:: Walldrobe Photography ::

Once again, I’ve wasted 22 days of my life away in ‘green’, doing lots of irrelevant and redundant things. Yes, it’s literally wasting my life away. Everyday, I watched the time ticked away and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. Have you tried lying on your bed staring at the ceiling fan counting the number of rounds it can rotate in a minute or waking up 5am in the morning just to wait for the next activity starting only at 2pm? Out in the jungle, we played with anything in our sight. We stared at spiders and played with ants, just so time can pass slightly faster. I’m perfectly cool with training for a purpose but sad to say, this is not the case. This is purely a show we have to put up just so to fulfill our liability. If you ask me, I’d say my fieldcraft is level 10 but my warcraft…….hmm… I really can’t express much about the dissatisfaction I have with this sad and long 22 days I’ve wasted. I’m sure lots of people share the same sentiments as me. A yearly ‘life wasting exercise’ I have to go through and a few more years to go….

Nonetheless, I did lots of thinking about life, about the people around me and about Walldrobe. It’s only during this period that I have all the time in the world to think through what I’ve done for the past year and what can be done better. Well, it’s still a good break away from my computer and it feel so fresh when I look at the images from my backlog all over again.

This article The Secret Life of Wedding Photographer has probably appeared in many wedding photographer’s blog but I must say I can’t agree more to whatever that’s written. I guess it happens to every wedding photographer. Even among my own group of friends, it’s not unusual to hear this remark.

“Hey, wanna meet for dinner?”

“Erm.so sorry, I don’t think I can make it.”

“You sure bo, you should be the most free person among us leh. We work like mad 5 days a week. You shoot 1 day a week then everyday stay at home one leh.”

So, what are we doing for the rest of the week? Well, I frequently see myself as a graphic artist doing editing work for my pictures, doing album design for my clients, as an IT guy troubleshooting whatever problem my pc has, as an admin clerk doing my book keeping, replying emails, meetings clients…etc. The most frequent hat I wear next to the graphic artist hat will be the IT hat. With social networking site like Facebook and blogs, it has totally change our life in terms of updating of our work. And man, you can’t imagine how much troubleshooting I do every now and then, be it hardware problems or software problems until you work your machines real hard everyday. To think about it, ever since I became a wedding photographer, my working hours has become much longer then when I was working in the corporate world. Every day of shoot means countless days behind the computer doing editing of the pictures.

If we were to shoot 40 weddings a year, it means we only take pictures 40 days out of the 365 days a year which translate to just 10% of our total workload. In fact, taking pictures has become so secondary that I view a shooting day as a day for me to get away from my daily mundane work.

It’ll be great if I can concentrate on what I like to do most – shooting, rather then all the other stuff. But if you ask me again, I’d still say I love my job.

Did a little shoot for a friend’s blogshop a couple of days ago. They carry a wide variety of ladies’ apparels and accessories from head to toe. It was a shoot that was delayed for quite some time due to my busy schedule. It was a long but enjoyable session. Had lots of fun taking the pictures. Went through a crash course on some photo taking techniques followed by another crash course on some Photoshop techniques. Hope its not too overwhelming for you, Chris.

Visit their shop if you’re free and if you like what you see, recommend your friends to their shop too ya.

Visit their shop here: http://tinkerbelastory.livejournal.com/ and their Facebook fan page here

All the best, Tinkerbela Story.

It has been increasing difficult for us to stream nice songs into the highlights we are doing due to the stricter checks from the authorities on the use of copyrighted music for weddings. As much as I conform with the copyrights for individual artist, I understand the additional cost couples need to fork out on top of the already very cost taxing preparation for their weddings for the use of these music. It’d be a celebration without music for some of us here from now.

Check out this article from TODAY online here: They’ve only just begun – to charge

The past months has been really exciting. My days are packed with lots of shoots, meet-ups and DI. Got to meet up with many amazing couples who totally appreciate photography and I’m certainly looking forward to their weddings. Shoots throughout the past months have been blessed with good weather too. The heat is certainly a killer but the lighting is simply marvellous. With that, it also mean there’s lots of editing and albums to be done.

I’ve migrated my site to a new server as well. With so much down time from my previous hosting, especially at night, and the lack of a speedy recovery, I’ve decided to just switch to a new host. Hope this will greatly improve the browsing experience to my site.

So much for the update, am going back to my good old friend – PS again…

Did Serene and Daniel pre-wed shoot last October in Melbourne and wow, how time flies, its coming June very soon. Serene had always wanted a shoot locally and after repeated re-scheduling, we finally completed the shoot yesterday.

Here’s a little side track from the shoot. Arrived at their house slightly earlier and Serene is still doing her make-up. Their house is very nicely done up and it feels very cosy. We had planned to start shooting from their house before proceeding out for some outdoor shoot. Once I reached their house, I was greeted by their cute little doggy and ended up taking lots of pictures of her. Ok, more of the couple in the later post but meanwhile, here’s Coco, their cute little doggy.

It’s been a long while since my last post again. I’ve always wanted to maintain a more regular update to my blog but it has always been put aside due to my hectic workload. I’ll make it a point to adhere to it.

Just a month ago, there’s a new member into my arsenal of equipment and yes, I finally got my 5D mkII. It’s really a wonderful camera and I’m very pleased with the results. But then again, it’s increasingly taxing for us on our CF cards and harddisk space. Thankfully, storage is very affordable nowadays.

