Craig Ferguson Images blog

Blog of Taiwan based editorial and commercial photographer Craig Ferguson. 

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Why Photography? vlog 6

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In Pursuit of Myself

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Yoga is one of my favorite subjects to photograph. As well as to do myself. I recently collaborated with Lydia from Origin Yoga with a series of photos. We shot stills in the Origin yoga studio / retreat centre, as well as stills and video on the beach. Here’s a small selection from inside the studio.

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Recently I was called upon to make a series of portraits of YK Lee, the CFO of Branded Lifestyle, a clothing company with a presence in half a dozen Asian countries. We shot at the company’s headquarters in Taipei, where they have a series of model stores for their various brands. The company represents brands such as Hang Ten, Roots Canada and Arnold Palmer, and has thousands of stores across Asia. During the shoot we covered each different model store, as well as a few outdoor portraits in front of the building. Here are the tearsheets for what ended up being published. 

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Wilds of Yonghe

As the name suggests, the Wilds of Yonghe focuses on the green strip located on the outskirts of Yonghe. This district of New Taipei city is one of the most densely populated places in the world. Prior to its inclusion in the larger city, it was considered its own city, and its population density put it in the top two or three most crowded city’s on Earth. When people talk about Yonghe, it’s typically the crowded living conditions and often old, grimy buildings that are first mentioned.

The northern border of the district where its separated from Taipei proper, is marked by the Danshui River. Every year or so, a typhoon will come through that causes the river to burst its banks and flood the surrounding land. And that creates the wilds of Yonghe. This narrow riverside strip cannot be built upon due to the flood risk, and so it becomes one of the few leisure areas for the people of the district. If you are out in these fields and gardens, you can forget you’re in one of the most densely crowded places on the planet. The natural world greets you, and that’s used to full advantage with market gardens, dog parks, bicycle paths, running tracks, baseball fields, and wide open spaces. People fish, people grow food, people exercise and people play.

This is the Wilds of Yonghe. Finding a piece of nature on the edge of a crowded, busy city. The photographs are a mix of planned and posed images alongside candid, found shots. Minimal processing to give a better idea of what the environment actually looks like in its most common light.

There’s a new Instagram feed if you would like to see more. 

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Coffee. An essential ingredient in a photographer’s life.

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The Commercial Headshot

One of the standard assignments for a photographer working in a small market is the business headshot. However, a lot of the time the subjects that approach me regarding one don’t specifically want a headshot but they require one for their company website or an upcoming conference. This adds an extra challenge on the photography end especially if the subject has never been in a studio before or had their portrait taken professionally. When they see that first image come up on the tethered computer screen though, and they realize that they look better than they imagined, the ice is well and truly broken and it makes for a great session.

Here are a handful from a recent shoot.

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What are you drinking?

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Vegan and Vegetarian Chefs for Weeknight

For the past year I’ve been shooting features for Weeknight, a local lifestyle magazine here in Taiwan. Each issue is coordinated under a different theme which has meant a lot of variety in what I’ve been shooting. The most recent issue focused on the vegan lifestyle, quite timely as Taipei has recently been described as Asia’s best city for vegans. 

During the coverage of a series of places, I shot a lot of food. I mean a lot - probably close to 40 different dishes in 6 unique restaurants and cafes. That in itself presented challenges as we wanted to ensure that there was a consistent look to everything and have it all shot in natural light, no matter whether we had bright sunny days or dull cloudy ones. I could have faked natural light with strobes easy enough but we were sometimes required to shoot in small corners while service was going on around us, and to do so would have been disruptive to the customers.

I was also tasked with photographing the owner / chef in each place. If I could only shoot one subject for the rest of my life, it would probably be chefs, so this was great. What was even cooler was that 3 of the chefs are friends, and I’ve photographed them before, and a 4th was guest editor and so was with me on every shoot. Like we did with the food, we made use of ambient light only for these portraits.

So, without further ado, here they are.

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Yoga for Hamsalife

I’m not a very good yogi. Although I first encountered it as a kid, and first started doing it when I was 18 or so, over the past 25 years my on-again, off-again relationship with the practice has been more off than on. 2017 has so far been more of an on phase but despite my own sporadic practice, it is a subject that I absolutely love to photograph. Towards the end of 2015 I shot a personal project, Yoga Is The New Black and it came to the attention of the founder of Hamsalife. It took quite a while until he was ready to shoot, but we were finally able to make something happen in the last week of 2016 when we did a shoot for their new yoga mats.

There were a few different coloured mats to feature and so we decided to use a rainforest-type park as the location. Once there, we found a few suitable areas and set to work. As the yogi went through a series of different routines, I shot in a fairly loose style to capture the flow. 

I’ve made use of this particular location previously for a yoga shoot, and it’s one of my favourite places to shoot. It’s never crowded yet is easily accessible from central Taipei and offers a large variety of backgrounds. We barely scratched the surface of possible locations within the park to shoot in.

We ended the shoot with a large selection of photographs to choose from, some of which have already made their way onto the company’s social feeds. All in all, it was a great shoot that focused on one of my favourite subjects to photograph.

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Electric Race Cars - Xing Mobility

Sometimes assignments come along that open you up to a whole world you didn’t know existed. Such was the case with a series of features for Weeknight Magazine on electric vehicles. Despite my background in environmental science, beyond Tesla and Gogoro I really had no idea of the field of electric vehicles. These shoots were incredibly interesting just with the background information I picked up along the way, as well as a fun challenge to shoot.

