I did a series of dancer head shots for the ballet company. They all have great neck muscles! Only 4 dancers and the teacher were present on Sunday however, as most of them were at home watching the superbowl. The current company website is skimpy on photos and content, and one of the dancers, also a graphic designer, wants to remedy that. These are just the beginning stages of a revamping of the website, for the company to take on a more professional, ambitious persona.

Ballet subjects look good in black and white. I think it's because B&W encourages the viewer to take note of form, shape and pose, rather than be distracted by color.

This turned out better than I expected. I put my camera on sports mode, aimed at the empty spot where the leap would take place, watched the dancer approach out of the corner of my eye from the right, and then hit the shutter as she unfolded into this leap, the specific ballet name of which I don't recall. It almost looks like she's doing splits on the floor, but then, the floor is several feet below her.

One of the dancers hired me to document rehearsal for the Kathy Mata Ballet Company. He wanted the gritty feel of rehearsal (verses the very polished look of performance). So though I cringed at the electrical panel in the background, it added to the informal feel.

I added a light vignette to the photo. The vignette is the darker edging, in an oval shape around the dancer. The danger with vignetting is it can look cheesy if not subtly done. And it is more effective with some subjects than others. I thought it would work here because there are lots of distracting background details; the vignette points the eye towards the dancer.

The dancer laughed when she saw the photo. "Look at my hand!" she imitated her flopping left hand. It should be pointing upward and forward, in line with her arm. She was pleased with the rest of the posture.

I've put these photos together to illustrate the effect different natural lighting types. The photo on the left features the small child entirely in the shade. The trees are quite high above him, so it's bright enough for a photo, but there's no direct light. In the right hand pic, he is in direct sunlight. The parts in the sun are washed out by the brightness, and meanwhile the features in the shade are rather flat. And then the camera gets confused as to what what balance to use (should it err on the cooler side to compensate for the warm sun, or vice versa?)

That is the brief version of why I recommend taking people portraits in the shade, unless you're using a selectively metered flash (to lessen the contrast between sun and shadow) or unless you're intentionally creating a sun and shadow effect.

Two year olds just keep on movin'. I took the flash off my camera, because it was too clumsy to keep on the camera (the external camera flash is heavy and unwieldy), while chasing this little guy around. I just hoped that he would pause long enough in shady spots that I could grab a few quick photos.

Ten months old and really cute. Lily and her mom, who found me on Craigslist, drove up from San Jose to meet me at the Botanical Gardens. I'd not been there for about three weeks, and it was immediately apparent that everything looked different, due to the nature of nature. I looked for familiar nooks that previously had worked well for photographs, to find that lighting and foliage were completely different, even though it was a sunny afternoon like last time.

I took 450 photos over about 1.5 hours. It's necessary to take that many with babies, as one never knows when they're going to crack a smile. With the shutter going off constantly, I know I'm going to catch that split second, randomly elicited smile.

Happy Lunar New Year of the Ox! Every week I pitch event coverage ideas to the SFStation (city guide to San Francisco) editor, and if she likes any of them, I am assigned to photograph the event. This week I got Lunar New Year Flower Market in Chinatown.

Here was my pitch:
"San Francisco offers many opportunities for inter-cultural immersion, and the Lunar New Year Flower Market is one not to be missed. Much more than a shopping event, the flower market heralds the celebration in anticipation of Chinese New Year. The bustling, festive crowd will enjoy lion dances and other Chinese performance arts in addition to the endless display of winter-blooming flowers, brightly colored fruiting trees and array of traditional Chinese foods. Attendance to this free event is expected to be 400,000 over the two days.

Photos will capture shoppers and visitors in candid and posed shots, as well as the festive atmosphere including splashes of brightly colored flowers and decorations."

Usually, an event with many people makes an assignment easier, as there are more subjects. Chinatown Flower Market was the closest I'd experienced to Hong Kong crowds outside of Hong Kong. It was so crowded, it was hard not to get jostled, and hard to pull aside people to photograph them. I stuck to the side streets, where the pace was slower.

At events such as benefits and fashion shows, people expect to be photographed, and understand the To Be Seen Scene. Street fairs are different. People look very surprised and perplexed, some become bashful. I've learned to pick out young adults, especially young women who look like they put a little thought into their ensemble. High percentage rate of agreeing to be photographed. Teens are the most self conscious, as if by being in an online gallery everyone in the whole world is going to bother to look at their picture and critique it. The only people who refused today were a group of teens, apparently too cool to be photographed, and even too cool to bother to look at me. I know I too was a teen at one point, but for some reason I just can't empathize with them any more!

The people most enthused about being photographed was this group of demonstrators.

What are you doing, Small Child? I wondered, but then I realized she was imitating my hold on the camera, with her index finger on the invisible shutter button.

This wedding was very casual and comfortable; a backyard gathering of close friends and family, home catered and decorated. A good low stress way for me to further ease into wedding photography. After I finished my photography shift, the family insisted that I

stay and eat. It was hard to refuse, when someone opened up the oven and started spooning home made biryani onto a plate. Very well. It was generous of them to include me in the festivities (they gave me champagne to toast too), given the intimacy of the small guest list. I have to strike a balance, between being professional and downing shots and jalapeno poppers. I find that in most cases, people like to be friends with their photographer. I suppose I'd rather have my photo taken by someone I get along with than someone who is a stranger.

The Giant Thorny Walking Stick (Phasmid) female is about 7 inches long and 2 inches at her widest. The males are brown, smaller, and friskier. About 12 of them were hanging upside down to the mesh lid on their terrarium. Previously, when given a demo of how to handle these bugs, the demo giver flipped the lid over so the clinging bugs were right side up, and placed the lid on the table. The walking sticks calmly sat there.


Later, I asked if I could do the same thing so that I could try photographing a few. So I flipped the lid over, and this time, the walking sticks all started, well, walking. out of the tank, off the lid... one even made it onto the legs of a desk chair. Every time I caught one, another had escaped, and I barely had time to take any photos before I spotted another sneaking off. I spent a good 10 minutes herding walking sticks.

Should you have the opportunity to meet a GTWS, know that they are vegetarian. They can be picked up by sliding an open palm under their body and lifted upwards; their little feet will eventually let go. If they're in a bad mood though, they'll press their hindmost pair of legs into your hand. The legs are adorned with thorn-like spikes (bigger than those on its head) and they pinch. I held a grouchy one today.

With some help, everyone was back in the tank except for this lady. I could finally put my 100mm f/2.8 macro to proper use. It wasn't the brightest room, and the auto focus had some trouble figuring out what to focus on (whereas cameras seem programmed to recognize and focus on a human face, they don't do the same for insect faces), so these are manually focused.

I have a new part-time job, and that is to take lovely bugs like this one out to schools and to teach kids about biodiversity. I'm still in the training stages though.

What a great face! I think I featured these frogs the last time I took photos at the Cal Academy of Sciences too. They're ideal models, because they're easy to anthropomorphize and thus effortlessly look like they have lots of character. Plus, their bodies are sculptural and best of all, they stay completely still.

Unlike this small child, who was rolling around on the floor of the rain forest exhibit.

I went to CAS for fun. I do have a membership, and it takes but 15 minutes to bike there; I really ought to go more often. This afternoon was pleasantly uncrowded.

I didn't know what this thing was called, but I didn't want to reveal myself as a geekdom outsider as I mingled with the contestants and organizers. "Mind if I get a close up of that?" Holding the cube was one of the few women associated with the International Rubik's Cube Competition at the Exploratorium. Three out of four of them were Asian American. Just an observation.

Well, many of the male contestants were also Asian American. As I wandered amongst the contestants and reporters, I overheard many players mention that they were math majors. Most were of college age, though there were some young'uns that received wide audience support.

There were many categories. 3x3x3 one-handed, 3x3x3 blindfolded (How? I wondered too. The player observes the cube for 15 seconds without moving anything, then when s/he's ready, the blindfold is pulled over the eyes and timer started. The player has to have all his/her moves planned and memorized ahead of time - and some actually managed this!!) pyramid, 4x4x4, 3x3x3 speed solve (the fastest I witnessed was 10 seconds).

Players are presented with a pre-messed up cube. Backstage, I watched competition organizers twisting and turning cubes, so as to randomize the squares. I wonder how an equal level of randomness is achieved for all cubes?

There are special touch pads that lie flat on the table that start and stop the timers. Upon completion of the puzzle, each player triumphantly hurled the solved cube onto the table, while in the same motion, slapped the timer touch pad. All of them did the same motion, sometimes causing the cube to bounce off the table.

Signs read "NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY", so I relied entirely on my 50mm f/1.4, which did a fine job without flash. I did wonder if any contestants felt even more nervous, with all us press people pointing video cameras and big ol' lenses at them. However, they did all sign waivers saying that they'd allow their image to be documented.

Below, an 11 year old world record holder from Japan for 3x3x3 speedsolve from a few years back.

