My first entry into the New Year 2024. On the day after Christmas & after three years of dodging the “Covid” bullet, I tested positive…DAMN! What timing! Christmas & New Year is a time to be spent with family! Like everyone else, we took all of the safety precautions, wearing a mask & washing hands frequently, of having our traditional dinner with my immediate family but spent it isolated in my bedroom quarantined. Even though the safety precautions, my wife tested positive a few days later. Fortunately, my two daughters, brother, niece & her family steered clear & are all negative! What a way to bring in the new year!

In April of 2023, after purchasing my Leica Q2, I fell in love with street photography & found it to be curiously delightful!! In my “work” environment as a professional photographer, I still find it strange calling myself a professional photographer after doing photography as a hobby for the majority of my photographic journey. I enjoy photographing people in general & looking for moments seems to be what I look for in all of my work, photographically speaking. This mentality aims to capture interesting moments on the street with everyday people. The shrinks say that one should have a hobby away from whatever I do as a “day” job. With my “day” job as a photographer, my hobby is photography & for the moment, it’s specifically street photography, my getaway. I have never been your “normal” kid growing up & am still the same today, a bit on the odd side, so photography is my hobby from photography! Lol!

I’m unsure if anyone feels the same way I feel when using different camera systems. A little something I’ve noticed after looking at my small body of street photography work is that when photographing an engagement, elopement, or even one of my creative projects with my Sony A7IV, I see everything in color, a very sharp technical sterile image, this is exactly what I want in the image. Having an eye to use the dominant colors of a scene, composition & more so, the lighting sets the mood of the image. As far as the noise is concerned, I try hard to minimize the noise but have come to terms with having a “noisy” image I believe it helps to set the ambiance to the whole image & it really doesn’t bother me at all if it is noisy. I’d rather have taken a noisy image than no image at all! The Sony will help me create beautiful color images of a bride tearing up at the wedding ceremony as she reads her vows or create a sci-fi glowing lightsaber scene out of Star Wars!

When I shoot with my Leica Q2, I see everything in black & white. 90% of the time, in fact, I find it annoying to have it set to color. However, there is the 10% of the time, that calls for color. I have three saved profiles that are set in monochrome & one in color. Rarely do I see anything in color; it’s so strange! The Q2 makes me want to go out to shoot my street photography work, where black & white can enhance the feeling of a picture of a person, place, or thing. Something I don’t get from my Sony, & I don’t think I’ll ever grab my Sony for street photography! It’s definitely too big, bulky & obvious to people walking by. When I’m shooting street, I want to be a fly on the wall.

The Fuji black magic voodoo kicks in when I pick up my Fuji XT5! I don’t know what it is about Fujifilm, but there is an aura, a kind of mystique about holding & shooting with it! I can’t explain it & it’s the same with the Leica Q2! I used to shoot with a Fuji XT2 & XT3 before I moved back to Sony. I love it for street photography mainly so I could interchange different lenses with my two favorite focal lengths, even with my Sony 35mm & 50mm, a Fuji 23mm (35mm equivalent in full frame) & 33mm (50mm equivalent in full frame). In my opinion, it is the one fatal flaw in the fixed focal length of the Q2. With the XT5, I see everything in “Classic Chrome,” a Fuji film simulation, and I am starting to experiment with Classic Negative & shooting RAW + JPEG or just JPEG. As an Oahu photographer wanting to learn as much as possible about photography, I want to test it out on a portrait photo shoot. The Fuji system is lighter in weight & they are known for their excellent glass & weather sealing. The XT5 seems to me to be a gateway between Sony & Leica. It almost split down the middle of the technical image sharpness of a Sony & the b/w feel of a Q2. The XT5 has a 40mp sensor & Fuji is updating its lens lineup to be able to render the higher megapixel with their new sensors. Perhaps a change in the future for me? Who knows?

At the end of the day, wandering around the streets, I ask myself, did I enjoy my walk & doing some street photography? 99.9% of the time, the answer is yes! It really doesn’t matter if I got a shot or not. Just shooting for fun is great therapy for my mental health, especially with all the hustle and bustle of everyday life. I’m not trying to impress anyone.

What’s my worth as your photographer?

Defined from Oxford Languages: “Having or showing the qualities or abilities that merit recognition in a specific way.” Value is what something is worth. As a Honolulu based photographer, photographing someone is my service & most importantly, my vision or style. This also spills over to customer service & being able to connect with whoever is in front of my lens on one of my photo sessions here on Oahu.

