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Portraits

A day at the park: Family Portraits of Clement & Yoke Lin

I first met Clement at one of the Bloom Workshops I had conducted in the past. He is an avid photographer himself, and like many parents who love photography, are often not in the photos themselves! He told me that every 2 years, they will do a professional photo shoot with their family. I think it’s a great idea to capture moments with the children as they grow through the years. The other thing that is special too is that his relationship with his wife started when they were just teenagers since they got to know each other when they were 15.

Here are some of my favourite moments from our 1 hour shoot together recently.

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You’ll Never Walk Alone: Pre-wedding of Andrew & Desiree

Andrew and Desiree are one of those couples who instantly make the ‘friend’ list the moment you meet them. They’re friendly, warm, and thoughtful. After our pre-wedding shoot, they even gave us a box of chocolates and a hand-written card, which really made our day! We photographed their wedding at Pulai Springs Resort, JB recently but before we share those images, here are some of the photos from their pre-wedding shoot.

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Dignity for Children’s Visit

Last week, we had 12 very special visitors to the Stories studio. It was an unusual day for us as we never had a group of teenagers visit us in this manner before. These teenagers were chatty, fun, cheeky and ambitious. You wouldn’t have thought that they came from underprivileged backgrounds or hold a refugee status here in Malaysia.

But thank God for amazing individuals who have volunteered their time and energy in order to give back to society. And especially so for the people behind Dignity for Children, a one stop community learning centre for the urban poor and underprivileged children. Their vision is to empower these children to break the cycle of poverty through quality education, which leads to a positive life transformation.

We were pleased to share our journey as photographers / videographers and to encourage these students to see that this is a viable career path. It was a good exposure for most of them and they even got to have their portraits photographed by our team! It was really worth it to see their smiles knowing that we made a small impact in their lives, even if it was only for 2 hours. We really pray for the best for these kids, and hope that they will lead successful lives as they make carve their path into adulthood.

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Tips on Photographing Babies & Newborns

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It’s funny how it is through my career in photography that I get to handle infants. More so now compared during the time where I used to work directly with kids as a teacher! There’s truly a different set of skills to learn and be aware of with handling children and babies of different age groups and even with that, every child has different temperaments!

At Stories, I have had the wonderful privilege to photograph and document relationships between parents and baby. Every shoot is a new experience as every individual is different and more often than not, I rely a lot on my intuition to navigate through the differences. Just want to share with you some thoughts I have concerning photographing newborn babies and slightly older infants.

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The Food Story: Pre-Wedding of Chuen Wai & Kim

From day 1, their story revolved around food. It was February 2008 when they first met. Chuen Wai was working in Sagano Japanese Restaurant and Kim was interning at Sheraton Imperial. Despite her first impression of him (that he looked really young, even though he was 25 then!), they hit it off, and shortly after that on the same month, on Valentine’s Day, he presented her with a huge bouquet of flowers at work.

Things moved really quickly from that point onwards, as they spent lots of time talking about where to eat, what to eat, what new foods to experience, how to cook those new experiences, watching food channels on TV together, and traveling to places where food would dominate their itineraries.

However, since Kim had to head back to Switzerland to complete her studies, they spent 2 years in a long distance relationship with a 6 hour time difference. Eventually, Chuen Wai moved to Dubai and their time difference was shortened to 2 hours, which made it more manageable. And once Kim moved to Dubai, everything got even more exciting as they relived their love, commitment and passion to each other once again.

This May, Chuen Wai and Kim will tie the knot, and we would like to wish them a hearty congratulations! This shoot was quite a memorable one for the team, because initially, I was scheduled to do their pre-wedding shoot last October. However, the night before the shoot, I was really in a lot of pain from the Urinary Tract Infection I had, plus I was heavily pregnant. That morning of the shoot itself, I went into labour to deliver Kyle. Thank God for Jamie and Diane who were really amazing as they stepped up to replace me.

So before the shoot ended, I had Kyle in my arms. Though I never met Kim and Chuen Wai personally, I had communicated with them through many emails, and seeing these images made me feel that they are such a fun, relaxed couple to be around. Perhaps one day, we will meet and I would love to sample some of that cooking!

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