Stepping Out of Comfort Zone

In my career as a photographer, I am most comfortable photographing weddings (almost considered myself born with that talent because I think I did alright on my first ever wedding shoot, or maybe because I was prepared for it - had the visual in my head) but I always wanted to venture into other kind of shoots ; conceptual or editorial. Lucky me I have a close friend who is so good at it; Alif Hisham. We actually known each other from the first wedding shoot that I did in Kelantan and right now we live very close by, hence I get to meet him often to talk about our ideas and squeeze our creative juice over meals.

So Alif had this idea of shooting girls in different races, in their own skin, to help them express themselves and be confident of their flaws and I think it was such a powerful campaign that he was trying to portray. And in one of those session, he planned to do it in an Airbnb in PJ and while we were at it, we planned to have a short staycation and have bbq night there. And so everything went as planned; started the make up at 3:30 in a coffee shop nearby and we head over to the Airbnb for the shoot and it went on a little past sunset. The model had to rush back right after the shoot so me and a bunch of high strung people in that little space did not want to let it go to waste so I started to take over the camera and asking the stylist to pose for me.

Before coming there, I already had this idea to shoot a little something for my own portfolio and that little something means me stepping out of my comfort zone. Honestly it was not easy to shoot something with no emotion floating in the air and without any prop or partner. And one thing that I found to be a huge struggle was to fight my own guts to have everything symmetrical and lined up like I always do in my previous works. I had to tell myself multiple time - “It’s okay if the line is not straight”, “It doesn’t have to be perfect”, “Ignore the eye-level angle rule, get down there on the ground” and a thousand more inner voice telling me to break the rules.

And that got me to thinking that it takes a lot of practice for a fashion photographer to get to a certain level because personally, I struggled so much from that. It is a whole different discipline and it takes a lot of creative mind to be able to create something so extraordinary and not everyone is able to do that without hard work. So I really adore people in the fashion industry; not just the photographer but the models, stylist, make up and hair experts, creative directors and the list goes on because you guys surely put a lot of work into something that often times people underestimated what went on behind it. Hence, here are my humble work from that night (in an extremely small space but we made do of that):

That’s Emmy who was the stylist for the shoot and she also makes batik headbands which you can out here. I kind of turned her into a photographer as well while Alif was busy with the bbq. And I think she did a pretty good job considering I was such a stick in front of the camera. It took a village to show me how to pose like literally. Aida, who was also the make up artist for that day, not only make us look like a goddess, she also directed me to pose and patiently asked me to loosen up and get in the mood and be myself. I owe you Aida and Emmy, you guys are wonderful human beings, never thought I could click so much with you guys, my instant friends.

Consider yourself lucky to witness this super awkward posses by me. Honestly I never thought it was going to be this difficult and now I must say I would just stay behind the camera (that’s what I do better). Oh by the way, I did not plan on the outfit to be matching with Emmy but somehow we did and we better not waste the chance right?