Its so hard to select pictures for this video, but here it is~ my first promo video after few years... Actually there is a title for this slide, its called "A Woman's Symphony", 送给女人的交响曲. It describes all aspect of women's emotion when they in love. When I shoot more pictures I began to understand women more, they seemed complicated but there are a lot of sacrifices when they began to give in themselves to their love ones, sometimes they'll feel confused, missing their love ones, submissive, sweet, thoughtful, hopeful, looking forward, forgiving, etc, to spend their life with the one they love. Love can be in many different stages, and in life it is indeed complicated. What I hope to present is their purest part in them, which many time in real life we felt so hard to express. With photography I discovered a lot in them, many tears have dropped, many stories have heard, they all are unique individuals with a unique theme. This is one of the thing that kept my passion going. Thanks to everyone of you!
Dear all, its been a fantastic year in 2012, I received a big present from NTV7 on valentines day! I was surprised that they have added a few clips about me in the video clip, a big thank you to NTV7 for featuring me. Its my second time to be featured on TV. The first one was 15 years ago LOL. Well the feature was great, just only I found that I have gained many weight compared to the first one. Time flies pretty fast.
Before you click the link, maybe I can write some of my stories behind the words that I have spoken. When I was a little kid (don't worry, I won't bored you with a long story :p), my dad had told me if I score good in my result, I can reach to the moon, he said that was many people's dream, and it made me feel like I wanted to be an astronaut. And over the years I have been visioning this similar trait, of course in the old days, if anyone that is good in physics, math and art, of course people will ask me to pursue science. Over the years, schools have been honoring more on nerdy people than artistic people. So I have been treating art as my hobby, I love to draw, to take pictures, to read, to sing, I did many things but my main trait was science. And people have been telling me that, those people that studied science will have a better future. And schools have been educating me that professionals can earn more. Nobody have asked me to be a CEO. :p So I venture myself and become an engineer, did my studies in the States and earned a degree in Aerospace Engineering. Worked in an Airline for 7 years and ended my carreer as a Contracts Manager in the Engineering Department to pursue something what I really feel like doing, which is ART.
You know, when I was young, I wanted to achieve a lot of things, but all those things are about myself. My dream was to be nominated as one of the TEN OUTSTANDING YOUNG MALAYSIAN by doing a lot of innovative work in a corporate world. But overtime, my perception changed, after 30s which I had persued the knowledge I wanted, the experience I have gained, I began to think WHAT CAN I CONTRIBUTE TO THE WORLD. And I began to realized many things and pursue photography as my new carreer. Pictures can speak many things, after went through my process of switching my career, I noticed that many people are relectant to change and live their lives with their dreams being abandoned. And by doing photography I have received mails from young individuals about what should they do in their lives after they graduate. Its not like in the old days where people have less selections in their lives. Therefore my vision had turned to young individuals, with my experience and persistantcy, I hope my work and my profession can inspire more young individuals to look back about themselves and lead them to a brighter side of life. I have also found that we do not have a lot of Hero's in Malaysia, which is someone that we inspired and able learn from his vision, someone that willing to sacrifice like Ghandi and Mother Teresa, someone that can spent their whole life searching for a clue to cure cancer. And many individuals have lost their spirit and become materialistic. Most that have been inspired have left to overseas. Therefore I made myself as one, I do not think I am the best one but I have pictures as my tool. Hopefully with pictures I am able to tell individuals a message behind, something positive that can make their heart shine, something happy, something that can make the couple love each other more, something that able to create an impact in their lives. Hopefully in the future, we can see more individuals with spirit, and work extra hard to move a step forward. This will remain as my dream!
Hope you love this video clip. Thanks everyone that have seen it, and experienced it. Thanks for supporting my views and vision, and glad that many of you have loved my photography. I also want to give a big thanks to my mom and dad that have supported me, they did not stop me for pursuing my dream, but giving me freedom to prove myself. Thanks to them, hugz.
For this year of the dragon, I am open to educational organizations from high schools to colleges to invite me for a speech and allow me to help student finding their own world in their lives. Below here is one of the speech I have did last year. This is my little vision for this year aside from my photography work. To inspire.
Its been another wonderful year in 2011 and I promised to launched another valentines day couple voting contest for 2012 if my fans had reached a number above 30,000. And surprisingly it did, and we did another round of contest this year in 2012. Thanks for all 36 couples that had participated for this years voting contest. Congratz to Jared and Zengie (couple number 2) for winning this prize. As promised, the couple that gets the highest vote will win a free couple portrait worth Rm1,800. The contest goes on for 10 days and we had just announced the winner couple of hours ago.
