I Am a Hong Kong Portrait Photographer
Hong Kong Kids Portrait
Portraits are a very unique, personal thing to photographers. While my business falls under the umbrella of variously “family photography” or “family portraiture” I have never really considered myself a pure family photographer. I am a portrait photographer, specializing in kids. I don’t know why I found this little corner of the photography world, but it felt right. As the eldest of six kids, with six nieces and nephews, I fell into it at the same time I got into photography. At that time, kids photography was heavily stylized with kids wearing angel wings while wandering around pumpkin patches. What on earth did this have to do with anything? It was all about the parents, nothing about the kids.
So I made it my mission to capture personalities, no matter how young.
My thing as a photographer is getting people comfortable in front of the camera, whether photographing families in Hong Kong, kids in the desert of Rajasthan, or in the rice paddies of Cambodia. (The country where I first picked up a camera while working for The Cambodia Daily newspaper.) Portraiture is all about capturing something about the subject’s personality. I found that most photographers were just trying to get cute shots, which I do as well, but the great shots, the ones that will last for generations, are all about capturing personalities.
I’m completely uninterested in having kids (or gown-ups for that matter), smile in every photo. For some, of course, but personalities aren’t always revealed by grinning. I feel the greatest photos of people are those that reveal who they actually are. For me photos without smiles can be 10X more powerful than those with smiles.
I also fully realize that many people just want a family shot for the holiday card, and that’s fine, but I have been lucky in finding parents that wanted me to capture unique, personal images of their children. I don’t know why I am apparently good at this, but I suspect reflexes are a part of it. (I am very quick.) But I also don’t talk down to kids, I just talk to them as I would grown-ups. By the time a kid can toddle, their personality is there, it’s quite an incredible thing. There is something that happens when it is just my subject and me, that connection can last for a few minutes, or with some kids, microseconds. And that is my job as a kids photographer.
