My little sweety Daisy had a oopsy Daisy moment the other day. She jumped off the couch and her paw slipped on the tile floor and she landed sideways banging her head. She then has a seizure that the Vet says is related to hydrocephalus. I was shit scared and immediately stuck my finger in her mouth to open her airway, she convulsed for a few minutes and then stopped she was then dazed and confused for the next two hours and just lay in her basket not doing anything. Well i took her to the Vet, same one that my friend Lisa took her dog too, the one that knows about hydrocephalus, which is a condition with Chihauhaus whereby they basically have poor wiring and any trauma to the head will cause them to have a seizure. Poor little Daisy… she is fine now, but I feel almost like she needs to have a crash helmet… OOPSY DAISY…

Here she is an hour or so before the accident, my friend David was shooting some product in the studio and she wanted to be a part of it…

This was taken last year when I went up to Beijing to visit my folks who were having an R&R break from their job in Mongolia, I am sure it looks a little different now as all the construction will be finished and maybe they even planted grass around the place to make it look nice. According to reports on the BBC, the air quality is terrible. We have heard that they are going to shut down all the factories and building sites in the entire area starting right about now.  So upwards of 300 million people are going to be out of work for the next two months, WOW. Only in China.

Well one thing to say, I am quite sad that I am not going to be able to attend the opening ceremonies of the games, it will be awesome, out of this world, spectacuar. The Chinese are pulling out all stops to impress the world and they are going to do it.

We had a couple of clear nights last week, nights when it was not raining, nights when it the air was not polluted, so Ike and I headed out to photograph some cityscapes. Somehow we managed to get over to Tsim Sha Tsui (TST) just in time for the nightly Hong Kong Tourism Authority’s Light Show. Basically they have great big spot lights and laser beams on the tops of roughly 30 buildings on the Hong Kong water front. These lights then ‘dance’ and the crowds of tourists gather nightly along the TST waterfront to witness the spectacle. Music is piped out to the crowd along the promenade near the Star Ferry, music that is somewhat muted in its exuberance. Actually it sounds like MUSZAK the stuff your hear in elevators. Obviously the HKTA does not want anyone to get too excited and have a heart attack while watching this nightly exhibition of the crass commercialism of HK. Somehow they get everyone to stare at the tops of all HK buildings for 20 minutes each night. Buildings that have bloody great big ADVERTISING billboards all light up in NEON… Ah Hong Kong the city of Light…

If you are in Swizterland and looking for a Hochzeitsfotograf yes that is Swiss for wedding photographer. Check out Roman’s website and blog for contemporary wedding photography in
Switzerland

The photo is giant not the family, ha ha… Anyways, I just picked this up from the framers it is a beautiful picture of Deepu’s family. Unlike Venture Studios, I did not blow out the skin tones by over exposing, over staturation etc.

Rather I shot this on a 21 megapixel camera the Canon 1Ds Mk3, with an 85mm f1.2L lens, one of the sharpest portrait lenes made. Then I spent over a week retouching each shot and then combining them into the layout to create this ‘Giant Family Portrait Master piece’. The finished file once flattened in Photoshop was 845megabytes, and was printed by Color 6.

It is not often that I get really excited about a family portrait picture, but this one is quite special.

—————————————————

And looking at this picture I think, how did I get so FAT… so off to the gym I go…

Another year has passed and I was again invited to photograph the Shek O Challenge Open Water Race for the two Dougs. This is an annual event and is growing with popularity each year. Swimmers start at Shek O Big Wave Bay and swim the approx 2.5 km to Shek O Back Beach. This years event was well attended with almost 150 participants taking to the water. The weather man cooperated, providing clear skys and a hot hot sun.

The top three swimmers were:

a blistering pace for a 2.2km swim, let alone an OPEN WATER swim.

After the race, participants enjoyed a hot meal courtesy of DELICOUS’s Dennis who now does catering only after his landlord jacked the rent on DELICOUS Restaurant by 100% and he had to close. Music was provided by Dean Morris.

