It came to our attention that Auckland weather just doesn’t settle in early Summer, but it didn’t matter. Thanks to the mix of indoor outdoor space, Zen Garden provided ample opportunities for photographs even on a rainy day. We simply pulled out “PlanB”, then the wedding ceremony went on unaffected, beautifully as usual, but with a tag more special.

There’s just something very special about their relationship. Adam and Frea met each other at Pigeon Mountain Primary in Auckland. Yes, since primary! It’s where we genuinely played and loved each other, where friendship was pure and our big hopes and dreams were real. I am a big fan of such good innocent times. Ahh I miss my primary mates! So after celebrating over 30 years of friendship, they’ve now made vows to each other, as husband and wife, for the next 30 years and thereafter. I wish you all the best guys.

The weather didn’t stop us from enjoying the wedding, nor did it stop me from capturing those candid happy moments. Laughters were all over the place, right from the start.

One thing everyone must have noted here, the cute bridesmaid dresses!

Drinks, more drinks, cheers!

What a fabulous bridal party!

A special visitor at the reception.

Decorations were very thoughtful and consistent, down to the very last detail. Love the matching floral design on the wedding cake.

So it has been a very busy season. Having the hornor to photograph many fabulous weddings, meeting with couples who are still planning their big days, editing tens and thousands of images and of course flying back home to celebrate Chinese New Year with family and loved ones really affirms my career choice and the decision to venture into a full time business July last year. Now, it’s my dream to make this bigger, bigger and better.

Besides shooting weddings, I had the opportunity to work with Hera Bridal once again for their new ads. This is the 3rd year. And every year we as a team always drive to improve our ideas and make images better. Now, we are on the first inside cover of the latest New Zealand Weddings magazine (Autumn 2013 issue). Very exciting!

Wow, it feels so great checking in even just dropping in a few lines…Now, back to my hard drive and work through my photos! More blog posts to come soon! Ciao!

Filed under: General Photography, Personal ]]> http://creationheart.com/2012/12/29/kissing-christmas/feed/ 0 CHP_3214 eyeport CHP_3214 http://creationheart.com/2012/12/09/christmas-in-the-park-2012/ http://creationheart.com/2012/12/09/christmas-in-the-park-2012/#comments Sat, 08 Dec 2012 12:46:20 +0000 FELIX WU http://creationheart.com/?p=1825 Read More →]]> Santa Parade and Christmas in the Park have always been two of the most major celebration events for kiwis before holiday arrives. I missed Santa Parade due to work so I was quite glad that I could make it to this year’s Christmas in the Park. It’s always been the same venue, similar singers and songs…Same old same old stuff, but each year feels different. This time we also got a picnic spot not too far from the stage, which really makes enjoying the musical performances much better. Didn’t take that many photos, but out of a dozen shots I was particularly surprised this one. I know, it’s not blazing with fire, but nothing beats Santa hat firework!

Have an early Merry Christmas everyone!

Recently, I photographed a lot of different things across a diverse subjects, many of which have been uploaded on my Facebook page. Here I re-sorted some of them so I could share with you who have not yet liked my page. Please do take time to click the LIKE button so you can stay the most up to date with what my photography and I are up to. Without further ado, I have you will enjoy these images.

Human and Nature

Landscape

Cityscape

Interior

Wildlife

Travel and Adventure

Nightscape

Astronomy

 And this is what I really do : )

Thank you for viewing. : )

For Craig and Nicole, love is friendship, opportunity and sparks. Meeting each other through a mutual friend visited Auckland from another city is perhaps nothing too uncommon in a modern boy meets girl story, but to them the most unplanned gathering had become the bond of friendship, the most unexpected location had become the venue they first met and one first dance had sparked off the romance of love. And of course, now that mutual friend Willie is also going to become one of Craig’s grooms man. Love is change. At the time, both Craig and Nicole had pre-set plans of moving to different cities of Australia, but life kept them on track and brought them through rough patches. In fact they are where they are today because of their effort of making each other a better person yesterday. Love is simplicity. Craig and Nicole’s cute and welcoming cottage home made a pleasant photographic portrait location on an overcast/rainy day. Their taste for simplicity not only shaped the character of their home, but more importantly defined their relationship as a young couple together.

“Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed” ― Jodi Picoult

Craig and Nicole’s wedding will be held on 1st December this year. And not doubt it will be a super stunning wedding. = )

First up, a map showing some complex tracks around Piha and Karekare areas. As part of the Mt Zion Track, we only did a very short part of Hillary Trail. So no, we didn’t make it to Day 3.  =P

As you see, it turned out not being a very good day for sightseeing at all.

Hiking in the rain or after the rain would easily make your track turn very nasty. MUD! With mud like this you don’t expect to come out clean.

A medium level track can turned out to be “difficult”.

At some point you and your team may get confused about your direction, so a wrong decision can easily throw you into the water, just like this one. FREEZING COLD! And because it was the wrong way we had to take off our shoes and go through the freezing water TWICE! We all looked we were having fun but we were quite in pain crossing the water like this.

Even though it’s a rainy day, you still get a bit of bright yellow colour.

There we go, having fun again on the black sand.

Take a closer look you will see two of us were wearing a plastic cover with silver fern and little kiwi patterns on it, those are not plastic bags, they are the “in” outfit when you are under-dressed for nasty weather (i.e. they were wearing “Cotton-On”).

Finally we reached the tunnel, meaning we’ve only got one more challenge to go through.

The whole experience was about getting wet, windy, muddy and sandy.

It wasn’t my first time walking through Mt Zion Track, so we might as well do it in weather like this. Most fun with the craziest. : )

Below are some photographs I took during our latest South Island pre-wedding photoshoot, by our holiday house at Lake Tekapo. But please don’t mistaken the water as Lake Tekapo, it’s just a pond next to our house. ; )

I woke up at 5am that morning, finding myself sleeping on the couch in the living room. And my bed was completely untouched. Oh right, I was lying on the couch at night thinking about something, perhaps trying to think of new photoshooting ideas? Anyways, looking out of the glass window and the sky was still near pitch dark, I could only see a little bit of moon light reflected on the adjacent snow mountains and together with some glare from the nearby street light. I picked up a fully charged battery with my camera equipments and headed outside, trying to see if I would be lucky enough to see the milky way. Not really. I could see stars but they were quite scattered so didn’t have any interesting shape. I set up the tripod and did a long exposure to see if I could get anything useful at all. Not quite, but there seemed to be something else – PINK! A touch of pink was on the clouds behind the snow mountains.

Then I crossed into the open field next to our holiday house, walked to the opposite side of the pond and positioned my tripod there. That way I could hopefully get some reflection in the water to make the photo more interesting. It worked. Here I experimented different exposure time, focal lengths and HDR. I firstly exposed the shot for 30 seconds knowing it will smooth out the water to make it more mirror-like and will show more cloud movements in the sky at the same time. I used ultra wide angle to show the entire picture of our holiday house, sky and the still water.

I then tighten my shot to exclude the holiday house (any human presence) to keep the shot purely “landscape”. And I also played with different exposure settings.

I also used the in camera HDR function in the 5Dmk3 to include more shadow details, but in the end here’s the shot I like. It’s shot with a Canon 16-35mm F2.8L II at ISO100. f11 at 1/4 second. Although the long exposure did smooth out the water nicely but it caused too much movements in the sky so all the interesting details in the could were lost. And too long an exposure makes photos look a bit crazy at times. Same goes to the overly processed HDR. I would weight details of the sky over pretty reflection for this particular scenario. And I chose a wider angle shot to show the moving direction of the burning red clouds in contrast with the much colder greyish sky.

It really comes down to a personal preference in how dramatic you want you photos to look. For me, I prefer the last photo because of the combination of all of the above reasons. It gives a more natural look to the image yet it’s essence is highlighted with the right photographic techniques. It works for me. I knew dawn was coming, but had little knowledge it would be so darn pretty! Oh I also did a 12 minute time-lapse video showing the colour changing process after I got my happy shot! Shooting in the early morning is hard work, but rewarding and amazing!