I shot this in the reflective office window at night, as you’ll see from the backwards HK and NY. The man burning the midnight oil is Thierry Halbroth, executive creative director of the McCann Erickson team for Cathay Pacific. Canon 5D with an 85mm lens at f/1.8, as I recall. Click for a much larger [...]
No, I didn’t set this up. Yes, you can experience greater desire by clicking.
Thanks to Leela, we have papaya trees on our terrace. This particular tree grew so tall that we could no longer easily harvest the fruit so we left it to the birds. They poke a hole into the fruit with their beaks and then eat for several days before the fruit falls to the ground [...]
Shooting myself in one of the art pieces at a Hong Kong art exhibition. Click me for bigger pixels.
Some photos speak for themselves. A bigger yawn is yours for the clicking.
I walked into the room, assessed the situation at a glance, whipped my camera out of its hip holster and fired off this single frame at 1/4000th of a second before he could move … Oh, please … this is Spooks we’re talking about. I walked into the room, saw this fool sunning his belly, [...]
It’s been 21 years today since the day I met Leela … and she still makes me laugh. Last month we attended the George Town Literary Festival in Penang and stayed in the Eastern & Oriental Hotel. I wanted to take a photo of the corridor leading to our room (halfway down on the left, [...]
Taken in a hallway between two restaurants in Penang with a Canon 5D MarkIII and a 17-40mm lens. Now if you’re interested in that lens, you’ll also be interested to know I left it on the stone step of an uninhabited house on a narrow road when I changed lenses — I’d go into greater [...]
I took this yesterday on a sunny afternoon near the beach in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. He and his wife Indra were sitting on a stone bench in the shade. Satish is a handsome man to begin with, but he looks even better in a thoughtful mood under the trees with filtered sunlight shining on [...]
Mid-Autumn Festival in Hong Kong is also known as the Lantern Festival. Everywhere you see children and adults walking around with colourful lanterns — fish are a favourite design — lit by candles or battery-operated lights. It is one of the nicest holidays on the lunar calender, not least because the long heat of summer [...]
We are still trying to track down the T-shirt sloganeers — to congratulate them, to learn from them, to share whatever it is that they’re having. I don’t think it’s orange juice. Click T-shirt for a size large; click again for an extra-large.
One of the things that a photo, especially a large photo, allows you to do is to study all those details you never saw when you were busy trying to get around people, find the right distance, wait for the right moment, and finally press the shutter. In this case, that means just looking at [...]
Even if you haven’t read his books, you have to appreciate the man’s style, especially when it comes to choosing colors that go with the greenery and complement the wood tones of the stage. I was sitting in the audience at the Hong Kong Literary Festival 2012 and Justin was kind enough to notice I [...]
Some of the best photos for me are the ones that simply present themselves. You’re sitting in a post-production house waiting to be called into the recording studio and you look up and there’s your photo — all you have to do press the shutter. Later, when you look at it, you’re pleased that Touches, [...]
Once upon a time, America built products to last. And in the hands of my father they will last forever. As it turns out, this one outlasted even him. This is his Kirby vacuum cleaner, purchased in 1953 for about US$150 … making it 60 years old this new year. It is a solid piece [...]
Ice Follies, or Going with the Floe Dear Family and Friends, Naja’s been fishing in our mailbox recently and pulling out plenty of homey Christmas letters that tell us everything we’d ever want to know about people who send us only one mimeographed message a year. Sounds good to us, so here’s our little effort [...]
FinanceAsia wanted to increase traffic to their website and attract new subscribers to their magazine. Of the three concepts we presented, they chose the daring one. The “URL campaign” carried no branding at all — if you didn’t click on the URL or type it in your browser, you’d never know who was advertising. Below [...]
In 1980, California was raising racquetball clubs faster than oranges — a trend that rapidly spread to the rest of the US. The greater the competition in the sports club market, the grander the clubs became, and metal lockers were no longer good enough. I was working for a large woodworking company at the time [...]
Cryptic was a bar and lounge at 7 Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Hong Kong. Vincent Kwok was looking for something, well, cryptic. For this logo, we used the larger concept of a maze and added smaller elements of secret writing — the characters below each letter spell “cryptic” in what is sometimes referred to as [...]
Chino Latino was a bar and restaurant on Wyndham Street in Central, Hong Kong. We were looking for a loose, long-legged, casual feel here that had some fun and color to it. On a design level, the “ino” in both words match up vertically, because we make the “ch” and the “lat” approximately the same [...]
At the time, dv8 was one of four restaurants owned by Harilela Strategic Holdings on the second floor of Sun Hung Kai Centre in Wanchai. Their other three restaurants — Viceroy, Milano and Saigon — used typefaces for their logos. So when dv8 was created, the challenge was to create a logo that used type [...]
Of the logos I’ve created, my favorite is the one I did for EDGE, a music club on Wyndham Street in Central, Hong Kong. The ownes wanted a logo that fit with their million-dollar sound system and cutting-edge attitude. The result was the logo above. It was created in black and designed to be used [...]
Seeing this young lad confronting the world face-to-face makes me wonder who I might have been had I not been pushed around the park in a pram lying on my back staring at the sky, nibbling my toes and seeing people only when they loomed in for a grinning gape or a tummy tickle. What [...]
The man in this Godfather setting is Vishal, and I am related to him and everyone at this table by marriage and good fortune. Now pay attention while I can explain this post’s title. Vishal has two brothers, Valsan and Vishnu. His father is Vivekanandan, who has four sisters and two brothers. The sisters are [...]
The last time Leela and I were in Penang we stayed at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel, established in 1885 by the Sarkies Brothers, also famous for having established the Raffles Hotel in Singapore two years after that. It is Penang’s premier hotel and is built in the colonial style and has just four stories. [...]
A thumbnail observation I wrote in 2006 when I returned to Vietnam for the first time since I left it in 1968 after two years in country. I spent six days walking around the city with a camera. You can click on the photos for larger versions. I land in Hanoi on April Fool’s Day, [...]
The Four Seasons wanted a bedside guide for their guests to the many fruits of Bali, some of which they might never have seen before. The words are mine; the photos are by another whose name eludes me right now … Walter someone, I believe, from Hong Kong. (If you see these, Walter, please write [...]
It was 1997 and I was a creative director at Leo Burnett. The return of Hong Kong to China was the big occasion that year and we decided to publish a calendar on behalf of the agency — a rare treat because we were our own client and could do what we wanted. My friend [...]
Penang has quite a bit of public art and it’s always a treat to round a corner and find a new one. We were just a few minutes late for this one, however; there was a family of five taking photos of all three children posing with the wall painting. So we waited … and [...]