So check out the images here and if you want to buy a copy of the DIGITAL FILE, you may do so using our fully automated e-shop.

See you next year at the Hong Kong Shek O Challenge…

I am now exclusively represented by Central Weddings and Occasions for all wedding work. This means that I will be working weddings for them and them only. All my wedding bookings and arrangements will be made through Central Weddings and Occasions. Central Weddings and Occasions will be doing all my marketing and promotions and I will now be known as Sean David Baylis for Central Weddings and Occasions - Wedding Photographer.

I am really looking forward to this new relationship as I believe Central Weddings and Occasions is ‘the best’ wedding boutique in Hong Kong and their clients will be looking for the best service, from a photographer they can trust to capture their special day with style. I guess this is why they asked me to be their photographer.

Well in the process of starting to work with Central Weddings and Occasions I have been asked to provide a video slide show to use at a wedding fair this weekend. This has forced me into a long awaited task of going through all the weddings I have shot in the last three years and pulling out a selection of new ‘portfolio’ shots. This is what I came up with. Hong Kong Photographers New Wedding Portfolio Gallery, please enjoy.

Our old assistant Kalun has moved on and become his own boss, and so he should, working for us he was over worked and under paid for his level of skill and talent. Well, Kal has a new website up and it looks pretty good. Kal’s personal style is quite artistic and he has a great eye.

White Box Photography wish him well in his future career and will gladly recommend him to anyone, just not our clients, ha ha…

So check out Kal’s new website. Hong Kong Chinese Fashion Photographer of note…

Many times we get asked “where is a good place to print my photographs” in Hong Kong. I usually then ask “what kind of printing do you want?” Are you concerned about the cost, or the quality or both? Are you printing 4R for a scrap book or are you doing fine art black and white?

For a short answer I just say, ‘Color 6′ on Stanley Street (tel: 2526 0123). They do the best all round printing in Hong Kong, their service is however, not very friendly, but their printing is pretty well as good as you will get in Hong Kong. They can also do large prints up to 6′x9′ on matt or glossy PHOTOGRAPHIC paper, from your digital file

For cheap and cheerful 4R prints we usually use East Asia on Swatow St. in Wan Chai as they are very close to the studio. They also do nice quality larger prints, but can only print upto 3×4. They are a little more reasonably priced than Color 6, and quite a bit friendlier…

I try to avoid places like “PhotoMax” or any of these little 1 hour places, and for good reason, I sent a disc in to them the other day and the prints were, well, so poor quality that I has to reprint them at East Asia as I was not about to give them to the client.

A place that I used to use, who were really good and always gave good friendly service was John Leung’s, but then they closed and became “Digital Force” or something and I lost touch. Apparently they are still operating… I really must look them up cause Color6 are just too unhappy sometimes..

(Looking to do your own BW printing. PhotoScientific on Stanley Street still stock Illford fibre based papers)

As this is summer and always a little slow around the studio, we decide to do a little advertising. Usually the best place to advertise in Hong Kong is HK Mag, but I really hate giving them my money cause they are just so, well… (Mom said if you can’t say something nice…)

A great place for Expat information in Hong Kong is GeoExpat, who run a great site and we have been listed in their directories for quite some time and always receive about 30+ referrals a month, many of which turn into job leads. So we have now taken it a step further and have started advertising on their site. Shri, who runs the site, really knows his stuff and the forums are always a place for a good vibrant discussion of life in Hong Kong and beyond.

