Conceptual Photographer in Manila
Many of my works are conceptual and surreal. I enjoy taking pictures and creating images that evoke nostalgia, fantasy, and magic by combining photography with digital illustration and photo editing. The process is never short and simple, but the challenge is precisely what attracts me to conceptual photography.
My style in photography, digital illustration, and retouching serves clients well when we create conceptual frameworks for photoshoots and campaigns in general.
I often create high-key images that are grounded in reality but still possess a dreamlike quality. Even during the earliest years of my career, I’ve been flexing my creative muscles to turn bland images into something more.
Making Conceptual Photography Seamless
There are no limits in photography. A clever play on lights and camera angles can show a subject interacting with its background, and the resulting image would be fun and amazing. Such photos can stand on their own without too many enhancements. There are, however, themes that may be difficult, even impossible, to shoot in a practical set. Conceptual art photography is the best way to realize them.
Flying animals, an imaginary and futuristic backdrop, a model’s face breaking cleanly through the water, perfect reflections appearing on broken mirrors — these concepts require intensive illustration and digital retouching, and not just as last-minute touches.
In conceptual photography, digital illustrations and retouching techniques are vital to bringing complex ideas to life. The digital effects are part of the subject; without them, there can be no photo.
So feel free to unleash your creativity and come up with designs that awe and wow. I can bring to life anything that can’t be staged in a practical set by making creative compositions using raw images and digital illustrations.
Guiding Clients Beyond Their Comfort Zone
Brands and ad agencies in the Philippines have long relied on tried-and-tested methods. Want to sell an energy drink? Take a picture of the bottle against a plain white background. Need posters for a telecommunications company? Hire a celebrity endorser and have him pose with a cellphone pressed to his ear.
The Filipino audience and the rest of the world, however, are now ready—no, looking—for more.
Commercial photography can be at once creative and effective at drawing customers to a featured product or service. This conviction led to my winning a D&AD Wood Pencil for the poster campaign images I and my company Paper Boat Creative produced for Unilever Philippines.