Steven Leong’s Blog

• 0730 – wakeup
• 0800 – breakfast
• 0830 – reach location for fashion shoot
• 1030 – fashion shoot starts
• 1330 – fashion shoot ends
• 1430 – lunch and proceed to pick-up gown for next shoot
• 1500 – gown picked-up
• 1530 – download and process fashion photos
• 1730 – prepare for next shoot
• 1815 – dinner
• 1845 – proceed to shoot location
• 1915 – 2nd shoot starts
• 2200 – 2nd shoot complete
• 2230 – download and process
• 2330 – processing complete, shower
• 2345 – start writing this blog entry

Crazy day-huh? Not really… just one of those days but for a change, today I was shooting fashion which I have not done for a long, long time. And curiously… everything came back to me immediately… how to pose, where to get the model to stand, lighting location and requirements and even which outfit to shoot first. Guess fashion photography must be something like cycling and swimming, once you have learnt it, you can never forget it and it will always come back to you when you start doing it again.

1st fashion shoot was for a pair of local designers who brought 4 outfits, one with their signature purple and the other 3 were a mix of wonderful patterns, all made from flowly chiffon; Personally, I have a love for shooting light and flowing fabric since the possibilities are nearly endless though they do present a unique challenge. Normally, light and flowing fabric tend to be thin and are nearly semi-transparent, a bit of overexposure will ruin your day as the colors will disappear and a strong flash will normally cause such fabric to glow, losing it’s original color and semi-transparent look.

Anyway, to make a long story short… the location chosen by the designers were perfect for the shoot, it’s an area of Kuala Lumpur with old buildings that have retained much of it’s charm and of course faded colors, making the location perfect not to overpower their designs.

After having much fun with that, I went on for the 2nd shoot and being in hot, humid and wet Kuala Lumpur; it started raining just before I was about to leave for the shoot. I was planning for a evening / sunset shoot and needless to say, rain doesn’t help those at all.

Since this was a personal portfolio shoot, I decided to move the venue to elsewhere to take advantage of the wet roads and such : Putrajaya. Upon arrival at Putrajaya, I found the roads have completely dried and it turns out that the rain stopped in Putrajaya much earlier… this didn’t seem to be my day but I did make the best of it and did get some satisfactory images for both me and the gown designer.

… time to sleep… early day tomorrow @ 6am+…

…goodnight Kuala Lumpur …goodnight world.