So next time you are browsing GeoExpat, you may see our ad…

(Jet Lee on set with Kevin Lynch Photographer from LA for the movie MUMMY3 - Snapped with my iPhone)

Kevin Lynch noted LA photographer, recently called upon us to produce a shoot for him. Initially the project started out as a rental. Kevin sent me an email requesting to rent our studio and asking how much etc… I replied and he booked the studio. The next day he sent me his equipment list and asked if I could help source some of the gear for him in HK as he didn’t want to bring it all out with him. At this point I looked at the list and then asked “Do you need someone to produce this shoot for you?” to which he replied “YES, Please”…

This was on Wednesday, the shoot was scheduled with his prelighting on Saturday and the actually shooting of JET LEE on the Sunday. Only thing was that the following day, was Ching Ming festival, one of the big holidays in Hong Kong, when everything is closed. So we had one day to actually get everything sorted for Kevin. Luckily this is Hong Kong and such things are possible in this town of amazing efficiency. We were able to organize on very short notice

• Rental of lighting and grip equipment rental, the value of this gear was in excess of HK$750k
• Rental of Hasselblad HD3 and lenses
• Catering for 20pax, first class food with live chef cooking hot food in the studio as the client was all hollywood execs
• Transport for execs and photographer for 3 days while in HK
• Rental of two large industrial studios. (after looking at Kevin’s list I knew our place was too small for him)
• 3 assistants and a digital technician familiar with the Hasselblad software
• Wardrobe stylist/seemstress
• Telephone for local use by Kevin
• MacPro Tower with 16 gigs of RAM - No one in HK rents these but with my local connections I was able to borrow/rent one from my computer guy.
• Locations scouting for alternate location shootings

Well you would not believe how tired we all were at the end of the three days. Kevin had this to say about our efforts in an email received a week after the shoot

Hi Sean,
You’re help was tremendously appreciated.
Great meeting you guys and thanks again for all your help.
Look forward to another one with you.
Cheers,
Kevin

If you are an international crew looking for help in Hong Kong with producing an upcoming photoshoot in Hong Kong, give us a shout cause we are happy to help and you will find our local connections and knowledge very helpful and your shoot will run smooth.

Ah ya, after two weeks of seeing my business tank and my traffic drop to next to nothing I have changed my mind, got cold feet, done a loopy, and switched my domain URL back to sdbphoto.com

The thing is that I was not ranking for those hundereds of other ‘long tail’ keywords that I used to do very well with.

So sorry for the confusion, but as always everything still works. A redirect is in place to send queries to the ‘new url’ back to the old url…

Ok back to work…

Just a quick reminder we have a wonderful studio space in Wan Chai available for rent to other photographers. The studio is 1000′ with a 13′ ceiling and large daylight windows on either side of the 25′ wide cyclorama.  Rentals are available 7 days a week with advance bookings.  We also have available, rentals of Strobe heads. We have:

• 2x 800w/sec Monoheads $500/each/day
• 4×600w/sec Monoheads $500/each/day
• 1×500w/sec Monoheads $500/each/day
• 2m Para inverted Umbrella $500/day
• Softboxes - Free with head
• Flourobanks $500/each/day
• HMIs $500/each/day
• C-Stand, autopoles and boom - Free with heads

The studio has WiFi, iPod hook up as well as fridge, clothes racks and a steamer.  There is also a shower in the bathroom, should anyone need to clean up after a shoot.

Located in the heart of Wan Chai the studio is in a clean modern building with marble trimmed entrance and lift, ideal for corporate photo shoots.

The studio rental rate is HK$3000/day, 9 hours, or HK$2000 for 4 hours. Advance booking are advised and a 50% deposit is accepted on booking.

Please call Ike 9141 3600 or Sean 9277 1810 for booking.

Shooting again this week for Opera Gallery in Hong Kong, one of my favorite Artists iKumi Nagasawa. This piece is called “the end”… i like it as it reminds me of times gone by and the trival way in which we humans attribute endings to things… as they say, the end is only the beginning…

Opera Gallery in Hong Kong has a fine selection of ikumi nagasawa art, thus far we have shot about 20 of his works, each one unique and interesting.