People may wonder why I would run a contest like this, its really simple, as a photographer that shoot mainly weddings I have witness numerous love stories, for couples that have not decided or have already went through the process of marriage, I hope I am able to extend their love, or to those that have not participated in this contest, I hope they are able to feel the true stories from each and every couple that have shared their stories. By doing this I hope I am able to use this hopeful day on valentines to promote positive thinking on relationships. There are people that enjoyed most in relationships but there are people that are also suffering from relationship, or lost in some way, I hope this campaign can build their confidence to look forward in their relationship, or to those that do not have a partner, might gather those love stories and have a positive mind in their future relationships. Its just mainly something I would feel like doing every year to help or to heal the souls of humanity.
In this contest I asked couple to send in their stories, write a short story about them, and also state why they love my pictures. And I am surprised and learned a lot how each individual perceive my pictures, below are the statement they have sent in.
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because his photo full of feeling, every photos have different feel for me. For the wedding photo, I can feel the bless and happiness between the bridegroom and the bride. I like Dennis Yap Photography's photos! ♥"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because you are the best amongst the best."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because....your technique of shooting is very nice and modern!"
"Why i love dennis yep's photography because i have an excellent taste ;)."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because his photo full of imagination and meaning, bringing out feeling in every photo, and the best Photographer!"
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because the photo that he take give me diffrent feeling and got his own style."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because, i saw your photography as a way of feeling, of touching & loving.
What you have caught on your film is captured forever... it remember little things, long after you have forgotten everything. i love your pieces of art & passion” ♥
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because he is "THE Great". ( Photos better than words)"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because your photography is meaningful to me and it just like story-telling. I love to sense on photography as I love photography too and I find the feeling of natural on your most photography. Your photography is amazing all the way and I just love it."
"I love Dennis Yap photography because we able to find ourselves in the picture :D"
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because he shoot an extremely lovely couple pictures, heart melt!"
"I love dennis yap photography because...He manage to capture the true feelings of the moment...the moment may have passed, but the picture brings the feelings back...^^ i'm luvin' it."
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because his photography full of feeling when i review the photos taken by him. Besides, his photography create the sense of natural beauty, that why i like his photography."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because he manages to capture real moments in pictures that make you feel as if you were there when it happened."
"I love dennis yap photography because the photos being taken by him is an art and able to tell a story."
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because all the pictures was taken not only for fun,,but Dennis Yap can give someone feels very extraordinary and the pictures taken not only meant to get happy but it is meant on realizing some moral ethics or attitude for people to get self motivate..(^_^)v"
"I LOVE DENNIS YAP PHOTOGRAPHY BECAUSE HE CAN CAPTURE THE GREAT PHOTO WHICH FULL OF FEELING AND NATURE OF ♥ LOVE ♥!"
"We like Dennis Yap Photograph because his pictures are so true and lively, can explain a story without adding words."
"And I love DennisYap Photography for his photos - shine as the true events. Truly Inspiring!"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography is because every single picture taken, every single detail concentrated on, leaves a footprint of memories forever "
"Because we are married and you are the chosen photographer for the BIGGEST day of our lives and we love your work! What else can be better than these reasons!"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because I wish to use his service in our wedding album.His photos are so lively and the photos explain everything without our explanation!! Amazing!!"
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because he can captured all the right moments with the right feelings."
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because every picture taken looks natural, full of live and romance."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because of how it captured that very moment. ♥"
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because your photography is meaningful and beautiful. Anyway, i just love it."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because the pictures captured by him do paint a thousand words."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography because your pictures so creative, very special, also very interesting."
"I Love Dennis Yap Photography is definitely because his pictures speaks louder than words and it shows every single detail of happiness and love in it. Thumbs Up !"
"I love you from the sincere of my heart...I love Dennis Yap Photography because his photo full happiness and meaning.I love it..."
"I love Dennis Yap Photography because his photos make me cried ~~~"
Thanks for all your comments; it really had melt my heart. For the reason I am doing photography is simply to tell the world that pictures can be more than just beauty. It can speak, made someone realize something, and can also heal or extend their love.
There are also an obstacle that I have faced for this year's voting contest, I have also learned that facebook voting contest has emerged to a different scenario, which is the question of fairness. You know what I want in this contest, is simply to be fair with everyone and I felt that I have great responsibility to make it as fair as possible because I am dealing with 36 lovely couples here, simply do not want to disappoint anyone.
To define the true winner, the winner has to be able to generate enough true vote from their friends or from friend's friend, this should be the true meaning of the contest, which is to get the highest support from their friends. However, dealing with heteroscedasticity in facebook is never easy. If you do not know the meaning of heteroscedasticity, it is simply the most extraordinary numbers in a statistic group. Everyday I have been monitoring the fans that have 'liked' the pictures. The software I have been using to monitor like statistic is called "Flirt". Flirt is a software created for only mac machines to monitor facebook events and it serve viral focus to gather specific likes for marketing purpose in both macro and micro monitoring. Out from Flirt I noticed these specific events as shown in my pictures below.
