Fashion Brands by Mark Tungate

Awesome book by Mark Tungate

Picked up this book at a local bookstore a couple weeks ago. Author Mark Tungate did a wonderful job introducing us to the world of fashion. He first covered briefly on the history of fashion branding from Worth and Bobergh in 1858 to some of the top fashion brands nowadays including LV, Gucci and Chanels. Then he went ahead and talked about the business trend in the fashion industry, as well as discussing strategies some brands and designers used in selling their products. Being a "fashion outsider", Mark was able to cover all these topics in a way that is easy for everyone to understand.

I especially love how this book focused mainly on the business side of fashion. Fashion is a really tricky business. As Mark mentioned in this book "Fashion is based on creating a need where ,in reality, there is none" and because of that, marketing pretty much determine the success or failure of a brand. Media has always been the tool of choice in marketing fashion brands. Understanding the business side of fashion helps me understand fashion photography better. I highly recommend this book to my fellow photographers and anyone who is interested in the fashion industry :)

Photographer - the Sartorialist

(image source: http://morningcup.wordpress.com)

Couple names always come up when we talk about fashion photography - Nigel Barker, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, etc... The wonderful works from these world famous fashion photographers defined the look of fashion photographs in our time. Teaming up with world-class models, makeup artists and fashion designers they portrayed an extremely glamorous world of fashion that is more a fantasy than reality. Their extremely creative take of fashion photography also gives some of us an impression that fashion photographs have to be "loud" in order to be noticed by the general public.

Truth is, fashion doesn't have to mean loud. Scott Schuman, aka. the Sartorialist, takes a totally different approach in fashion photography. Instead of following the big trend of creating an unreachable fashion fantasy he decided to shoot most of his fashion work on the street with "real people" he saw everyday. As a photographer who really know fashion, he knows what is "IN" and he captures what is really attractive to the viewers. His back-to-basic approach put *fashion and style* as the main focus of his image which is sometimes not the case in today's fashion photography.


The Sartorialist Book (image source: http://www.selectism.com)

Being listed as one of Time magazine's top 100 design influencers, Schuman is now a frequent contributor of GQ Magazine. This year he published a book with some of his favorite images. His signature street-style photo made this book a really great reference of today's fashion. If you are a fan of fashion I'm sure you'll find the images in this book very inspiring. ^___^)

The Sartorialist official site - http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/

Underwater Photography

I was discussing with my buddy Muze and Tony the other day about underwater photography. Muze was studying the possibility of bringing cosplay photography underwater and all of us suggested a favorite underwater photographer. Here are the 3 awesome photographers we were looking at that day:

Elena Kalis - elenakalisphoto.com/

(image source: www.preik.no)

Alix Malka - alixmalka.com

(image source: look.thecubie.com)


Zena Holloway - zenaholloway.com/zena.html

(image source: musaranias.files.wordpress.com)

They are really great photographers! I really enjoy seeing how they each handle underwater photography with their own unique execution/vision. Loving their works BIG TIME!!

Can't wait to try out underwater photography some day ^__^)

Nikon P6000 with Pocket Wizard

A lot of people are wondering about whether the Nikon P6000 supports the Pocket Wizard radio trigger system. The answer is YES. The only thing you'll have to do is to turn off the build-in flash as shown below and you'll be good to go:


(image source: johnbiehler blog)

You will then see this icon indicating that your flash is on remote-triggering mode:


Other than the Pocket Wizard, the P6000 also supports Nikon CLS as well as other remote triggers such as the Cactus Triggers as shown in this article on johnbiehler blog.



I did notice that if you turn off your built-in flash while having your Pocket Wizard on the hot shoe (turned on) the camera might not recognize the PW right away (it happened once) in M-mode so you might wanna turn off your camera and turn it back on again to use the PW with M-mode.

I haven't played with the CLS on this camera much but the original press release only stated that the SU-800 (NOT SB-800) and the SB-900 can be used as the commander so I'm not sure can the Nikon SB-800 be used for such purpose.

Photographer - Ume Kayo

(image from: this online interview)

A couple days ago while I was browsing around the web I came across works from Ume Kayo. This Japanese photographer has an incredible ability of capturing mood. Her works shows off the natural beauty of her subjects as well as displaying a very refreshing style of her own.

Similar to photojournalism used in newspaper/Natinoal Geographic. She creates images by capturing street-style candid shots from her everyday life. However, her images are more "personal". There is a strong sense of herself in each of her images. Every shot captures actual moments/interaction between the photographer and the subjects.

No strobes, no fancy lenses, no typical themes/poses/angels... just herself, her camera in "P"-mode and her 50mm prime. I find her works extremely inspiring ^__^)

Interview 1 (Japanese)
http://dc.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/exib/2006/09/12/4586.html

Interview 2 (Japanese)
http://www.1101.com/umekayo/