At last HONDA is building a Hydrogen Fuel Cell car. What with the current price of oil and the craziness going on around the world as nations scramble to secure the worlds oil reserves we see a light on the horizon. Oil Free Day maybe a few years away, but we can see the possibility now. HONDA have broken the ice as it were and we are sure to see other manufacturers joining the GREEN RACE soon. So all I can say is BRAVO to HONDA for this brave step forward to a cleaner planet…

3G iphone just announced by Apple, will be available in Hong Kong July 11th for equivalent of US$199. Now that is half the price of the current 2G iPhone. So you must be thinking how can they afford to do that. Well, with 3G, the network usage is much heavier, and yep you guessed it much more expensive. An unlimited 3G package will run you somewhere in the region of HK$500/month. While the equivalent 2G service is only HK$128/month. So with all those people rushing out to buy the new 3G iPhone from 3 telecom, do you maybe think that Apple will be getting a cut of that $500/month… You can almost count on it?

Having said all that, I will not be getting one, rather I will stick with my 2G version, cause really I only use it for email when I am not in the office and with a 2G service, downloading my headers it is perfectly fast enough on a good old 2G or rather GPRS network…

Sorry Apple, no 3G sucker here…

As of last night we have officially retired the domain www.sdbphoto.com and switched our entire web presence on to our spanky new domain www.hongkongphotographer.hk

The change was done to offer a better easier to remember domain that more accurately reflects the purpose and content of the site. ‘hong kong photographer’ is who we are and hongkongphotograper is what we do.

The .hk sufix is also to reflect that this is a local HONG KONG run domain.

My good friend Chris Jean carried out the domain transfer is such a way that all my old pages will automatically redirect to the new URL, for instance if you type in http://sdbphoto.com/fashion.html the page will automatically direct you to http://hongkongphotographer.hk/fashion.html

Thanks Chris…

Star Sports TV coverage of the F1 races really really sucks. Why? Too many bloody ads. Not like just a few, but every 5 minutes they cut to 2 minutes of Ads. Now they must know that the F1 is watched by millions of people and they probably have very good revenue from this, but how the (&%$£) can they justify the shear number of ad breaks they have. Really F1 is a race, a fast paced race, to cut away for even 30 seconds, you will miss some of the action. Someone could crash, someone could take the lead or any number of other things could and do happen. STAR SPORTS do not care one whit about their viewers, their only care is to maximize the number of ads they can pump out. The stupid thing is that half the ads they show are for up coming programs, surely this is completely unneccessary especially since they repeat the same *&%$ing ad throughout the race.. Yeah we just saw that, five minutes ago, do we really need to see it again. Now if I could only find an alternative supplier of my F1 coverage, I would cancel my SUPER SPORT package cause STAR SPORT F1 Coverage sucks eggs..

Whats more it has become abundantly clear that STAR SPORTS has some kind of sponsorship deal with ING Bank Insurance and whatever as they are as they give Fernando Alonso in his ING Renault an inordinate amount of coverage. Can I just say this again, STAR SPORTS ING FORMULA 1 coverge sucks the big one… and Hamilton is out of the race, YA!

Last night Hong Kong had the biggest rain storm I have ever witnessed in my 11 years of living in this city. It was coming down ‘cats and dogs’… well this was the scene in the morning when I went to go to the MTR… I couldn’t get to the Sheung Wan MTR cause all the roads around it were flooded. Really flooded, unfortunately i didn’t have my real camera with me…

This past week I had the honor of being the photographer for Deepak and Komal’s 25th Anniversary Celebration. These are my Sindhi friends, Komal is the owner of Sanskrit an Indian fashion boutique on Lyndhurst Terrace. I have been doing alot of Sindhi parties lately, it seems that I am the ‘Sindhi Photographer’…

The celebrations kicked off with a party on Friday night at LINQ on Pottinger street in SOHO. http://sdbphoto.com/komal_deepak_25th/ Wow these ladies and gents sure know how to have a good time and the party went til very late or rather quite early, which way you want to look at it.

The the official celebrations began on Wednesday afternoon with Komal’s Mehendi. A Mehendi is a party thrown by the friends of the bride, a few days before the wedding. The purpose of this party aside from showering gifts is to ‘beautify’ the bride and the ladies apply ‘henna’ the beautiful designs on hands and feet, so popular.

