My name is Richard Wong and I’m a wedding and portrait photographer based in Auckland New Zealand and have been shooting professionally for about 15 years.
Website: http://www.PhotobyRichard.com
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Tell us about your first introduction to photography. What drew you into this world?
When i was a little kid, I sometimes used my father’s camera to take photos. I don’t remember whether the photo turned out great or not, probably not haha, but I really enjoyed that experience!
Do you remember your first shot? What was it?
It was probably a photo of my family, but can’t really remember.
Your work focuses on wedding photography, did you try any other types of photography? Which one(s)?
Yes, I actually started with automotive photography, and also photographing car racing/drifting at race tracks. Then I started doing baby and children portrait photos. And later on, shift my focus to Wedding photography. But these days, I also do quite a bit of event photography, and some product photography as well. These are not something I planned to do, but just happens a few companies I have contacts with asked if I can do it for them.
Who or what influenced you?
Everyone! There are always lots of things I can learn from people. Not just from the other experienced photographers I met or work with, but even beginners I quite often found they have something i can learn from.
What details do you believe make the best photographs?
This is quite a hard question to answer. But there are so many things that are very important, light/shadow, timing, composition, they are all crucial. But I think a photo that tells a story is what I enjoy the most and usually what I will remember even many years later.
How do you educate yourself to take better photos?
Look at other people’s photos, try figure out why their photo is great. Look at my own photo, try figure out why my photos are not that great.
What was the best piece of advice you were given starting out?
Just go out and take photos! Don’t worry about what gear you have. You don’t need the best camera gear to do photography. It’s a bit funny for me to say that as I review so many camera gears on my YouTube channel. But really, I think while most of us want to have the latest and greatest camera gears, I enjoyed photography just as much when I had my first entry level camera with a kit lens.
You are known for photographing wedding photography? What draws your initial interest in a place?
It’s the fact that I’m capturing one of the most important and memorable moment of life and help the family record this precious memory. I’ve done quite many different types of photography, while each requires it’s own skills and has its own challenge, I feel wedding photography requires a really wide range of skills. Not need you need to have solid photography skills and able to take nice photos, you need to know your camera really well so you can control the camera like it is part of your body as most of the time you won’t have time to stop and think what or how to adjust the settings you should use. You need to plan a lot of things but at the same time you also need to have really good problem solving skills as there are always unexpected things happen at weddings. You need to be really good with people as well and know how to deal with and handle different type of people. So I really like that challenge, and at the same time it is extremely rewarding when you see the happy face of the couple when they saw the photos you took for them.
What equipment do you use?
I have a number of cameras I would use, probably more than what i really needed (haha) The cameras i used the most for weddings are my Nikon Z 6, Nikon Df and Panasonic Lumix S5.
Do you spend a lot of time editing your work? Why?
When i first started doing portrait and wedding photography, that was about 15 years ago. I spent a lot of time editing pretty much every single photo, from basic things like make sure the photos are not tilted, do a bit of cropping to get better composition, then play with different editing style, tweak the colours, clean up some messy background..etc. But these days, I spend a lot less time in editing. I still need to fine tune the exposure a bit and adjust the colours to my taste, but I try to make sure all my photos are as close to what i want as possible when i click the shutter button. I would make sure my camera is not tilted, I would avoid messy background and just in general pay a lot more attention to all the small details so I don’t need to spend much time to fix them during editing.
