely nice lady and really simple and down to earth so she actually meets me, gets her assistant to make me coffee and ask me my shoot ideas. Since we’re not shooting for Business week, including the studio logo and name is out of the question so she thinks two of my ideas work out and offers a room. I see the a couple of possibilities there so she goes off and I setup.
To keep things fluid, fast, and portable, I throw up a Lastolite EzyBox on a Manfrotto 1052BAC stand. Since I’ve no time to fuss with line-of-sight crap, I shove on my RadioPopper PXs on a Canon 580EXII flash.
Clock hits five and it’s action time. Took a couple of frames, moved a to a glass door and bam, much better than the textured wall. Still not getting it. The editor said beauty so here’s this E&Y Entrepreneur of the year winner, savvy business woman and beautiful at the same time. I didn’t want to position her too hard so I changed ideas, asked her to sit and put her hands together. EzyBox up close, my favorite 70-200 2.8 lens at f/3.2, dialed in +2/3EV to factor in all the white and my 5D Mark II’s brain took care of the rest. Did a couple more but I knew I had the cover.
The first shot, I like the textured wall so I had a tight grid on the flash head to create a natural vignette. Flash head zoomed to 70mm.
The logo for A Cut Above featured blue glass with horizontal texture so this door reminds me of the logo in a subtle way so that’s the reason for the backdrop. Felt something lacking and the don’t really like the door frame so next…
The cover shot here. Flash down -1EV with +2/3 for ambient. I did soften this in LR3 a bit for a final but this is exactly what I got out of the camera. Notice I left space at the top for the Magazine masthead. I shot three of the same, with space on the left and right.
Did a standing shot but it’ll didn’t excite me so that’s wrap. And a couple of shots which they also ran inside for the article.
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.
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