Portraits From the Studio & Location | Ian Taylor

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.

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.