As it turns out, unfortunately I am NOT done. I checked my lists, and found that COYOTE has been left out. Sigh! So right now I have 87 skulls completed. For fun, guess what animal the skull on the right belonged to. I'll tell you at the end. The biggest clues are in the teeth. Which type of teeth are particularly big?

The coyote skull is in San Diego. It's important that the sample I draw from is from San Diego county - San Franciscan coyotes may be subtly different, and this mammal guide is specific to SD. Therefore, I couldn't go to a museum and borrow a local coyote skull. What has to happen is that the San Diego Natural History Museum will loan a skull to a museum here. I'm hoping the loan will work out with the Cal Academy of Sciences. This is how I planned it all along - to leave out one skull so that I'd Have To go to CAS and Have To meet people who work there.

So any ideas for the skull? Besides the teeth type, it's skull is quite robust looking. Big fat jaw. Who would need a particularly fat jaw? A carnivore would need a big fat jaw to which to connect biting/chewing muscles, but there are no obvious canines. Those big teeth are incisors. OK. I'll tell you, it's a beaver.

This is The Last mammal skull that I have to draw, possibly in my whole life. I'd been procrastinating quite a while, possibly because in this case I had to work entirely from photos I'd taken, which is not ideal, and maybe because it was the last and a part of me didn't want it to end? It is a Gray Whale.

It's not over though. I have some 80-90 mammal skull drawings, and two thirds of them have been sent to a mammal skull expert, and returned to me with corrections to the drawings. For example, where I'd drawn a line where there really wasn't one because my skull sample happened to have a crack. Or maybe some tiny lobe had broken off my sample and was thus missing from the drawing.

The San Diego County Mammal Atlas Project only wants digital versions of the drawings. What will I do with all these actual drawings? Surely these pen on paper scientific illustrations must be a rarity these days, and I have a whole collection.

"But we're so unphotogenic!" they exclaimed. I'd offered to do engagement photos, and though my new friends were reluctant at first, I they had fun in the end. And "unphotogenic"? I think not! It seems that it's not uncommon for people to consider themselves unphotogenic, and to be camera shy. It's because those ubiquitous little point and clicks aren't designed to take nice portrait pictures. They tend to have wide angle lenses, which means that faces and features like noses are widened. The flashes on those things make for extremely unflattering photos. Well that's part of it. There's the photographer aspect too :)

We went to the Botanical Gardens in Golden Gate Park. It has swiftly become my favorite place to photograph. So many natural backdrops to choose from, lots of sources of shade without it being too dark. Plus many secluded spots, so no random tourists in the background. The yellow-leaved ginko tree was a pleasant surprise, nice to have a spot of bright color in the photos.

I have not produced any art recently, so I am posting some recent images to accompany my blatherings about what I have been up to. This is a pic of the underside of a large leaf.

I made my first contribution to a wiki page today. The Randall Museum set one up, and invited me to contribute photos from the 2 events I volunteer-photographed. It took some experimentation, but in the end it was pretty straight forward setting it up. See Halloween Fest and Holiday Craft Fair at:
http://randallmuseumwiki.wikispaces.com/

While waiting for craigslist responses, I decided to research local children party planners to network. I found three that specialized in themed parties (like princesses, pirates, wizards, mermaids etc), and wrote a that I liked their costumes (they provide costumed performers, as well as costumes for the kids) and if their client should ever need a photographer, please think of me. I used the same text template on all three, and just as I pressed "send" on the 3rd email, I received a response saying that all 3 companies were actually owned by the same 2 women.

Embarassing?? Yes! But! They didn't seem to take offense. In fact, they were interested in having head shots done of all their performers in costume. I hope that works out... costumes make for fun photo shoots.

I'm a little bored with jzeestudio.com. New Year, New Website, so why not New Domain Name? I like ginkgo leaves, and it just so happens that GinkgoPhoto.com is available. The link is up and working, so feel free to have a look. I am still editing it however, but the portfolios are filling up nicely.

Unfortunately, "Ginkgo" is a commonly mis-spelled word. I mis-spelled it today, when looking up GinkoPhoto.com, to see if it was taken. It was and I was disappointed. Then I thought, maybe GinkoLeaf? I googled that for fun, and google said: Did you mean Ginkgo Leaf? Yes I did. Another wrong spelling is Gingko. So, it's only a problem if someone is trying to recall my website name without text reference.

I spent the day riffling through my photos to update my portfolio, and prepping pictures to upload onto the site. I'm using qufoto.com, which I so far like. The designs are polished but straight forward (no distracting flash, or fancy designs to pay for), the payment scheme is simply (no "sign up fee", just a standard monthly rate of $19 per month). User friendly and fast customer service.

