Archive for the ‘Portraits’ Category

This past Saturday, the crew got together and did two photo shoots with two amazing models, Jane and Stacey, on Treasure Island. Some of you might recognize Jane, as she was a contestant for Miss Asian American (MAA), winning Miss Photogenic for the 2009 MAA. Stacey on the other hand, has a ballet background that we most definitely will be putting to use in the next photo shoot with her.  Treasure Island, named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the same name, is an artificial island in California that sits in the Bay between San Francisco and Oakland accessed via the Interstate 80 freeway. It is home to some 1,453 residents, and is a popular tourist attraction as you can see sea lions on the shoreline and also get a very nice view of San Francisco along with the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge (Interstate 80).

There are many condemned and decrepit buildings with warning signs of asbestos strewn upon boarded up doors and broken windows making for an urban explorer’s wet dream and, in our case, a great site for urban portraits.

Having never heard of this Japanese manga: NANA, I did some research online by reading the Wikipedia entry and even reading a few chapters of the English translated manga to get some insight. Nadia and Steff taking some pity on me, explained their respective characters:

It’s about two rival bands, one is a punk band and the other is a rock band. Nana [Osakai] and Layla “Reira” Serizawa (Nadia) are the respective vocalists. Shinichi “Shin” Okazaki is a bassist from Nana’s band. He kept the fact that he was underage a secret from everyone, and was actually sleeping around with women for money. When he met Reira, it started out to be like that, but they ended up falling in love. One of the things that these two have in common is that they’re half Caucasian and have had a hard time with it when they were younger. They were always hiding their relationship though, due to their age difference and their band’s reputation.

Certainly sounds interesting. Sounds like if they were Facebook buddies, their relationship status would be “It’s complicated.”

It’s been awhile since we’ve last done an update on the blog as we’ve been busy in the meantime, but I’ll be putting up a series of new blog posts.

The first one is a photo shoot of the lovely ladies of United Underworld. The last time we had a chance to photograph the group was at the 2009 WonderCon event. You can see pictures of the photo shoot here and resulted in this shot that I really like:

United Underworld Photo Shoot

Click in to see more.

Ly and Rene Wedding

October 14, 2009

Ly and Rene’s wedding was a beautiful gala of Asian colors rich with Asian and Hispanic culture. Started off with the Chinese/Vietnamese Tea Ceremony at Ly’s house that included some Hispanic traditions that then progressed to a photo shoot at the gorgeous Warrior Lake on California State University Stanislaus (better known as Stan State). The reception was held at the American Legion Hall in Modesto, CA. I should note that Ly’s hair and makeup was done by her sister, absolutely amazing work! All the photography would not be possible without my amazing friends: Eric, Rendy, and Lynn shooting with me. Click in to enjoy the pictures and the slideshow (definitely watch the slideshow, has more pics).

Inspiration comes in many forms. Sometimes you see something as simple as an alley in Chinatown with broken concrete, gravel, parking cones, and those traffic control barriers, random strangers watching you, and you have one of the beautiful models sit down in that mess and what do you get? Something really neat:

sf-street-photographers-chinatown

Inspiration also comes from photographing with other amazing photographers in the local Bay Area.

Wedding photographer extraordinaire Ryan Brenizer invented this really cool technique while on his honeymoon which is dubbed “The Brenizer Method”. For those who may or may not have heard of it and are not sure of what this technique is exactly, it’s essentially using a telephoto lens to create a very shallow depth of field as if shot with a wider angle lens. This technique makes a dSLR image look like it was shot by medium format.

Eric and I got together to do some portfolio shots for ModelMayhem member Anna Luong, a beautiful model and very easy to work with. We shot at San Jose State University. All images shot with a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II and Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II USM. My favorite shots, with Eric’s shots coming soon, click in to see.

Because of my sister’s graduation from San Francisco State University (SFSU), I didn’t attend FAnime on Saturday. But Sunday turned out to be quite a good turn out. Thugs started getting pretty busy around 11 AM and was non-stop hustle and bustle.

Like many other photographers, we at Bui Photography had a number of private photo shoots lined up. In total for Sunday, we did 4 scheduled photo shoots with 3 more random unscheduled photo shoots. For those who are interested in just seeing the pics, click here. To read more and see pics from the photo shoots, click in.

The 2009 FAnime is now upon us. I attended FAnime on Friday after lunch time and things got busy quite quickly. Despite being a Friday, turnout was quite high. I also did a number of photo shoots with KittyCatChi (non-cosplay shoot), MissNintendo, CherryTeaGirl5, Hikaru-Jan and Rena-Girl. You can view all the pictures from the photo shoot including just random shots here. Click in to read more and see my favorite shots.

Jan (Hikaru-Jan) is one of my favorite models to work with. I’ve photographed her at a number of events and did a private cosplay photoshoot with her at WonderCon2009. This time around, we decided to do something different: punk/goth-style portraits. For this type of photography, the backdrop would be important to fully convey the scene, so I chose no other than Battery Mendell in the Marin Headlands for it’s great graffiti and stone walls.

Clothing worn was all by SexPot Revenge.

Here are some samples from our photo shoot: