José Jeuland | Pushing the BOUNDARIES of Creativity
The studio offers unlimited options and creativity. I construct simple to cinematic-style setups, where I experiment with lighting – with flashes, continuous lights, natural lights, or, more often than not, a mix of these forms of lighting.
Frequent readers of Lens Magazine may know me as a documentary and travel photographer. In addition to that, my career has also given me many opportunities to do commercial photography and videography.
It has been two years since I have launched COCO Creative Studio. The studio is based in Singapore, Joo Chiat, an area known for its colorful Peranakan shophouses.
My studio holds great significance to me – it is not just a place for work, where I do product, portrait, and lifestyle photography. It is a space for me to unleash my creativity as I explore new ideas and test various equipment. It’s where all my gears are stored, and where I edit on BenQ calibrated monitors. Soon, I’ll also be getting a printer to produce my own fine art prints. I mostly use the studio for my portrait photography tasks – something which I enjoy the most. I take a lot of pride in the quality of my portraits, using hand-painted canvasses from Gravity Backdrops as my main props.
These backdrops greatly enhance the ambiance, look, and feel of the final images.
For this feature, I initially intended to feature a combination of some images I have produced in the studio. After some consideration, I decided to do something a little different – to conduct two fuss-free portrait shoots with two non-professional models, with no assistant, make-up artist, or art director. It would just be me, my trusty camera, and the model.
My vision was for the process to be an organic exploration of the models’ energy and personality.
I chose Lia and Zsa Zsa’s portraits for this feature.
There’s just something about them – the majority of the pictures I took were outstanding!
In fact, I actually took more time to select the photos to be featured, rather than actually editing them.
Zsa Zsa
She has many interests – plays music, sings, and does boxing. I decided to photograph her in her boxing outfit using the FUJIFILM GFX 100, a digital medium format camera with 102 megapixels. I already knew that the photographs were going to turn out great, but she far exceeded my expectations.
Her strength and tenacity really shone through the images, and it was such a fun collaboration!
Lia
Lia needed some portraits for personal use.
For her, I went with an editorial fashion portrait style, using the FUJIFILM GFX 50R, a digital media format camera with 51 megapixels. She actually never did a photo shoot before, yet I was deeply impressed with the amount of personality and class she exhibited in front of the camera. It was such a great session, and I hope to be able to do another shoot with her again!
