Truth about professional photographers

10 things that I love!

These are the things that make me sing!

10) Paul Smith esp Red Ear stuff , after a short 12 year hibiscus from 16 yrs old, i have amassed a few more pieces in my wardrobe. Simon, my associate and Bryan knows my obsession with all things old, vintage and cool looking. Mr Paul Smith, if you are reading my blog, all my retirement funds have been relocated to yours.

9) Mac Computers, our work stations are cool to look at and fun to work with. Still the same, we have added more workstations to the growing influx of work.

8) Flea Markets, Alyce and myself, we can spend the entire sunday shopping, looking at stuff, once in a while.

7) Mechanical German designed Time Pieces, need I say more Lange, GO, just pure lust. PAMs are always in my cards for the old world military looks, all my friends say I was born in the wrong era, I unbashfully agree. Mechanical German made cameras are also nice but one can only afford 1 luxury once awhile.

6) Super markets, All my overseas clients know about it, I need to shop at least 10 times a week, haha!

5) Travelling, its a little harder with The Little One, but we are planning trips to Bali, Australia, KL and Japan in the pipeline.

4) Sleep, I getting very little of it the last year or so, work just consumes me.

3) Bookstores. Another luxury. I just spent an hour at Kinokoniya on Tuesday and its was the most refreshing moment of my life for the last month. I wish I can afford a huge office to store my books!

2) Clients, i only work with clients that understand our work, cannot live without you guys, thanks to you I'm always in the state of love, joy and happiness!

1) My Sweetheart, Alyce, this year a newborn creep into our lives and rob our hearts as well, Hayden thanks to you, daddy has to work harder but also happier and you gave us the glow in our hearts. We love you, grow well!

Its great to read my blog entries again and refresh my thoughts and works. I'm growing up to love this more and more and I still think its the coolest job, if you call a job. Please continue this journey with me and watch my growth and art and I hope to be able to document an aspect of your lives someday!

I also take this chance to thank Minda, Kenji, Caroline, Rebecca, Dang, Daphane, Margaret, and many others whom helped us grow our small company up! Thanks Simon sticking with me, Tom for all your encouragement, Byran for your help. Thanks Kuang for opening the doors to this great journey! Thank you all at WPN as well, I love you guys!

Now back to work!

Bedcot for sale

Baby cot for sale! Great for newborns to 1 yr old, my little boy has outgrown this bed and he has another bed to himself, so we are selling this one featured here. Its from Mothercare and he been using it for only 6 months, its great as you can swing the baby to bed and we have include the mattress and a crib protector. We paid about $400 for everything and we want you to have this all for only $100.

You need to visit our home at Toa Payoh to view and pickup, I tried my best to take these on a tired weekend so pls pardon the pictures.

There are more information on this piece here

Thanks for viewing!

its not a bird

its a flying batman! I've been working myself the last 7 months without a break, so we decided to go somewhere for a break soon!

Hi Alex & Esther!

Hi Esther & Alex, no worries, I have not forgotten about you guys! We are working very hard on your wedding at this moment! We hope to present it on our blog next week!

Jonathan & Cheryl, you are next too, so sorry for the delays! We have a lot of May Weddings and we need to work on their bridals urgently! Hope you guys understand!

rants

Aujourd'hui est le début d'un autre beau jour, peut I pouvoir terminer mon travail à temps. Pour voir le beau soleil se lever, les étoiles et le sourire chaud de mon amour ceux.

Veuillez me donner la force et la vitesse d'un dieu !

PS: Si n'importe qui veut tirer à Paris, svp relâchez-moi un email, je doivent stocker vers le haut sur Nutella haha !

PS 2: Au directeur qui ordonne avec sa petite tête, vos travaux réfléchissent sur qui vous êtes vraiment et ils sucent. (translate: To the director who rules with his little head, your works reflect on who you really are and they suck.)

This episode shows 2 things:

What is love, unconditional love, love for her family? Mrs Irene Neo

What is a Jack Ass? Jack Ass Neo

real clients

Today I created a furore, not that its my first time, but I sent a young couple out of the office when they cannot decide what they want for themselves.

