A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to photograph the ONE Fighting Championship: War of the Lions MMA tournament as part of the media. It was an eye-opening experience for me, as it wasn't just the first time I'd photographed a MMA tournament but also my first time attending one!
I was there to get some shots for my colleagues at Men's Health Singapore, and also to test the Nikon D4 for my review of it at HardwareZone. It's a beauty of a camera and performed impeccably in the challenging low-light, fast-action situation. Not to say it was easy, I struggled with locking focus on the fighters through the ring fence and getting a good shot of the action from my assigned position. In the end, I think I did okay, and it was a great learning experience for me.
You can see the full set of my images from the night over at the Men's Health Singapore Facebook page.
Hot South Korean ring girl Kim Ha Yul.
Creating photos can sometimes be a very strange thing.
I was in Tokyo last week for a short work trip, I've been to the city a few times and I've always enjoyed it. This time though I felt incredibly lonely – probably because the last time I was here I was with my fiancé.
Over the weekend, I had the chance to witness something I thought only happened in movies. It was an event ripe with photographic opportunities, but I chose not to shoot a single frame, leaving my camera in the bag.
Why? Because some events are too private to be documented, and some experiences are meant only for those who are present. Because some moments are meant to be lived, not made to be captured. Because sometimes, those gaps between frames do not belong to you, even if they were shared with you.
Inside those gaps, brilliance can still arise, even if they are not of your art. I live to photograph, I do not photograph to live.
And no, I couldn’t tell you what happened even if you asked me, because I promised to keep those gaps for ourselves.
As a photographer, it’s both inspiring and maddening to see a beautiful photograph and wonder just how the photographer did it. I mean, there are photographs that are really good, with excellent composition and beautiful light. And then there are photos that transcend the really good; you don’t just appreciate them with your eyes alone but respond to them with your heart. Those are the photographs I wanted to learn how to take.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single book that talked about that. There were a lot of books about composition, technique and gear – which were great, but nothing about how to distill moments of feeling into a single frame.
Until I found Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision by David duChemin. To be honest, I’ve wanted to write about this book for the longest time, but I kept putting it off because I have no idea how to summarize a book which I’ve learned so much from. In the end, I think the best way for me to put it is to put it bluntly; this book changed my game.
It helped me move up from taking photos like these of Japan in 2008:
To photos like these in 2009:
