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With the high demanding market in smartphones, digital tablets, cameras and data storages. A lot of people are saving their precious photos on their phones or other storage devices. Resulted to fewer people printing their photos. When is the last time you printed your photo? Digital Photos Fun fact you may be interested: A one-terabyte hard disk storage drive can save around 2,000,000 photos (assuming average size of the photos are 500k). Its is an insane amount of images to be stored inside a palm sized device and we are pretty sure it will take quite a long time to fill up one hard disk. But has any of your hard disk failed you? If it does, how many photos you've lost? Don't get us wrong, we like hard disk storages and in fact we have lot of them too. It is a very economical way to store so many images considering their price and physical size. And we are having more than 18TB of storage as of now to store our client’s projects including backups and backups of backups. Yes, that’s how we are afraid of hard disk failure and we learn it the hard way. According to statics, “just under 80% of all hard drives will survive to their fourth anniversary”. We believed that no one wants their drives to fall under the 20%, so having your hard disk or any other storage devices backed up is very important.
Print Photos There is a reason why you still see your childhood photos after so many years. Printing your photos may not be as cheap as compared to storing your photos in the drives now. However, if you store your photos well it can last you for ages. Our parent used to print our childhood photos because digital storage was not readily accessible and is very expensive at their time. According to jcmit, it was about USD$5.28/MB in 1990. At that price, it makes more sense to print out your photos than storing it digitally. Therefore, we see all our childhood photos printed and still accessible till now. In addition, you don't pay hundreds or even thousands to take a professional photo shoot just to store it digitally. Have it printed out, hang it around your home and show it to your guests. As hard disk increase its failure chance from year to year, print photos lose its color and quality as years goes by. There are a few ways to keep and store your prints to slow down the color degrading of the photos. A dry cabinet/box, it is very common storage method for photographers to keep their equipment away from mold and fungus. It is also consider one of the best ways to store your printed photos as well. Think of it as a refrigerator for your vegetables to keep it fresh. At about $20 investment, you can buy a dry small cabinet/box from most electronic stores. It comes with different sizes to suit your collections and most importantly, it keeps your precious photos the way you printed it.
Reference: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/ http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm
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There is a lot of confusion between a professional and amateur photographer. And we get asked quite frequently what are we between both of them. A straightforward answer to it is, we are professional photographers.  The term professional photographer means a person who earns 100% of its income from photography. It is less relates to photography skills and more towards business entities from marketing and networking to accounting and client relationships. Where as an amateur photographer are those who have a full-time job but earning extras from photography during their free time. Therefore, there are no definitions in terms of skill set in these types of photographers. Which means one can be better than another or vice versa. So which one should you choose for your project? Unfortunately there are no definite answers because art is very subjective. It is client’s personal preference and work relationship with the photographer. One thing for sure is that a professional photographer spent most of his/her time crafting images compared to an amateur photographer who is only free to explore photography after their full-time job.
At the end of the day, note that camera and equipment is just another tool to creative mind. Expensive cameras do not guarantee nice images. Potential clients are paying for solutions to their problem not photographers with high-end equipment.  Picking the right image for your portrait session can be a long and tedious process. Therefore, we will discuss how we assist our client to shortlist their images and choose their final photos easier. Some of you might have experience with studio photo shoot, but still having difficulties in choosing the right photos for your applications. Before every start of any studio portrait session, we will discuss on your objectives for taking the photos. For some people, they want to print it out and hang it on their wall. There are some who just want capture their portrait for memories sake and keep it for years to come. For whatever reasons, there has to be a purpose for taking a portrait shoot. Before taking up any personal portrait, have an idea in mind on what are you going to do with the pictures and let the photographer know about it. This will not only helps the photographer in the conceptualization process during the creative discussion, it will also allows the photographer to gives you some general ideas as suggestions for you to take on. It is best if you are able to collect some reference images online to show the photographer so he/she can use it as reference for a start. This process is important because you do not want to regret when you hang the images you choose does not suit your room.  Next is who is in the portrait session, portrait does not mean for individuals only. It can be any numbers from 1 to as many as the whole company. Perhaps for individual, it is easier to communicate and arrange the session. But as the number of pax grow, the difficulties increases. Therefore, take note on the attendance if your intended session is going to be a big group.