What is wedding photography to me, its my passion, first of all to be able to be the person to capture all the little emotions, tears, laughter, pats, hugs, and everything that the couple works so hard to a climax on their wedding day.

I see couples so passionate about how they want their wedding to be, what they are going to design on their invites,what gowns they like and the fabrics they prefer, how each couple wants the best for each other and the best thing to allow me the record all of this hard work on the day itself.

Its a great honour. I take so much pride and passion. Every couple whom work with me sees that.

I feel so sad when couples come in, and all their minds is about getting the best deal, and forgetting all that is to the photography, is themselves.

I know nothing about you before you come, I wait patiently for out arrival. I feel no remorse when you are late. I feel very bad that if i was late for an appointment and I make it a point to say Im sorry if i did.

Yes its a business and its sad when I turn down clients, but it will kill my passion if I become just a tool to take pictures because someone else says I'm good. I work with passion, feelings. Look at all my pictures, I put my heart to it.

Have a good think about what I say because if you think you are going to dump my work after the wedding, why bother to waste money in the first place?

Love you guys, but I work better when i know my clients want me to be there for them, to preserve and keep these work for their love ones, their friends and treasure their legacy and history.

while editing today...

its one of the world best jobs!

meet some of the nicest people!

share your joys!

work towards one of your life goals!

the best part is to be excited not just the work we do but the clients we come across!

Yesterday was so beautiful, the sun come out just for our shoot! Look out soon for the photos guys!












we realise we

LOVE OUR WORK!

Rude people

We do not work with rude people, respect yourself, be polite. We are very generous when you are.

Durians

You know, in the fruit store, you get to see alot of interesting people. Once Alyce and myself wanted One durian for supper. If you are a durian or fresh food person, you know the best stuff comes when they open the durian right in front of you.

When I was at the durian store, its was late and the durian seller had lots of durian he opened up and kept in boxes. He was selling them at a discount of 3 boxes for $20. The unopened ones are at $10 per fruit.

The fruit seller was trying to pursude us to get the open boxed durians "at a discount" at $20, twice more durians than we wanted at additional $10. We kept insisting we just ones the unopened ones and we only need one durian as we are unable to finish the other 2 boxes.

We are like that, we know what we want and a discount will not tempt us as we end up spending more money but we do not need the extras. We aren't greedy and calculative and the durian seller failed at pushing us his unsold wares.

We end up going to another durian store instead and spend $15 at one better durian. We fail to understand the logic of wanting more when you do not need to. Sometimes the real value of money is getting a better product not getting the most of the product.

more work on the way...

Thanks for your patience while we clear the work. Just a side note, I actually ran out of memory space and had to visit my friendly sim lim shopping centre to buy more hard disk.

Gilbert has

1 more wedding to edit

1 more pre wedding

2 more slideshows to do

Alyce has

0 more wedding to edit

1 more birthday

0 more albums

All the 2nd shooters have

1 more wedding to present

$1 chicken rice

Remember in the late 90s, there was this craze for $1 chicken rice? It started by an ingenious hawker who wanted to rise his business profile and started offering people offering discounted chicken rice at $1 while and the rest was selling at $2.50?

How did the $1 chicken rice survive? Apparently not for too long. In order not to compromise on profit, he has to sell twice as many rice to meet his sales target. When word got around, it did not take long for Singaporeans to pick up a bargain. Long queues are form and the hawker needed to hire more staff to cope with demand. this in fact lowered his profit and he has to shrink the portions to maintain the profit.

One of my first lessons in life as a "Cheep-po" was to actually join a queue and await for my bargain lunch. I was rather disappointed with the portions, it did not fill me up, the chicken tastes rather hard and the rice was not fragrant as the rest. I kind off regretted to waste time for awful food and this manta prove good later in life.

I would never go on asking for a bargain as I know, somewhere there will be a compromise. I would rather save another dollar to get a better quality chicken rice. 2 plates of a bad thing does not mean equal one plate of a good chicken rice.

How about the business? When you reverted selling to $2.50, many of us will only remember that the chicken rice is only worth $1 and the taste is not up to standard, of course the chicken rice business did not survive.

working on site!

