Portraits From the Studio & Location

Sometimes it’s convenient to label myself as another kind of photographer: Hong Kong Family Photographer, Bangkok Family Portrait Photographer, NGO and Humanitarian Photographer, HK School Photographer and on and on. But actually I just consider myself a portrait photographer. I was always kind of a shy person, but something about taking another person’s portrait forced me to lose that reticence. When I have a camera, or a guitar, in my hand, I am a different person. I think this is true of many people when it comes to their ‘happy place’.

When I was starting out as a photographer, a very well-known photog friend told me a great simple line:

A Portrait is a Collaboration

It sounds obvious, I know, but it helps to focus the process and define what is and isn’t a portrait. (i.e. Taking a photo of someone who doesn’t know you are taking their photo is not a portrait. To me.)

While my business is primarily as a family photographer in Hong Kong, and Singapore and bunch of other cities, my favorite thing to do in my off-time, is to head to a more unknown corner of Asia and take portraits.

The ultimate portrait destination is India.

If you haven’t been, you must go. Wander the streets of Calcutta and take portraits, nobody will refuse. It’s a time-capsule that gets almost no tourists. Everyone you talk to has probably never met a Westerner before. The same thing goes for my favourite spot in Cambodia, Battambang. It’s the Southeast Asia of my youth, when I showed up to work in Phnom Penh in 1994.

These days I have a little studio in my apartment that doesn’t get enough use. I’m not a studio person, even though I spent a big chunk of my life on film sets. I like to be out in the open air, searching for light, with Mother Nature as my Lighting Director.