ROBIN WONG : Shutter Therapy Finally! Street Portraits with Olympus 25mm F1.2 PRO at Petaling Street

Last weekend, finally, after more than 3 months break, I finally had a proper shutter therapy session, which was much needed! I brought along the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III and M.Zuiko 25mm F1.2 PRO to Petaling Street area (in Kuala Lumpur) to do some portraits of strangers shooting. It was a quiet weekend, the streets being emptier than usual due to the pandemic and the city still being under semi-lockdown but we are allowed to roam around and do "public filmimg", so street photography is definitely very safe to do now for us here in Malaysia. Oh I never thought I have missed street shooting so badly!

I had a friend, Irene Chen who tagged along this shutter therapy session. Irene is an international multiple award winning photographer, specializing in newborn, maternity and family portraits (check out her incredible portfolio here). I have somehow managed to get her to start her own YouTube channel, she was sharing about her plant and gardening passion in her videos!

I did not manage to shoot that many images this session, but that was not the whole point of this shutter therapy outing. It was to go out and have fun, I certainly have filled that quota sufficiently. I get to spend time with Irene, catching up and we had amazing food over lunch.

To be entirely honest, I was not too happy with the images from this session, I knew I could have done better. It was somewhat expected since I divided half my effort into vlogging, and taking care of the video part of things. The vlogging part took a lot of my brainpower and that was quite a huge distraction, taking away my concentration on getting the best possible shots from my street portraits. Ideally I'd have a crew following me around and shoot me so I don't have to think about video but that is impossible to do for now, I can't take advantage of my friends like that, and certainly I don't have enough spare cash to properly compensate them for their time and effort as well.

Do cut me some slack, I have been out of action for quite a few months, I am slowly starting to pick up the pace again, and trust me, more and more shutter therapy content is coming very soon to this blog, as well as my YouTube channel. I can't wait to shoot more and share fresh images, my hands are getting unbearably itchy!

All images were shot with E-M1 Mark III (loaned from Olympus) and M.Zuiko 25mm F1.2 PRO. Aperture Priority, for portraits wide open F1.2, for everything else stopped down as necessary. Images were all shot in RAW and post-processed with minor tweaks in Capture One Pro 20