For their 25th Anniversary Celebrations it was decided that Komal would do a traditional ‘mehendi’… this took place at the Hong Kong Country Club and all the ladies wore their finest ’saris’ and everyone was a glitter with jewels. The photos are here. http://sdbphoto.com/komalmehendi/

Day two was a small family celebration (if anything Sindhi can be called small) at the Aberdeen Marina Club. The traditional Chinese Banquet was enjoyed by the family and close friends. Deepak and his good friends really got stuck into the party and singing and dancing ensued. Some photos are here… http://sdbphoto.com/chinesebanquet/

Friday night was a big Cocktail party hosted by the family of the bride, held at the JW Marriott. Everyone was looking fine and the happy couple Komal and Deepak enjoyed an evening of merryment with their friends and family. http://sdbphoto.com/komaldeepakmariott/

The grand finale was a Gala dinner hosted by the family of the groom at the Kowloon Intercontinental Hotel. The grand ball room was decked out in glorious silver themed finery. Komal and Deepak’s closest friends and family enjoyed a fine sit down dinner with music and dancing provided by DJ Romi and a live band. Shanky, a close friend of the happy couple performed a rousing rendition of “You look wonderful tonight”… to much applaus.. As with every Sindhi party the dancing then went on til the wee hours and everyone had a wonderful time. The evening ended with the enforcement of the InterCon’s 2am noise curfew, but not to be outdone, there was a cooked breakfast waiting in the loby for the weary party goers… As this was such a fun evening with so much dancing I brought my friend Kal along to shoot with me, together we managed 1700 images, which I have now edited down to 633, but given that LightRoom gallery software only allows galleries of 500 I have had to make two galleries. They are here:

http://sdbphoto.com/galadinner/

http://sdbphoto.com/galadinner2/

Finally as the actual day of the Anniversary is June 1st, a Sunday night dinner was held at Harlans in the IFC mall. Harlans is one of Hong Kong better restaurants. A smallish group of some 120 sat down to dinner. It was with some thanks I was asked to join one of the tables and I got to enjoy the delicous Lamb chops… um so yummy.

Deepak and his friends were soon singing old favorites, with Deepak seranading Komal, accompanied by friends. The photos are here http://sdbphoto.com/anniversarydinnerharlans/

All in all a great week working for a lovely couple, part of Hong Kong’s vibrant Sindhi community. People who really know how to celebrate the bonds of family and love..

http://sdbphoto.com/komal_deepak_25th/

http://sdbphoto.com/komalmehendi/

http://sdbphoto.com/chinesebanquet/

http://sdbphoto.com/komaldeepakmariott/

http://sdbphoto.com/galadinner/

http://sdbphoto.com/galadinner2/

http://sdbphoto.com/anniversarydinnerharlans/

—————————————————————

Ordering Prints. Selling prints is not really our business and we do not have the manpower to handle many print orders, therefore we encourage people to ‘pinch’ the photos they like from the galleries. Deepak and Komal have requested a FLASH GALLERY so that you do not have to CLICK CLICK CLICK to see all the pics, only problem is this makes it difficult to ‘pinch’ the photo. Therefore I have also made a MASTER GALLERY, with all the photos in bigger size for everyone to take. Please feel free to help yourself to the photos that you want. They will print reasonably well up to 4R size (please note as these photos are optimized to a higher quality this gallery will load slower if you go click click click)… If you would like to order a bigger print of any or a larger number of prints, please contact me. Note we have a $200 minimum print order.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE. THESE PHOTOS ARE FOR THE GUESTS OF THE PARTY ONLY AND MAY NOT BE USED FOR ANY OTHER PURPOSE.