I joined a workshop a month ago by Benjamin Young conducted in Singapore. He’s a very well known wedding photographer in the Phillippines and we did a lot of shoots with the reflector, off-camera flash as well as the video light. It’s a very good refresher for me to learn how he sees light and capture the couples in the most natural moment. Have always been very interested in the video light which I think is so much better than off camera flash. Will hope to organise some shoots with a few kakis to explore more on this technique when I have the time. Below are just a couple of pics we did that day. So sorry, there’s a whole lot of it but I only manage to find time to process a few.

After months of extensive revamped, I can finally announce the new Walldrobe website up and running. Nothing awesome about it, just a proper site with better nagivations as compared to my old site. At last I can take a breather from all the scripting and stuff. It was actually a great learning for me when my designer shared all the problems one might encounter when testing the site in IE or Firefox or Safari. Thanks to Noel for accommodating my countless requests and changes.

There’s still a couple of bugs which Noel is trying to fix but generally, the site is good to go. If you come across any bugs or problems when serving my site, do notify me through email. I’ll try my best to fix it. One problem which I encounter is the slideshow which will go haywire once in a while. If that happens, do a refresh and the site is good to go again. Another problem is the page number at the gallery page right on top of the thumbnails. It just doesn’t change accordingly even when I’m viewing the pictures from the following page. Everything looks ok on a local site but once online, the problem occurs.

I have lots of questions about why the name Walldrobe which doesn’t seems to link to photography and I thought I’ll take this opportunity to share the reason behind this name. As I don’t wish to use my name like Shaun Tay Photography or SKTay Photography, I had a hard time coming out with a proper name. There was one night where I actually jump out of bed in the middle of the night staring at my wardrobe. I was staring at my clothes hanging nicely in the wardrobe and I though…why is it called the wardrobe in the first place? Then I thought we usually hang nice pictures on the wall and photography is all about pictures. Since the closet for clothes is called wardrobe, I though the wall for pictures can be called Walldrobe. And so, thats the whole idea behind Walldrobe.

There was also a long story behind why my site address is walldrobe.sg and not the more commonly known walldrobe.com but I think I can skip this. So, here’s my site www.walldrobe.sg

Chinese New Year was just round the corner and I was just busy buying bakkwa for my family and friends but before I knew it, it was over. As I get older, I realised I don’t enjoy New Year as much as I like when I’m younger. Year by year, it seems quieter and collecting ang bao doesn’t stir up my interest either. This year, even the Chinese New Year movies were a let down. There isn’t any movie worth watching. Not that I don’t support local production but this year’s quality is really bad. Having said that, that’s just my personal preference for movie. I really miss the good old days where we’ll watch Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow during CNY.

To get myself into the mood, I visited the Sentosa Flowers this year. It was really hot and crowded. I feel the event can be done better but nonetheless, I quite enjoy the trip. Courtesy to my friend Aylwin for his fantastic Tamron 90mm macro lens, I managed to capture a few close up of the flowers.

After a while with the flowers, the bees caught my attention. While others are busy capturing the flowers, I was busy following the bees, focusing on their flight. It was ‘The Bee Movie’ I watch last year that I knew they actually play an extremely important role in pollinating the flowering plants and are a major type of pollinator in the ecosystems that contain flowering plants. It was amazing to know those bees actually contributed so much in our human food supply by pollinating the plants. But the world is changing and there was a report I read sometimes back saying the bees are decreasing in population in an alarming rate for some reasons not really known to us.

Happy 2009 to everyone. 2008 has ended with quite a number of unpleasant incidents, ranging from earthquakes to terrorists attack to the crush of the financial markets which affected almost every economy in the world. Having said that, let’s not forget there are moments which touched our lifes and events which lifted our spirits too. For the first time, Singapore hosted the first F1 night race which brought us into the limelight all over the world. For the first time over 48 years, Singapore won a Silver medal in the Beijing Olympics, not forgetting the opening ceremony at the Beijing Bird Nest Stadium was one of the best show ever.

On a personal basis, I finally did my proposal to her and bought our wedding bands 2 days ago. 2008 is also the year where I seriously considered venturing further into Wedding Photography. I’ve always love photography and this thing has been at the back of my mind for so long. It was a tough decision to make and definitely a total switch from the current job I’m working as. With the passion and the support from all of you, I’ll continue to shoot and bring you better pictures.

What’s New Year without the fantasic firework display. I’m a great fan of fireworks and every year during the Singapore Firewroks Festival, I’ll be there queueing without fail. Though I wasn’t there this year at the Marina area witnessing the countdown, I’d still like to post some pictures of fireworks which I took over the years. I’d also like to specially thank my friend cum mentor Say Chong, who taught me a great deal about how to shoot fireworks. It was through him I learnt a whole new thing about photography, especially fireworks.

Before the announcement of the Marina IR, the Merlion has provided a very good foreground for shooting fireworks, to capture the fireworks with a taste of Singapore within the picture. Ever since the marina area was block off for the massive IR project, I’ve to change my location to the other side of the river, with the Singapore skyline as the backdrop. This doesn’t bring out the best in the fireworks as with the Merlion anymore. The backdrop is too far, the lightings in the buildings too dim etc. I’ve yet to shoot it from the floating platform though. That area might provide a better angle.