“So, how comfortable are you guys with the cameras?”, I asked Lynn and Sung. “Oh, not at all,” the both of them said in unison. “We’re probably gonna be one of your worst couples.” I think I might have blurted out a nervous laughter when I heard that. =) Sung was pretty clear to me at the start that they were going to challenge me that day.
Lynn and Sung, if you’re reading this, I just want to tell you, that you were NOT difficult at all. So, no, you don’t get the “Most Difficult People To Shoot” prize!
It’s really about being comfortable with each other, even if you’re really uncomfortable with the camera. The crazy-camera-totting me may be following your every step, but that’s easily forgotten once you get into the groove of things. A little bit of awkwardness at the start is very typical for everyone. But with my stay-back, laid-back, shoot-from-afar style, people tend to just ignore me after the first 20 minutes or so, and instead, focus on each other. THAT’S when I start shooting.
I’m a fan of the cupid. There’s a cupid in every relationship — be it a co-worker, a family member, a waitress, a book, or even a cab driver. The cupid in Lynn and Sung’s story was Sung’s sister, who was determined to set them up.
Lynn called it the “set up,” while Sung called it the “con job.”
It all started one evening while planning for her Halloween party, when Lynn decided to ignore Sung’s sister’s phone call, knowing that she was going to bug her about introducing Sung to Lynn at the party. By missing this call, Lynn never heard the end of it for the entire week after that. Out of guilt, Lynn decided to finally let her set up a meeting with Sung over dinner and a movie, having been promised that it was going to be “totally casual, its soo not going to be a date!”.
Of course, once the non-date evening started, Sung’s sister felt conveniently tired, and proceeded to excuse herself to go home early, leaving Lynn and Sung to spend the rest of the night alone.
“But we were ok with that anyway, because we liked each other even from the start,” Lynn said shyly with a smile as Sung rubbed her arms and held her close to keep her warm as the temperature dropped with the setting sun.
Years later, Lynn was telling this story to a friend, when Sung exclaimed, “What Halloween party??” The “con job,” as they now call it, is that his sister never invited him to the Halloween party. The guilt trip that Lynn got for the entire week after the missed call was just a con job to get Lynn to agree to a date with Sung!
And, my friends, they lived happily ever after. The end.
Sung is known for his lack of cooperation in front of the camera. Every photo of him (seriously, almost EVERY photo I found of him on facebook) has him covering his eyes with two fingers, just like the black bar that goes across someone's eyes in a censored image without model release. So to reward him for being so cooperative during our session, I told him he could strike his famous pose 10% of the time. And this is what we got. This is, after all, what makes Sung unique!
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