There is a distinct difference between the cost of an item or the cost of a service for a photographer, as opposed to what my services are worth to you. So, let’s break this down. As in anything in life, if you do it for a long time, you are supposed to get better at what you do, so having 20 years of experience, and I’m still learning to capture beautiful images but also to see & capture intimate moments as they unfold in front of my lens. 

Pricing is the cost of the service I provide to capture these moments with you. First, I want to set this straight: when you hire me for a photo session, you’re not paying for my camera, lens, computer, or any other gear. You’re paying for the knowledge I’ve learned over the past 20 years to capture your special moments. The past 20 years are all the mistakes I’ve made & learned not to repeat the same mistake today! It’s also taught me to see a moment happen as it unfolds, watching and anticipating how each couple will react to a prompt & also, when the couple thinks the camera is not pointed at them & they let their guard down for just a split second. These unprompted moments are my very favorite to capture!

With the new generation of fast-paced social media & getting “content” for Instagram, Facebook & other social media sites, many engagement, wedding, and elopement couples are asking friends to take pictures with their iPhones and Android phones & I cannot stress how bad of an idea this is. These friends are not photographers trained to see intimate moments happening & if they do happen to see it, they usually see it too late as the moment has passed. At especially weddings & elopement, you cannot ask the bride, groom, or priest to redo the “you may now kiss the bride” moment or even a small but simple coy glance between the couple. 

Having a photographer who knows what moments are critical to the bride and groom is essential to capturing and documenting that special day for my clients. The old adage “You get what you pay for” holds true in hiring a professional photographer. 

What happens in the background when you hire me as your photographer? These are the things you don’t see or hear about. You get someone who knows how to capture a good image with a mood that will fit what you want, to be able to see intimate moments and guide you in posing to flatter your look. 

My camera has 2 SD card slots that automatically write to the 2nd card simultaneously as a backup, so if 1 card goes bad, I have a backup of the entire photo shoot on the second card. As opposed to a smartphone that may get damaged, lost, or stolen, you’ll never be able to get those pictures back. 

However, it doesn’t stop there. Once I return to my office, I’ll immediately back up the entire photo shoot to my main pictures hard drive and then make another two backups to the second & third external backup drives. In the meantime, my computer will begin to clone an exact copy to the cloud. 

That’s four copies of your photo shoot. As you know, computer files can get corrupt if there’s a system crash, but with four copies of your shoot plus the 2 SD cards I keep, until I make the final delivery to you, I have you covered to keep your memories safe. I’ll archive your memories for up to 2 years just in case something happens to your computer or mobile device. These services are included in my photo package pricing at no extra charge. 

So this is my worth as opposed to a friend shooting your memories on their iPhone who probably won’t have your pictures a year from now if they lose or break or, worse yet, have their phone stolen. Not all professional photographers do what I do on backing up to multiple hard drives & archiving your photo session. This is the workflow that I follow in all of my photo sessions & this is my worth when you hire me as your photographer….Aloha

The art of photography is so much more than just taking a picture of someone or something! As a portrait photographer on a wedding or elopement, it’s not only seeing that special moment unfold in front of me. It’s also the lighting & more so, the emotions & gestures! Here in Oahu, there’s no shortage of natural light. For the most part, we normally have sunny days & beautiful rainbows when it rains. 

Lighting sets the mood of a portrait, not the camera. The camera is the tool that helps you capture these moments. As the photographer, “seeing” the moment is the most important part of making a beautiful image. The eye behind the camera determines the mood based on the moment, subject, vision & lighting. Without light, there is no picture, only a dark void. The untrained eye cannot see beautiful lighting or anticipate a stolen kiss when the flash is not pointed at my couple. 

The word “photograph” means “drawing with light.” Personally, in my opinion, a good photograph will invoke an emotion, such as happiness, sadness, anger, calm, or even confusion. However, special moments don’t always wait for the “perfect” lighting, so with or without the “perfect” lighting, you have to take the shot. I’d rather have a grainy image with bad lighting than no image at all. I get this question from beginning photographers all the time & my answer is always the same: get the shot first. The couple will appreciate you telling their story with small, intimate moments more than the grainy picture! 

I put lighting into these categories: natural ambient lighting-sunlight & moonlight, artificial ambient-street & indoor light or flash, strobe, constant, & LED. As a portrait photographer, I use natural lighting & flash or a combination of 2 combined lighting depending on the scenario. There really isn’t a right or wrong way of using light, so long as there’s enough light to take a picture to set a mood.

