What's This?
This is not real snow. Image: SiuMing Photo
By Victoria Ho2015-10-13 09:08:25 UTC
SINGAPORE — Getting wedding photos shot means having to make a bunch of decisions, from the perfect outfit, to the venue and concept. In Hong Kong, an artificial snow company is hoping a white winterscape can be one of the choices for newlyweds.
Tropical areas of Asia don't offer changing seasons, so it can be hard to capture different looks. Orient Snow figures there's potential in couples keen to make their wedding photos stand out.
The company is the regional third party distributor for UK-based Snow Business, which has created winter effects in scenes for movies like Harry Potter and TV shows Game of Thrones and Dr Who.
Hong Kong-based Orient Snow is far more accustomed to setting up snow machines on a film set or in a mall at Christmas time, but there's untapped potential in the wedding circuit, an Orient Snow rep told Mashable.
"We estimate that snow photography could be a major growth area for us, perhaps providing as much as 25% to 40% of the business (eventually)," she says. This is because wedding photography is done all year round, and could be a stable and sustainable source of revenue.
For now, work with photographers makes up less than 5% of its business. Slightly over half of its revenue comes in through live events, with another 30% from films and TV commercials.
The company operates in Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, and is actively courting wedding photographers, the company says.
Hong Kong photographer Siu Ming is one of the early adopters of fake snow for his photos. He shot his first snowscape wedding two months ago, and has since started getting "many requests" from couples to recreate a similar scene.
One of the snow scenes Siu Ming shot.
He's even considering setting up a dedicated snow-ready studio if the volume of requests keeps up, he added.
"People here fly overseas to places like Japan just to take snow wedding photos. Hong Kong is very small and very (urbanised), so we're running out of interesting places to shoot," he told us.
Siu Ming, who shoots around 10 weddings a month, and has done so for the past seven years, says it's become trendy to shoot photos based on a narrative. "When I started, couples wanted stiff postures. It was not very natural. Nowadays they want a story that tells people how they met," he says.
This shoot was done in a movie theatre because the couple met while working for the cinema, he says. He did a series of double exposures to create clones of the couple scattered around the cinema:
Multiple double exposure shots created the illusion of the couple filling out the theatre.
He feels envious of photographers in countries where there are lots of majestic churches and grassland. This is a shot done at his favourite place, Shing Mun Reservoir, off the main Hong Kong island.
In order to constantly offer something fresh to clients, he's got a couple of new ideas cooking. His latest project has seen him stock a collection of flowers in a studio, so he can set up shoots against a wall of blossoms.
"This was taken in Hong Kong, but many people ask if it was shot overseas," he says proudly.
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Source: Artificial snow company hopes white weddings will become a thing in Asia
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