I was a little nervous when it comes to this because these are irregulars and I also found numerous likes were generated from duplicate facebook page which has only 1 member in the page. When I reasearch more indept on knowing where does all these duplicates were coming from, I have learned that there has been many competitions that was organized by large organizations which is considered unfair. Such as this page over here that I found to be unfairly organized, in this page the winner had gathered 36,000 likes and with total of 90,000 likes but the page has gathered only 11,000 fans, strange right? Which means that there are a great number of ghost voters. For my case I have had 17,000 likes in total, with 4,800 increased on members.
I have been pretty unpleased with facebook and it had somewhat discouraged me on whether to launch another couple portrait contest next year. But since I have launched this contest, I am set to develop a way that will be fair for everyone. So below is my approach.
In order to create numbers from viral reach behavior, you gotta know the 'like' performance of this competition. For example, the biggest fact from getting likes is how much effort the individual or the group of individual contributes to get likes, and versus the likes they have gathered. It is a known fact that if the main contestant that have shared the like invites to their own group of friends will more likely to get more likes, and their friends that have shared their pictures will more likely to get less likes. This is a known fact from Facebook experience. Therefore, the more days the competition had run, it is more likely that their effort versus like is less. And therefore the contestants have to use more effort to gather likes. In this scenario I called it 'like integrity'. Like integrity is a way to measure what you will expect from their effort and their actual 'likes' must be lower than the expected due to like deterioration from viral reach. In a competition like this, it is abnormal to see contestant that have spared less effort and able to generate great amount of likes, this is due to the viral reach performance. Of course, it also depend on how many friends each friends has in their account and therefore I have monitored and calculated the 'like expectation' from this competition; which also means the average number of likes gathered from each invite off from this contest. The contest is all about who you ask for likes, if individual had asked for likes from an unknown 'power like' group, then the viral reach will then failed and many ghost likes will be contributing and looses its like integrity, means that irregular activities occurred. Like integrity is a way to measure how likely people will be interested to like your page and support your contest.
The individual from 'power like' group that have liked the contestant will expect the contestant to like back, so I spent time to delete those invites in order to discourage them from doing so.
If you able to know what is the inclusion method, you will know how to gather 'like integrity'. For this I used a weibull method from statistic to measure how many ghost likes as a start. And this is my formula, the number of 1 to 10 are critical numbers used from risk analysis measured from mean of number of likes per invite. To gather a weibull number one has to capture the like contributed on each day and also percentage of ghost likes from Flirt because it will be tough to monitor them after next day.
Like Integrity = [Weibull = (1)/(1+irregulars) from life data analysis, thanks to Flirt and Reliasoft.]x[Invite performance = 0.1 to 1]x[Number of actual like]
So thats my effort for one single contest, and the winner gets a free portrait session from me. :D So much effort had been put in place, in order to voice out one VISION.
Congratulate Jared & Zengie, you guys have proved to have the biggest support from your friends and family, I will not disappoint both of you. ^_^
This was one of my most memorable wedding assignment, before the wedding day NTV7 gave me a call if I have any assignment coming up where they would like to feature them in their evening news, so I approached Basil and Clare. In the early morning while Basil was dressing up, he received a call from NTV7 said that they would like to feature them and they said yes. It will a little funny because both Basil and Clare is english educated and the NTV7 news is in mandarin.
It was quite a happy day for Basil and Clare, the gate crash was a short one since everyone is not so young anymore, but his love and sincerity for Clare is touching indeed, and first time I saw a guy kneel down right beside Clare's room, and Clare gave a sweet smile back to Basil.
Love the Church, both of them had a very religious ceremony in St Thomas More in USJ, the church was quite new and cozy. Just only the priest was quite particular on the shoot so we just listen to him, glad to have Cliff shooting with me that day so that I could get some shots from different sides.
And both Basil and Clare had a small interview session right after the ceremony, and me as well LOL, I was surprised, but since I given a chance to say something to public, I did used my given time to say something I strongly felt about in my career. Which is to inspire more young individuals to realise their dream. Thanks for Basil and Clare for having me, both of you really have a sweet and loving character, and I still remember that Basil said that he fell for Clare on first sight. Thats quite motivating hehe....
我想表白一个很明确的条件，寻找那个正确的人选。然而我用中文的原因很简单，就是他必须是会念中文的。你看到的首要条件可能对你来说很奇怪或新鲜，但这是我要寻找的伙伴，寻找这伙伴的确是有一点困难，有些人用一生的时间来寻找，很多时候是要看缘分；但其实是一些蛮普通又独特的条件，如果你是喜欢艺术的你，肯定知道我在要求什么，也明白我做艺术的精神着重于什么。
工作岗位：1. Designer + Editor (Priorty／业余,有当全职的心愿), 2. Photographer (Less Priority／业余，有当全职的心愿).