Last week I was shooting a wedding at the JW Marriott Hotel in good ole Hong Kong. This was one of the deserts on offer at the buffet.  The funny thing was that it sat untouched all night, I think people thought it was a work of art and no one wanted to harm it, well toward the end of the evening, I dove in and had a taste. I am a huge fan of Creme Brule and OMG this was without a doubt the best I had ever tasted. I went back for a second helping and then mentioned to one of the guests that the Creme Brule was divine, word spread pretty fast and within 15 minutes, the work of art was reduced to dirty dishes…

Today I did some spring cleaning, first I cleaned out all my old boxes and stacks of papers and stuff lying around. I collected a pile of unlabeled CDRs and put them all in a pile. Once the physical cleaning was done I set about to do some digital cleaning, basically finding out what is on all those unlabeled discs…

Well quite a few intersting old pics from the last ten years in HK… the one that I like the most was from my gory (no not glory) days as a male model… I can only look back now and laugh, so to share the laughs here is the Giordano Campaign I did in 1999… OMG 30Kgs ago… gotta get to the gym…

This weekend I went up to Dai Long Wan beach for a little R&R and basically to get out of the city for awhile. Dai Long Wan is lovely, it is well out of the way and requires quite an effort to get to, but it is well worth the effort once you get there. The beach is long and has nice white sand, and whats more the water is always crystal clear. Dai Long Wan is exposed to the South China Sea and as a result there are always small waves for surfing and as is the case with most surf beaches there is a rip current otherwise known as undertow. The situation at Dai Long Wan is that the rip current is always in a little area close to the shore almost like a small lagoon and it is very deceptive. Well while sitting on the beach over comes the GFS helicopter, Hong Kong’s big whirly bird. On the beach are half a dozen of HK’s volunteer park rangers. These are the people who spend their weekends patrolling the country parks helping out hikers in distress.

What had happened was that a couple of teenagers had been swimming and gotten caught in the RIP, an aussie surfer lady who is always on the beach had helped them out and pulled them to the beach, but not before one of them had swallowed alot of water. Well he went into shock and thus the GFS came to the rescue. That is when everyone else on the beach got out their cameras and iphones and started snapping away. Well not to be out done I grabbed my little Leica and snapped this great shot as the helicopter lifted off. Yes is has gone straight into my Alamy stock…

Moral of the story, if you are going to Dai Long Wan beach in Sai Kung Country park BEWARE the rip current…

Recently I read about the security issues with Wordpress 2.5 so I decided to upgrade to the recommended 2.5.1., oh what a big mistake this was. My server provides a one-click upgrade (yeah right)! I clicked and then my whole blog, this blog, the one that has been running for almost 4 years now, went… well it went away… far far away where no one could see it…

Grumble grumble… I CAN FIX THIS, I thought, I can fix anything (yeah right) so into the code I go. I know a little about WP inner workings, but really not much at all. So after a very frustrating weekend trying to fix it, mean while my blog gets dropped from Googles index, I am very frustrated. So finally I decide enough of this time to call in a professional Wordpress fixer, so I posted a request on: wp-pro@lists.automattic.com This is the WordPress list where you can find qualified WP fix it guys, like Chris…

Within minutes I had a reply from Chris Jean of http://www.realthemes.com followed quite soon after by a few other replies. Chris seemed sharp and on the ball so I accepted his offer of fixing my blog for US$50. I set up the admin so he could get to work and then clicked over to PayPal to send him $.

Well within minutes there was action and within two hours it was all fixed and working properly again. Chris was very helpful, we chatted on Skype while he worked and i learned a few things about working with WP. So if you are looking to upgrade your WordPress blogging package or have a custom theme built to your specifications check out Chris over at http://www.realthemes.com

This past week we were called upon to produce a shoot for well known Los Angles Hollywood Photographer Kevin Lynch. He was shooting PR material of JET LEE, for the upcoming Mummy3 movie.

From start to finish the whole thing was one big learning experience. Watching this master photographer work was great. Kevin shoots lots of movie posters for Hollywood as well as UFC (Ultimate Fighting Champions). His knowledge of photography, lighting and equipment is amazing. To top it all off, he is also a very nice guy, laid back and willing to share his knowledge of the art.

The production was spread over two days. First day was prelight and second day was shoot day. Kevin’s lighting is top notch and he uses only the best equipment available, most notably the Hasselblad H3D. The detail on this state of the art camera is scary. During the prelight day, I was asked to stand in for one of the shots and this is the result. Even more scary… ha ha…