Gold and Silver in PX3

Was very happy to see two series of mine awarded in the 2012 Prix De La Photographie Paris (PX3). My Stealing Beauty portrait series on the dying tradition of female facial tattooing among the Chin in Myanmar got a gold in the portraiture category. And a photo-essay I did on Chin State got a silver in the travel category.  There's a lot of really great work up in the winners gallery here and was happy to see my friend Luke Duggleby's awesome series on the Dhammakaya temple recognized too. 

Bangkok Fashion in Wall Street Journal

I recently started working with the Wall Street Journal contributing to a regular feature they do on fashion in Asia that appears in their weekend style section and online. It's the first time I've been asked by anyone to do street fashion and a bit of a nice change of pace for me since I usually roll into portrait shoots carrying a back straining amount of lighting and lenses. If you're familiar with New York Times street fashion legend Bill Cunningham, its a bit like that only instead of a bicycle I get around on my chopper and unlike Bill, I have very little fashion sense. If you haven't seen the brilliant documentary on him go out and rent it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1621444/

Weddings Are Fun: Paula + Tobi in Boracay

Just preparing right now for my summer trip to Toronto faced with the familiar dilemma of how to cram all my camera gear and clothes into a suitcase. With summer in Canada just on the horizon, weddings have been on my mind a lot lately. Most of you who know me know that I've been returning home to Toronto for the summer months not just to get my fix of of quality bagels, but also to shoot weddings. Weddings have played a big part in my development as a photographer and have helped enable me financially to shoot projects in Asia when I was just starting out and had no work. For anyone whose interested I wrote a piece for Applied Arts a while back explaining my approach to weddings here: http://www.appliedartsmag.com/opinions.php?id=50

The shots above are from one of my favourite weddings of 2011 which I shot for Studio 2000 on the island of Boracay in the Philippians. Tobi and Paula were an awesome couple to shoot for and the location was hard to beat. I even convinced them to trash their clothes on the final day and jump in the pool. Turns out they also have a great eye for photography, this last shot was their idea!

Ah Kolkata!

I recently got back from a trip to India where I was on assignment for Readers Digest shooting/writing a story about the fascinating living bridges of Cherrapunjee. Can't wait to see the spread for that. I also managed to pick up a few days work from Bloomberg in Kolkata, one of my absolute favourite cities in India, and Port Blair. Here's some shots I liked from the shoot

Portraits with Thailand's PM Yingluck

These portraits of Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra were taken on assignment for Bloomberg covering the World Economic Forum in Bangkok last week. I had a bunch of cool set ups in mind going in but her people bumped up the interview time by an hour so we were all scrambling to get ready last minute.  I was sharing the time slot with the Bloomberg TV crew who had priority, luckily Yingluck gave me a couple minutes after the interview and she even remembered me from the last shoot I did with her. Considering I had 2 minutes to set up and take the pictures I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.