如果你对我的艺术感兴趣，不妨看看你是否符合这一系列的要求，也许我们可以在艺术创作的空间有火花。
1. 你一定不可以是一个拜金主义者
2. 你对艺术一定要有自己独特的梦想与热诚
3. 你在艺术创作一定要有自己的思维，要有想启发我的心愿，可是不能太过于执着
4. 你必须要有自己的嗜好
5. 你必须要有肯为艺术牺牲的性格
6. 你必须是一个喜欢压力的人，又可以在生活里寻找喜悦
7. 你必须要对生活存有自己的态度，能够自我学习的一分子
8. 你必须是个喜欢音乐的人
9. Located in Kuala Lumpur
如果你不愿成为在艺术领域的牺牲品，想要在做艺术的生活里寻找喜悦，也许你就是我要寻找的人，不妨让我让你发亮。如果你有以上的精神，请email我你的resume。我们在一杯咖啡的时间洽谈，看看我们是否存有共识。希望我可以找到你，谢谢你啦！
Haha... I love this promotion! Its going to be fun. Inside Signature Weddings you can find this small little promotions hidding on the last page inside Jan 2012 issue. If you are a frequent cityville player, good news! Anyone that are able to franchise Dennis Yap Photography in their Cityville are able to receive a 10% off on either one package of mine~ The shop must be placed in the middle of your city.
At first Signature Wedding paused and asked why would I made a promotion like this one, I told them that my goal is to make them laugh and see me as a cheerful photographer. Well, its quite funny afteralll, say you are looking a wedding magazine with your serious eyes and you saw this promotion with wierd requirements. But believe me, I mean it LOL. Its not a joke. :p
All the while I have seen ads with big logo's with many pictures in order to grab the first attention. I made a quick decision and just wanted to have one image to describe everything, and added a message that describe my work the most. I love to focus on the heart in my work, I believe that most beautiful pictures are an expression not just on the picture itself but through pictures we can realize how individual feel toward each other. Which also an influence off a book I love so much, "The Little Prince". If you have read this book, there was this chapter where the little prince was searching for his flower in one of the planet while he was on the earth. He was looking around the sky filled with stars and was unable to find his planet. Just because he was unable to find his planet, all the stars became beautiful to him. That well described the beauty of the unseen and so this kind of beauty had an impact on me and I do appreciate things that are unseen, hidden, in the heart. I have collected 11 translation of this book and continue looking. :D
I never been a true believer of winning competitions, reason because I always think that there are simply better ways to make my customers happy by providing my hard work, giving them the most unforgetable experience in their lifetime. Therefore, over the years my focus is to gain appreciations rather than reputations, and I believe that reputations is earned, not won. Thanks to Signature Wedding Magazine for putting me under the Asia's Top 30 Wedding Photographer's umbrella, I guess I've earned it. Thanks to everyone that have supported my vision along the way, you all counts, this is not simply a reputation gained from a single beautiful picture, it is a combinations of numerous hard work and high level of service over the years. I will continue to work extra hard for everyone of you! Cheers!
Had some great fun shooting Andy & Serena's wedding day in Tawau. Just from the looks from those photos you can sort of feel how fun it is LOL, picture tells a thousand words. But one of the unfortunate thing for me was before the wedding day I found myself having dengue fever. I was almost going to call off this wedding assignment and fly some other person over to cover their wedding day, however the moment I heard Serena was quite sad to hear about my news and told me that she do not have any photographers to cover her wedding day, I decided to take my life at risk to fly over to this small little town of Sabah. Had my continual blood test over in some clinics there and surprisingly I found not many people aware about the danger of dengue fever there. Actually I had a long thought why am I putting myself in a big risk instead of admitting to hospital in KL. The price that I going to pay for the extra ticket is minimal compared to my life. However, I did not tell Serena about this but the sad thing I saw in the wedding was she did have someone to cover her wedding for her, in the groom side and he even made the slideshow for the dinner because I am incapable due to the fever. My hands and body were all red in the afternoon, lol a little shy that day. :p
Just some advice for future brides, it is indeed very important to hire 2 photographers for your wedding day, in case one fail, another one can take over in case of emergency. Even this was my first ever incident that require me to turn down the assignment (but I didn't), in certain times, things happened and we have to accept it, never put anyone's life at risk.
Finally its the 3rd day of their wedding day, I can't imagine myself doing such a big and tiring ceremony myself LOL. As for me, I just wish to have a picnic ceremony with really close ceremony. It was quite fun, glad to see many familiar faces I met while I was in the States during studies. And nice to see you again Ramesh. I used to sell bibles and education books to help me through school while I was Studying in the states, so every summer those are the gangs, we called them bookmans. LOL.