Studio W|W

It has been an extremely busy week starting with a major shoot with a creative agency and another product shoot for Yé Teas, a new tea start up in Singapore, which I have been working with since the beginning of this year. I cannot believe that it is nearly October as this year has gone by rather quickly.

Looking back, it was a slightly slow start to 2016 after university ended and when real life began, full-time employment was inevitable. Circumstances did change and I went into part-time work whilst pushing for more commercial photography work. I launched my commercial website - Studio W|W where you can see my continued collaborations with designers, makers, up and coming creative companies etc. Would love to hear your feedback on the new site! 

On another note, do check out Turning Earth autumn sale today in east London. The poster is from an image I shot for Sayaka Namba ceramics earlier this year. I will be heading down around noon so hoping to catch up with a few makers and topping up my props collection!

Quiet summer...not.

It's been a little quiet on the blog since it's summer! Bear with me as I am currently working on my major project, sorting out prints, planning my three weeks summer holiday and moving flat... It is ALL HAPPENING! On the news front, one of my prints have made the shortlist of the Royal Photographic Society International Print Competition! Tres excited! Very honoured to have made the first cut and to be amongst many talented photographers. You can view the images here. My selected image is made at Ridley Road market earlier this year and I wrote a post about the trip.

Last year, I participated in The Swap with Erik Nilsen and our photos are up on the site and we were featured on Don't Take Pictures,  a biannual print, online & tablet-ready magazine. Do check it out too!

On the other hand, I have been shooting more ceramic wares for amazing crafters and this image below is one for Sayaka Namba, an architect slash ceramicist! She and several other ceramicists are selling their handmade creations tomorrow at Turning Earth Studio sale from 1-6pm. Definitely check out their work! Details here on the Facebook page. I might just be hanging about so do come and say hi!

Our two selves...

As humans, we have many sides to our personality. We present ourselves as a unified being but in actual fact, we are composed of many layers. Over the last few months, I decided to slow down whilst shooting and captured a few portraits of friends and loved ones with silver film. A small mistake quickly grew to become a mini project of mine. Below are some of the images I have captured on Mamiya RB67 and Hasselblad 501c.

Blue...

A couple of months ago, we were given a task to shoot 'Blue'. It was totally up for our own interpretation. For me, I decided to find inspiration from Picasso's blue period and found a painting called La Celestina painted by Picasso in 1904. To give a little background, Celestina was a notorious procuress from a 15th century Spanish play who was the subject of Picasso's painting. I tried recreating the painting in the studio using myself as the sitter.

Studying the lighting of a painting certainly helped with the lighting in the studio. What I found unsuccessful in this image was the expression I had. I will have to learn to be more patient when creating self-portraits and study expressions a little more!

Finding inspiration from a painting

I made a trip to the National Portrait Gallery one weekend to check out the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition as well as to select a painting for my mini assignment at Uni. There were a couple of contemporary portraits which I was quite engaged with so I decided to check out more details about each painting/photograph before I chose one. This painting below (extreme left) is a portrait of Pete Postlethwaite by Christopher Thompson. If you study the light, the sitter is top lit using a single light source.

For my studio shot, I used a long and slimmer softbox which is positioned above and slightly in front of the sitter's head. Jo's friend was kind enough to sit for this portrait shot. After I did several shots of him, Jo and Franziska also wanted to sit for that shot so I managed to capture them in the same position.

It is interesting to see the subtle differences in all three portraits which I shot. What we learnt is that a single light source can create beautiful portraits. If I were to do this again, I would position the sitter further away from the background to make the background darker.