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