B&W has always been a problem to me. For one, i have never considered it as fine art because of my background as a top gun developer. B&W Tv’s are long gone and so are B&W films. Life as designed and perceived has always enjoyed the beauty of colors. The rainbow exist because of water droplets reflecting the angle of light and water is a necessity to life.
However, sometimes in the absence of light, where colors are dull or those pesky yellow indoor ambience casts the whole picture to be yellowish…a B&W conversion is warranted.
self aware
This was taken in pure darkness with only her phone lighting up her face. Leica Xvario.
start young
A cafe in busan hosts a number of happy felines to keep you warm. The whole ambiance however is yellowish, since anyone could imagine the orangey colors of this cat, a B&W conversion makes sense here.
volcano
Ran this image thru Nik Silver Efex Pro. If you are a fan of B&W, you would love this software. Have a nice day 🙂
A group of us were having lunch and chatting about work and whats not. Strangely today is the only day i did not bring my CCD nikon and the 58 lens, instead the Leica Xvario was chosen. Taking this shot i already expected that i will get very strong backlight and overexposed shots on anything except miss Anouschka’s face.
In Malaysia and i think almost all the countries in APAC, caucasian models as well as pan asian dominates the modelling and casting industry. There are few reasons for this.
1) Caucasian models are associated with developed countries and implies, grants any ads a “professional” feel to it.
2) Fashion labels are mostly associated with the western world, having a caucasian model adds a feel of class to it
3) Sharp features. Lets face it, asians doing plastic surgery often aim for double eye lids, sharp face, tall nose and beautiful mouth. Look at miss Anouschka here, her features already top the list without trying.
In the last 3-4 years, we do see that Chinese models are getting somewhere, this is largely due to the association of China as the emerging powerhouse of economy. Everyone wants to have a pie in China and hence your ads better show some local relation, hence the crazy amount of unnecessary cameo appearances in movies like Transformers.
It started as a beautiful afternoon as i walked outside Pavillion. Its a high end shopping mall in the Bukit Bintang area in Kuala Lumpur, arguably one of the safest place to do your street photography. First person that i took is this lovely caucasian model hired to stand outside the hot sun, I could see that she is sweating from the heat but the job has to go on.
All images are taken with the CCD Nikon and 58mm 1.4. Its been three weeks now with this camera and its a balance between film and cmos to me. Less gears, more photos, its like a mantra that i keep telling myself.
Happy all the way
Next is this happy girl chatting away on her phone while walking. Actually she has been chatting and walking like at least two(2) round and still looks happy. Whatever she is smoking, i need some.
Korean pop star
Some friends that looked like korean began to pose outside the mall entrance. I took the opportunity to snap one of this shot when the one with the black dress posed. The sky is turning dark at this point and my iphone is running out of batteries. I needed a break and walked across to the Leica boutique inside Star Hill.
Miko of Leica
This girl is just 19 years old. She is kind enough to borrow me a charger to resurrect my iphone while i chatted with her. I am easily intrigue with people’s life stories and decisions and i think i spent one(1) hour there listening to her. Bought myself a LFI (leica) magazine that is from April 2014 because of one of the article on Fukushima.
Family
In this picture only the little girl noticed that i was aiming the camera at them. Its true that DSLR ain’t so discreet when doing street and i been doing street using a ridiculous 58mm which is converted to 87mm since i am using 1.5 crop factor APSC. I do miss having a real 28mm around, but shooting at this portrait focal length forces me to get use to it. I am like about 7-8 meters away.
The Lost
I saw this uncle when i first reached Pavillion and after i went to the leica boutique and met Miko and came back out to shoot, i saw this same person walking around, with the same visage and expression. In someways, i felt pity but i don’t know the reason, so i just took a photo of him walking past me.
You can’t stop fashion
This is must be the most fashionable muslim lady i saw today. interesting matches of clothing.
Friends forever
When it rained, i quickly went to a shelter in front of Pavillion and noticed many people crossing over.
funi can’t believed he asked me to run in the rain
Hope you enjoyed these images. I know i have not been doing as much model’s portraiture lately and its not because i have lost interest, but photography is my main sports nowadays and walking around is the only real exercise i get. I do notice that i do street like i do portraits. If you are wondering why majority of my shots are females, its because that’s just how my photography eye is trained on, portraiture on models.
Whenever two walk together, its inevitable that there will be some agreement. These agreement manifest itself in friendship, love and sometimes even in the body language. Its impossible for two person to walk together, without forming a kind of agreement with each other. That, is life.