This was a photo I'd forgotten about - kids rushing to burst bubbles.

Charlotte is my most photographed subject. Having taken 100s of photos of her, it becomes challenging to come up with new compositions.

I'm working on putting together a new website, using a template provided specifically for photographers. It's in progress as I'm still adding photos and pages, and have yet to add a title, but feel free to have a sneak preview at:
http://qufoto.com/display/index/jzee

I needed a site dedicated specifically to photography. I may include one illustration portfolio. I think that people who are interested in seeing my illustration portfolio won't mind seeing photos also, but those people interested in my photography services will be confused to see such a mish-mash of media. This web design is a lot cleaner than my previous site too.

Happy New Year! I've yet to take any photos in 2009. I'm waiting for a new lens filter to arrive. The last one on my most handy lens, the 28-75mm, smashed as a result of an unfortunate camera drop. But, the filter served (one of) its purposes; with first line of defense: the lens hood, removed, the $30 lens filter took the impact, saving the $350 lens. Use lens filters!!! The camera is fine by the way, and the lens received a minor scratch on the very edge.

I'd been visiting the Aviary at Hong Kong park in Admiralty every few years for as long as I can remember, but this is the first time I'd noticed so many photographers with DSLRs and expensive zoom lenses. Perhaps they were there previously but I didn't notice them as I wasn't interested in fancy cameras and such back then. But somehow I don't think so. An easy observation of photographers is that most are men. I'd say 9/10 of the fancy camera wielders were men, which begged the question, why? I discussed this with a few friends, and the first explanation always to arrive is that men are more likely to be interested in tech-ie/ gadget stuff; especially Asian men.

Other reasons came up, ones that risk over-generalization and are not entirely convincing but may have some truth: women prefer investing time and money in more social activities; fancy cameras are heavy and they and their cases are not designed to appeal to or accommodate women; men are more likely to financially invest all out in their hobbies. And there's always the Freudian argument for men and large lenses.

The lower picture is one of a frequently photographed scene; the Hong Kong Island skyline in the evening. During the winter months, many of the office building fronts facing the harbor are decked out with decorative lights, spelling pleasantries such as "Seasons Greetings", or forming images of reindeer, Santa, holly, etc. The lights are then switched around in celebration of Chinese New Year.

The upper photo was not taken by me, alas. My husband intentionally unfocusedly photographed the same scene (though with more zoom, it appears) for an interesting effect.

Bird Garden in Mong Kok is full of photo opportunities. This man saw me wandering with my camera. He struck up camera conversation in Cantonese, and then shared his parrot photos, taken with a little Canon point and shoot. I was pleasantly surprised, as I often assume Hong Kong people want to keep to themselves; it's rare to converse with strangers.

Then he picked up his parrot, Coco, who had been sitting on a branch. Coco quickly attracted a crowd with her/his tricks, which included hanging upside down on command. Parrot man asked me to email him my photos of himself and Coco. Certainly! Bird keeping is a hobby, with mainly male human enthusiasts. Bird owners will take their birds out for walks (the bird sits in the cage, the man walks carying the cage), to socialize, and if well trained, some off leash, uh, or rather, out of cage climbing time.

Bird Garden has come a long way from Bird Street. Less than 10 years ago (approximately), it was a tear-jerking nightmare of illegally imported birds, packed into tiny unhygienic crates, with no moving room. The birds in the middle often didn't have food or water access. Mangy and obviously miserable. Bird vendors cleaned up their stores thousand-fold, as a part of an urban renewal project. Birds now have clean spacious cages. Not necessarily free from the illegal bird trade, but a vast improvement nevertheless.

Kung Tak Lam Shanghainese Vegetarian Restaurant, at 1 Peking Road in TST, Hong Kong. I've not been to many Chinese veggie restaurants, but this one has an impressively extensive menu, and very tasty food.

The bowl of noodles looks standard, but dishes like the above imitation ham wrapped in seaweed with young chinese veggies are opportunities for the cooks to really show off.

If the busy hands weren't in the photo, this would be a very posey portrait. A picture of a bride. But, with the addition of the hands, engaged in veil attachment, adds a story to this image. Now we know this is pre-wedding. Having experienced make-up, hair updo and dress zipping, she awaits the final touch. What is she thinking? To whom do the hands belong? Would a bridesmaid be wearing that watch? They aren't an old woman's hands.


I like that the red of the watch face matches the bride's lip color.