chinatown
It’s been 7 years since I started the Documenting Chinatown personal photography project and it has grown into a much bigger thing than I had ever anticipated. I made friends, I ventured into new places and tried new things … and got to document it all through the power of photography.
And in the end, I made a book!
Read MoreThe time has come!
I took many years but finally I’m releasing my first Chinatown Book “I Was Lured Into A Tea Shop”, encompassing the early parts of my Documenting Chinatown Project. Life changes, busy schedules and something called a pandemic had me put this on the backburner for a bit but it was always my intention to document Chinatown for the sake of making a book.
How do you even begin to encapsulate a year? It’s 365 days of living and being and breathing and it all goes by so fast. As a photographer, the photos I take are not only momentos of the little moments that went by but also memory place holders that let me look back and recall a time in my life: the smells, the sights and even the sounds.
Read MoreI didn’t want to do the usual styled shoot.
When Mandy from “Eventful by Mandy” and I came together to brainstorm an idea for a styled shoot, I knew from the get-go that I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do a styled shoot that was more along my style: unposed and more authentic. Mandy brought in the idea of doing an Asian-Fusion themed wedding.
Since 2013, I've been continually photographing Chinatown and as the years went on, I found myself meeting people and getting more involved. Eventually, I ended up joining the Wong Association and well... here I am.
Read MoreSo it's taken me a while to blog this. Life became busier and wedding season went into full gear and I found myself with little time to edit my own personal work... but these last few months have been a great time for me to sit and look back at the year that was. As I sit here a week prior to the 2018 Chinese New Year Parade, I thought I'd share some of the major photo highlights from last year's 2017 Chinese New Year Parade.
Read MoreWhenever I get a chance to walk around Vancouver, I'm always amazed at all the little surprises we have. Continuing from my last post, here's a few more photographs from January 2014 of last year, when the sun was out but the heat was not (it was cold...). Ah well, that's Vancouver :)
Read MoreMarch seemed like ages ago but I feel like we're feeling that cold Canadian weather now as we did then. I've taken a lot of images since that time but haven't really had a chance to share them with you all. My walks are usually around Downtown Vancouver but I like to explore other places too, including Chinatown and also areas by the Vancouver Public Library (which is where the sushi photo is from). Occasionally my wife and I get into our car and we make a bee-line for some unknown place... take an exit off the highway and see where it leads.
Read MoreWhile I've heavily been a black and white shooter for a while, there's been a slight tugging to colour. I truly enjoy the tones and the mood that black and white images have. It forces you to look beyond shades of red, green, blue and straight into the geometry and also straight to the people's expressions and actions in an image.
The truth is though, I enjoy colour too but... I think I'm really picky about it. It HAS to be right. It's so easy for us to just explode images with colour without thought or to get it wrong or inaccurate. Colours play an integral role in a photographic image and, believe it or not, also in black and white imagery.
Film for me gets colours right.
(And, with some tweaking, digital images with film presets).
I photograph a lot in black and white but some times I break out the colour film and go to (China) town.
In this image, I waited for the girl to enter the circular door to create a sort of frame within the photograph, contrasting the other people to the far left.