Its deepavali in Malaysia. Apparently, for the first time, my invitation for a model shoot has no takers. Maybe my street photography is giving mix messages compared to my more popular outdoor model portraiture. So its street photography again :-). This mural must have been there all the time, but i have never noticed it. Amazing piece of work, it talks about the love for “kampung” which means “village” in Bahasa Malaysia.
LOKL cafe. A modern cafe in an old stretch of road.
Since its a public holiday, i can’t just go around shooting without bringing my family out for breakfast. So surprise surprise a new cafe for them to visit. Phoenix was surprised that i could locate a new cafe that she haven’t really heard off. While there are many new cafes booming up in KL, including one which i am personally investing in “myespresso”, there are just too many of them that lives on “hype” while the really good coffees and quality recipe are held by a few cafes.
Getting married in a cafe?
Just next to LOKL cafe, i noticed they are decorating this long table and some love messages, i guess some folks wants to either propose or throw a small party related to wedding today. Its after all the festival of light (deepavali). In Malaysia, it doesn’t matter which race and culture is having the holiday..cause its a public holiday to all 🙂
Phoenix
Just took the opportunity to take this photo given the beautiful mural behind. Phoenix wanted to go UK for a year, but her application for the university in UK requested for some transcripts that she could not find. I guess she will be sticking around in Malaysia for sometime hahaha.
All these photos are taken using just 1 lens, 58mm 1.4 AF-G on a Nikon CCD sensor camera, D3000. My policy is less gears and more photos. How did i managed to take these photos given the crop sensor (90mm!)? Give up your gears and stick with one cam+len and msg me 🙂
Ever since i took on the path of lesser gears. I also took on the philosophy that 1 (one) lens can rule them all.
As much as i missed using the wide angle 28 lens for my shots, i am confining myself to this 58 1.4 lens and shooting at f1.4 at ALL times.
Masjid Jamek is one of the central LRT stops in Kuala Lumpur, walking around this area you get to see various races and some old school hawking of wares and food. Some of the shops and retail outlets here remains unchanged in the last 20 years. If you want to know how local folks in Kuala Lumpur mingle and what kind of culture exist in unity, this is a good place to start walking around. Hotels are rampant and ranges from budget to all the way to the premium high ends.
What you might find hard to see here are the younger generation (gen-y), they have abandoned these areas and have moved to the premium malls and other cafe gatherings for their weekends.
Misa yap, smiling confidently with her almost nude face.
At night, seemingly boring places begins to transform vividly. Beautiful lights and street bokeh fills any scene that captures it and people tend to be more relax. Welcome to casual night photography. I’ve always been a fan of taking natural photos of people without too much make-up, its often near impossible to find any models that would brave such session.
I realised that i could only ask for friends to pose for such shots. Oh, don’t forget that f1.4, u be needing it.
Life in the city, always evolving, adapting but the climate is always getting colder, in the heart at least.
Some find joy despite the cry of the want for material and wealth, some find love as though as they found a door to another dimension, in the cold city.
All images taken with fuji GW690ii on neospan 100.
Pudu is an old market that is unique to Malaysians. Its one of those rare “pasar” or morning market where you have you can find both different races of Malay and Chinese taking up large section of the pasar without squabbles. How is that so? Because the Malay are mostly muslims and its hard for them to be in the same market where there are “non halal” or where pork meat are being on sale. Nevertheless, Pudu pasar have been running peacefully this way for many years, a testimonial to the unity of the people in Malaysia.
Double blow
You can find all kinds of food being sold here, poultries, beef, pork being sold in various preparation and flavour, mostly raw though. There are also strange meats like, frog meat that are popular among the chinese for their porridge setups. These are not ordinary frogs only a specific species.
frog meat anyone?
During my walk here i noticed that most of the clients are those in the range of 45++ and there are a lot of foreigners being hired to run stalls here, burmese, vietnamese and even thais.
local owners might be seen with their pretty vietnamese wives.
Its a very busy street, packed like sardine and your nostrils are bombarded with assortments of perfumes ;-).
Sometimes you have to just make way for the human traffic that is flowing there and certain paths even have motorcycles barging in.
After i left that place, it got me thinking about the future of such business models. I rarely see any milleniums or Y-Generation there, this means in the near future, the upcoming generation would have no idea how to buy stuffs from these markets. Enjoy the rest of the photos i took today.
M changing lives with images. 