Looks like I was holding an photography workshop and the attendees were standing on 2nd floor observing how i shoot. Images by Alwin!

this world is living too fast

I really lament the pace of life that we are living now. Everyone wants instant things, instant results, instant photography....

I really admire photographers who could whip out a express highlight between a few hours of their break time to showcase everyone their vision in the morning for dinner as an outlet to 'entertain' their evening guests. Its just show technology is so advanced and the its also an tool to "sell" your services to an "ready audience"

I beg to differ from this practices, working in the afternoon greatly diminish my rest time and this will affect my focus for the evening shoot. I have the same type of mindset when I shoot in the morning, I need all the focus, time and energy to observe and craft out the interesting and exciting images I like my clients to have a visual memory of.

I prefer to catch my breath, backup my data (i think its so much more important), and have a peaceful meal with my wife so that I could recharge and be myself again in the evening.

So what if I miss a few deals, I make my client excited about the product after the entire project is completed, with faith that the evening photography is not compromised.

Also I would like to take this chance to express that we prefer more pro-family approach to living our lives. As weddings take up most of my weekends, I would like the non wedding weekends to be dedicated to my family and friends. We will not meet clients on weekends, our meeting days are only from Mondays to Thursdays. I hope most of my clients understand, we only live our life once, and we would like to focus equally on both my loves ones and my passion for work.

I understand most couples work around the weekdays we have facilitated them meeting us after hours on weekdays, a feat that already made me work more than 55 hours a week, so be nice and leave the free weekends to ourselves.

Need an upgrade?

You sure you need the best each time?

what is the secert to our success?

Alot of people always ask us, what do we do to make this pictures special? I often awe with amazement whenever I see some great work by my peers. Often its not that we are always lucky!

After attending Huy's workshop last month, I have reinforce this thought in my head. Photography is hard, really hard. If you want to get great images, you have to try to always break the expectations of yourself and try different approach to see and do things.

To see the action before it really happens, you need to be pay attention to the ongoings and anticipate the moments. This takes alot of heart and hard work to make it happen.

Wish you guys the best!

Huy Nguyen Workshop

Hey folks, I'll be attending Huy Nguyen workshop next week from Wednesday 23rd of July to 24th of July 08. Last year workshop with Jose Villa help our business and creatively heaps and I'm so excited to attend!


We be outstation from the 24th July evening all the way to 6th of August. For clients whom are getting married on the 9th August, we will email you shortly on our arrangements. The last day for client meetings is on Tuesday 22nd of July. Bookings can still be made thru emails! I'll try to attend to calls on weekdays but we have a new policy of keeping our free weekends to our families.

Thanks, we will update our current projects in the next few days!

Have fun!

Here are some snapshots from the Jose Villa's workshop last year!

Please contact Kelvin or Elizabeth of Lightedpixels at +65 96366385 if you like to attend this seminar and meet alongside some of the most talented wedding photographers around the world and in the region.

These are the things that make me sing!

10) Paul Smith esp Red Ear Jeans + stuff

9) Mac Computers, our work stations are cool to look at and fun to work with

8) Starwars Action Figures + Vintage Transformers figures and other cool toys! Been a collector since 16. Lots of figures has grace our house, I'm thinking to deco the office for one season with a different theme of toys.

7) IWC 

6) Interior Stuff like furniture/ furnishings 

5) Travelling

4) Lecia Rangefinders and other cool gear! Loving film more and more and more each pass day!

3) Penang Food and home cooked stews and soups. We cook too!

2) Our Families, trying to see them as often as I could. 

1) My Sweetheart, Alyce

CDG aka comme des Garcons SHIRT line used to be in the list but i kinda fell out of love for it the last 4 years. I been collecting Starwars since I knew how to watch movies and its a little secret to most of our friends that I have amassed a whole bunch of these childhood memories. I have actively stopped buying them about 5 years ago but I'm still fond of them very much. Red Ear is a recent favourite as I been wearing denim all my life. Picked up my first pair and was blowed away by all the fine details like the 1920s looms, cone denim, multi-coloured selvedge, brass buttons, funky details. 

some of the perks in this job......

is to share all the amazing love stories and hardships every couple goes though. Thank you once again, my clients, makes my work so meaningful and after all the hours behind the computer editing, i think its worth it!