Qiang Mai Portraits Part 2: The City Hall Page

Well, for the 2nd and last stop of our Qiang Mai Portrait shoot, we go to another place bustling with the urban presence, City Hall! For this shoot, I have to say that some people are best shot naturally in a fashion as candid as possible and well, here I have one such model.


When you get models that gets very conscious over every command you give, then the best thing is to go with the flow and stop commanding and start waiting for the right moment. Since you can't generate the mood through commanding, it's up to the environment to do the job. For the cover photo, with dimmy yellow lights and lots of passerbys walking past and trying to see what's happening, the model naturally gets into a 看设么看？！state and you have to seize the moment. It's such a short-lived moment that even I wonder if i captured it when i clicked the shutter~

The shot is another shot of patience and waiting as well. Now not for the model, but for the background. Waiting for the stunt cyclists to be in the "clutches" of my model was not easy and often the model has to be always ready when I shouts "Get ready" as the backgound gets into position~

Funky places give funky portraits i guess?

Another shot that requires the background (in this case the foreground) to be in place~

Hope you guys like these portraits~ I definitely enjoyed shooting them~:)

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Qiang Mai Portraits Part 1: The Raffles Place Chapter~

Hey all! As promised, here is the Qiang Mai Potriats! The theme for this year's shoot is "urban/city" so naturally, our first stop would be right in the heart of the CBD at Raffles Place!


For these environmental portriats, you have to take care a lot of things, out of which, I find location to be the most important. I particularly liked the location for the first shot in the lift. It took quite some time, mainly geting the background right~ The floor we are on changes the height above ground and affect the background and also it took some time to get the "moving" metal column at the position we wanted it! (we took the lift maybe 20 times up and down?)It was really lucky that no one else was using the lift~

Trying to find good locations depends on how familiar with the place as well. To me, I have been to Raffles Place quite often so it is still not that bad. I had wanted to shoot at these tunnels near VCH for quite some time but circumstance always do not allow me to do that until the shoot day! Combining the vanishing effect of the tunnel with a well-placed light, I liked this photo a lot~ And this photo took some time as we have to wait for the tunnel to be "cleared" of people before we can even take a shot~

As usual, I like to play around with lighting~ For the shot above, the flash was "screaming" at me throughout the shoot because I kept on firing it at full power~ The light bounced off a thin strip of "ceiling" to my right and gave this really soft shadow which I like a lot~ Good job, flash!

Lastly, I would say that for such shoots, it's good to have a lot of assistants around~ Be it as mobile human lightstands or even as part of the background=P

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Preview Post! Qiang Mai Portrait Shoot!

Hey folks! It has been 3 weeks since I last had a blog post! Sorry because I have mid terms and piling school work. But I have been still shooting! Here is a sneak preview! So who is Pei Xuan doing makeup on? :P

Who is Pei Xuan videoing? Hmmm.... Stay tuned to find out~ Answer will be revealed in a few days time!

Note: For people who are not in SPH, Qiang Mai is an internal singing competition within the SPH student correspondent club which I am active in~ As part of their publicity, they will be taking nice portraits~ SO stay tuned!

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