Many will have trouble on what to wear for portrait session. Without doubt it will always be a problem for anyone. We will always suggest a plain top and pair of jeans if it is a group portrait. Not only it provides a sense of unity, it will also look more pleasant for a longer period because photos are meant to keep for years but fashion may not last. As for individual portrait, we will keep the options open as long as the final images are aligned with your objectives. Usually personal portraits are taken every 2-3 years, but family portraits should be taken yearly. Exactly how is this relevant to picking the right images, you may ask. Well, most of the application needs your recent headshot from the past 6 months (e.g. articles, passport photo and job applications). Getting your portrait done every 2-3 years is as important as your career advancement. It represents yourself without you physically being there and picking the right image will follow through your success. Bring along your past portrait to show your photographer, gives them some areas of improvement with feedbacks received from your last portrait session. This process ensures you get the right image you wanted without getting repeated images for your next session. As we are shooting all studio sessions in tethered mode, this means you get to see the images taken on the spot throughout the session. We will explore possibilities along the way and make changes when necessary. In a studio lighting setup, the whole environmental mood changes. Some of you may get very nervous while some may not have the confident to bring out the best of you. While just saying “don’t be nervous” doesn’t really helps, we will show you the image taken on a larger screen to boost your confident and let you know for example which side of your face look better etc. This type of confident is build from inside out and we believe that once you have the confidence in you, it is very hard not to take nice portraits. With these, we will end this week’s update. Let us know which area you interested to know or any technical questions by contacting us here. When we prepare for a shoot, there are countless discussions and meetings with our client before the actual shoot. We will first understand the objective(s) of our client’s needs before we get too technical on the equipment. After a few creative discussions, we will get a few reference images to show our client to make sure the final outputs are what they are looking for. We will be using our studio portraiture session for this example, as we are handling portraiture projects frequently. Below are a few key areas we look out for in most of the portrait sessions.  Getting Tethered This means connecting the camera to the computer directly. What this does is to provide a better definition of the photos taken and allows the photographer to check on the focus critically on the monitor screen. It enables the photographer to correct any issues of the settings on the spot quicker compared to a small screen on the back of the camera. Another good thing about getting tethered is we allow our model to see the images of them taken and correct their poses easily.  Gear Let’s not talk about brands but rather what gets the job done correctly and effectively. In most cases, we are using a full frame camera body paired with 24 – 70mm because the image it can produced allows our client to print 24 x 36” with no issues and the flexible focal length gives our photographer to take a tight headshot to a full body image. Studio lightings are pretty standard in the industry and it can vary from a single light to a dozens of lights settings. Ultimately, it depends of the type of project we are handling. For portraiture, we use mostly 3 monolights (one key light, one rim light and the other for background). For fill light, we usually use a 5 in 1 reflector to fill the shadow if necessary. What it does is to fill in some lights the shadow for our subject and gives it a more 3 dimensional look to the image. Note that studio setup can vary from session to session depending on client's requirements. Makeup Artist
We offer optional makeup artist for our portrait shoot to give the image a professional touch by enhancing our model’s facial complexion. A professionally trained makeup artist understand different types of facial structures and know how to draw attention away from the flaw but focus on the positive features. Our DI artist will improve the image further by correcting the exposure, removal of fine blemishes, color toning, facial and body contouring before the final images are handed to our client. There are also other factors involved in a portrait session and we will discuss it in details next time. If you have any enquiries on personal portrait, please do not hesitate to contact us.
As this the first post of our blog, we shall declare that we are not professional copywriter but a group of creative individuals. Therefore, I will foresee many broken English (Singlish) along the way in the future so please be lenient with us on our grammar and vocabulary on blog posts. We will try our very best to update our blog post once a week on our projects and some behind the scenes (maybe).
For a start, let us introduce a new type of image called Cinemagraph (example below). It isn't exactly new in the creative field, it was first created by Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg back in 2009. Cinemagraph is an animated GIF image that brings basically any images to life. It contains the essences of a video and the spirit of a photo that makes cinemagraph different from conventional video or photo presentations. In addition, the animation is endless! Which means, the image will be animated consistently non-stop! Currently we don't see many of them in the social media, partly because some of the programming aspects does not support GIF format. So it is uncommon for most users to get in contact with cinemagraph. As we are still exploring more creative ideas and techniques on cinemagraphs, we will show you guys along the way. That's all for this week. See ya.
As this the first post of our blog, we shall declare that we are not professional copywriter but a group of creative individuals. Therefore, I will foresee many broken English (Singlish) along the way in the future so please be lenient with us on our grammar and vocabulary on blog posts. We will try our very best to update our blog post once a week on our projects and some behind the scenes (maybe).
For a start, let us introduce a new type of image called Cinemagraph (example below). It isn't exactly new in the creative field, it was first created by Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg back in 2009. Cinemagraph is an animated GIF image that brings basically any images to life. It contains the essences of a video and the spirit of a photo that makes cinemagraph different from conventional video or photo presentations. In addition, the animation is endless! Which means, the image will be animated consistently non-stop! Currently we don't see many of them in the social media, partly because some of the programming aspects does not support GIF format. So it is uncommon for most users to get in contact with cinemagraph. As we are still exploring more creative ideas and techniques on cinemagraphs, we will show you guys along the way. That's all for this week. See ya. |