The first assignment was to cover Azizi Tucker and his team at Xing Mobility. Azizi is a former Tesla engineer who relocated to Taiwan to cofound Xing and build electric race cars. Considering Taiwan has no motor racing to speak of, it was a bold move. 

Their head office is in Neihu, Taipei and is immaculate. I’ve been in garages before and there’s always a certain smell of petrol and oil as well as obligatory oil stains all over the ground. Not so here. Fully electric cars, as the yellow and blue ones are in the above photo, don’t require either. While I knew that regarding petrol, I’d have thought there’d still be moving parts that required oil but apparently not. 

The black car above is the sole gasoline-powered car in the garage. Why they have that, I’m not sure. Possibly as a base model to build the electric vehicles from. In this photo, Tucker can be seen discussing plans with a couple of his designers.

 This blue car was the newest model they’re working on. In tests so far they’ve had it up to 285km / hr but the only test track in Taiwan is not actually big enough for them to reach top speed. 

There were a number of challenges in shooting in this environment. It’s a large space, and we had a limited window to shoot in. We were also constrained as there was one section of the garage that was off-limits, and most of the team at Xing Mobility were still at work when we were shooting. That crops up a lot, where it’s necessary to get the required photographs without disturbing the people who are working there. 

Lighting was another biggie. With an editorial budget for the shoot it had to be portable lights for portraits and making use of the garage’s own lighting for everything else. Lots of shiny, reflective surfaces made placement of my strobes critical in order to only show what we wanted to show. 

All in all, this was a really fun shoot. Some good challenges, a very intriguing subject and friendly people. Job done.

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Kavalan for the Financial Times

It’s been a long time between drinks as they say, with a couple of months passing since my last blog post. A fairly hectic couple of months to be sure, so before 2017 kicks into high gear, I’m going to endeavour to get caught up on the blog.

This assignment for the Financial Times came together at the last minute, and saw me heading out to the Kavalan distillery in Yilan, an hour or two outside Taipei. Kavalan is a new player on the whisky scene, and has already won numerous awards. For this assignment, we had a fairly tight schedule, starting off with a customized version of the public tour that anyone can do - customized in that we followed the basic route of the tour but also had access to tany off-limits areas we wanted. The brief for photography was exteriors, interiors and portraits of anyone the writer, Chris Horton, spoke with. It was my first visit to the site, not being a whisky person. I’ve actually since been back again, the second time on assignment for Forbes but that hasn’t been published yet so I can’t show any of those photographs anywhere.

Just before we entered the main tour area, we were joined by Lee Yu-ting, CEO of King Car, the parent company of Kavalan, and Ian Chang, blend master for the whisky. They were actually early as we’d been scheduled to meet with them after the tour. This gave us more time with them, and more options for photography locations.

While I shot a few candids in the tour area, the situation necessitated pushing the ISO up to higher levels around 1600 which I try to avoid. Typically, 400 is as high as I like to go, 800 in a pinch, especially with people photography although modern cameras are certainly capable of producing usable files as high ISO. However, when I know something is destined for print, I like to keep things as clean as possible. The photograph below, shot in the barrel room (which is off-limits to the public) is one of the very high ISO shots, captured way above 1600. Needless to say, it didn’t run.

The barrel warehouse was one of the more photogenic areas, especially when we went up to one of the upper floors. When I shot there for Forbes, I already knew what had run in this story, and so I made more use of this room in order to shoot some different pictures. The tearsheet above (second photo) showing CEO Lee with a glass of whisky was made on the first floor. Here they take various VIP’s for a quick tasting of the latest whisky. I’m not a whisky drinker at all, it’s probably been over 20 years since I last had any, but we got a sample to sip and it was quite smooth. I also made use of the space to put Ian Chang in front of the camera, although his shots ended up not getting used.

After that it was one to lunch and final interview questions before our two subjects had to head off. They asked if we needed more photographs and so I took the opportunity to ask if it were possible to go inside the actual still rooms. On the general tour the public can look through the glass at the stills but I wanted to make some photographs inside. So we got dressed in protective clothing and two of the workers led us on a little private tour behind the scenes. Stuff like that has got to be one of the better perks of my job! The opening shot in this blog is one of those from this perspective - the worker is looking out the windows to where the tour route goes. Here’s another from inside this section.

One of the other interesting rooms we went into was the charring room. This is where they prepare the barrels and then char the insides. One of the photos from here ended up running in the story as well. This is another room that I returned to on my later assignment but you’ll have to wait until after publication to see any of those.

That fire took me buy surprise - it comes out a lot further than I thought it would.

All in all, it was an interesting assignment, a look behind the scenes at a world I don’t know much about. Any job that can put me into cool situations like this is a good one as far as I’m concerned, and last year was full of good ones. I’ll show you a few more of those jobs in the near future.

Before I go I just wanted to let you know that I’ve given my portfolios and site a refresh for the new year. If you’ve come to this blog without going through the homepage, head on over and take a look. 

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For the last issue of Weeknight Magazine we shot two different covers. The top one is for the international edition, the bottom for the local edition. Both were shot in a car showroom, the backgrounds were added by designer Natasha Chiang.

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Another cover image for Centered on Taipei magazine. 

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Conceptual test with a light-hearted look at social media in 2016.

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New cover for Centered on Taipei magazine.

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A little change of pace for me. Spent a bit of time in the studio working a few commercial images.