Ooi and Mei Leng visited my studio a year ago, when their older child was just 2 and Mei Leng was still pregnant with Jing Yu. I love to have this privilege of journeying alongside all the families I photograph, especially to see them grow. It was wonderful that I got to celebrate Jing Yu’s 1 year old birthday with a fun cake smash session in the studio. His brother was all too happy to participate in the session together!
Last year, we participated at the 9th Private International School Fair in Midvalley and met Yuki there at our booth. We had a great time just chatting and connecting and on that day itself, he booked a photography session with us. This really cute Japanese family loves Malaysia so much, they are considering making this their 2nd home under the Malaysian My Second Home program! It always amazes me when I meet expats who love Malaysia so much they want to make it their home. Despite the challenges our nation faces, I am still proud to be Malaysian. This is a place where many opportunities abound.
Here are some of my favourites from Yuki and Aki’s session.
We photographed Corina and Andrew a few times through the years – once for their pre-wedding, then family portraits after the little one was born, and a few months ago, Corina’s family! It was her sister, Samantha’s graduation and we were so elated that we got to celebrate an important moment with her. It is really our pleasure that we get to walk through life with our clients, taking photos of key moments in their lives.
Just this thought came to me the other day… through the years, we have actually accumulated Gigs and Gigs of data in our hard drives. Even though we photographed a client 12 years ago, we still have their wedding or family photos till today! Crazy, isn’t it… but these images are as precious to us as they are to our clients. If anyone loses their images, they can always contact us as we have 2 copies of their photos or video stored away for them! Growing up, after developing the photos from negatives, I always imagined it was my responsibility to keep these images safe. I don’t know if my clients think we are crazy, but yeah, we have records of hundreds of family photos, all archived safely for them.
When you add 8 young children below the age of 8 together in a large group portrait, chaos is sure to happen. Between threats, bribery, monkey calls (I was doing the monkey impression), we managed to get the attention of children. I even had to don my special lens accessory to attract them (look at the last photo to see what I mean). Between tears, shouts of “I don’t want to take a photo” and “Look here!”, we managed to get this…
We have a few versions of the group photo, but here’s what really took place behind the scenes of the Naza family’s Raya portraits.
We are really honoured to be part of their annual Raya photos for the 3rd year in a row, thanks to Datuk Wira SM Faisal. I also got to taste the delicious rendang made by his mum once again. This really close knit family is a joy to photograph. There’s just so much love and laughter in this family.
There were a lot of changes in my life over the past one month. On the 1st of May, while en-route on a company trip to Club Med, I got the news that my mom was struggling with her last breath at home. It was over WhatsApp that I said my goodbye to her. She was 81. Her death did not come as a surprise, because the month before that, my sister and I were going in and out of hospital, trying to rescue her infected toe that was turning into gangrene. Towards the last few weeks of her life, she had a lung and bladder infection, and the doctor basically just told us to be prepared.
My mum, looking very hip then! And the photo below was taken with my dad years ago when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Read a bit more about his journey here.