In the past, I’ve always been a stickler for having the sky, foreground & subject in “perfect” exposure! As a seascape & portrait photographer, there were workarounds to capture that perfect seascape image using ND filters & bracketing my shots. 

Then, there was portrait photography using VND’s (variable neutral density) filters & strobes (flash). Exposing for the background, mainly the sky & using flash to light my subject. The difficult part was to find that balance between the camera setting, VND filters, flash power & what mood I wanted to portray in the final edit.
In my opinion, capturing an image in natural light is an art in itself! It’s definitely something I had to learn & embrace in this past year! For myself, being a strobe photographer, it was a very difficult concept to grasp. I wanted the sky to have some form of detail; this is the seascape photographer talking,  but I’ve come to learn that it isn’t always necessary & the moment is what counts!

In my opinion, the ability to bend natural or artificial light to your vision is crucial to creating a beautiful image. Think of light as water being sprayed onto your subject. The more water you have, the larger the area will get wet. Less water focused on a specific area will carve out just a part of the subject. Water can also be focused into a pinpoint stream & so can light. I truly believe every photographer sees light in a different way & that’s a good thing, as we’ll capture beauty with our own vision!

When I picked up my Leica Q2, I stepped into a time machine.

For the past year, my bread-and-butter camera of choice has been my Sony A7IV, mainly for its articulating screen and 33-megapixel file size. Being a portrait and seascape photographer on Oahu, I’m surrounded by water. Having the ability to shoot low to the ground and not having to lie down on the ground, especially in tide pools and water, is a must-have in a camera body! I feel that 33mp is my sweet spot in the outrageous megapixel war that is currently going on in the camera industry. I recently sold my Sony A1, with no articulation screen and 50mp. When I pack my camera bag, I have reached for my A7IV rather than my A1. I feel the A1 is overkill for what I need with my portrait work.

I admit I’ve been looking at the Leica system, Q2, and the relatively new M11 in the last two years. I’ve also looked at the Hasselblad 907X 50C, and this camera is so sexy looking, and the X2D, which has a more modern spin on medium format, is not so sexy! Lol!

Enter the Leica Q2 Reporter. It’s a step backward in the sense of technology and features that we’ve all become accustomed to, such as eye autofocus, phase detection, and having many dedicated custom buttons and assigning features to exciting knobs, buttons, and dials. The Q2 can do some of this, but nothing like my Sony. I did opt for the Reporter version of the Q2 just because it’s unbranded with no Leica logos on the body.

It’s forced me to slow down to compose my shot and, more importantly, see my composition through a fixed 28mm lens. Before I made the purchase, I researched how or if this body and lens combo could shoot portraits. The biggest concern was whether a 28mm could handle portrait photography. It is a Summilux f1.7 ASPH, which is supposed to minimize the distortion from a wide-angle lens and does to a certain point. There’s no way to get away from the distortion 100%.

I have successfully done a few photo shoots with only my Q2 or a combo of my Q2 and A7IV. There are limitations on how close I can step toward a model before I start seeing the distortion kick in, but the images are still usable for the most part.

I’ve started a new sunrise photography project called “Like a New Day.” When I first got the Q2, I wanted to work it into my portrait photography and use it specifically for my wide shots, which will capture more of the environment to complement the subject.

Every seasoned Leica user says the Q2 is the gateway drug into the Leica system! At first, I didn’t think so, but now I’m thinking about the M11. However, for my professional work on engagements, elopement, and couples photography, the M11 will not work; it’s only manual focus, and I know that I’ll miss shots trying to focus on moments. My Sony A7IV with my Q2 will be in my bag for “work.” My Q2 is for me to have the freedom to grab a relatively small camera body as an everyday carry and have some fun with it.

Absolutely no expectations. I get what I get from walking around Kaimuki or at the beach at sunrise!!! The Q2 has reset my vision to slow down and think differently. In a nutshell, it makes me want to go out and shoot. The Leica M11 is on my wish list, and perhaps when I retire and sell all my Sony gear, I’ll get a chance to have my dream camera in hand?!?

From November of 2022 up until today, June 2023, these past months have been a total crap and very depressing time for me. My brain has been constantly in a fog, and, at times, my thoughts have been racing, making it hard to focus. My heart has been heavy and broken. Picking up the Q2 has allowed me to grab a camera and go into the world to help heal myself. I’ve started to take daily walks around Kaimuki to capture the everyday life around this small Oahu town, and, most of all, I’m having fun!