Here’s the link to the article.

The marketing scene for us photographers relies heavily on our blog and facebook update. All these social media update has become an essential part of our workload. We are practically glued to our computer all day long. Our work schedule can have very big swings. Very busy periods, not so busy periods, exciting ones, boring ones. People who misunderstood our job can easily imagine us sitting in cafes all day long sipping into our coffee, thinking this is the best job in the world. We only need to work one day a week.

To let people understand our job more, here’s a pretty honest list of my usual routine.

On busy periods,
- working later and later into the night, editing my pictures
- trying very hard to multi-task which I admit I’m just not good at doing it
- googling for help trying to solve yet another hip-cups from the PC, be it hardware side or software side
- becoming very quiet with all the updates, which is happening now (I still keep my Facebook alive though)
- planning for meeting after meeting forgetting I still need to eat
- on permanent invisible mode when signing into msn
- rejected all my friends’ date to meet-up
- keep forgetting to reply friends’ sms-es (this is really bad I know)
- wearing back the same few clothes. Whatever piece on the top of the pile goes

On not so busy periods,
- I write blogs like this. ha..
- linger in the cafe longer just to slack after meeting my client
- look into my work to enter photo contest
- dreaming of what new gadgets I can buy
- check out potential new places for outdoor shoot
- tidy up my admin stuff
- sync and update my ipad with more recent work

Do I miss the 9-5 structure of a day job..hmm..I absolutely love what I’m doing now.

Back to the blog, to keep it alive, Jean will be helping me with the updates whenever she can. You’ll be hearing more of her voices from now.

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.

“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.

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.

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

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…

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.

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.

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