Bryan Foong’s Tips for Photographing Celebrities

Sony Singapore recently held their Alpha Sessions. This was a generous free event whereby Sony invited esteemed photographers to share about their respective niches, providing valuable tips and lessons about the trade.

One of the guest speakers invited was Bryan Foong, who has helped photograph many local celebrities including Germainelenora, Denisecamillia and jeanetteaw. He has also worked with big brands such as Macallan and Leclairpatisserie. 

The main topic of his sharing was about shooting for celebrities. Whilst Bryan started off, and is mainly a wedding photographer, opportunities arose for him to shoot celebrities, which further propelled his name on the world map.

His sharings were insightful and provided the audience with many important tips, not so much from the technical aspect but how to approach looking at photography as a career. 

In particular, we have compiled a few lessons from his talk that we took away.

Always bring your A game:

Bryan gave the example that sometimes, brands require a shoot for multiple talents. What we took away was that it is important to be able to capture each talent with the same quality and wow factor. If he made one talent stand out more than the other, this may mean losing out on job opportunities with the talent that didn’t get to stand out as much. This means that he has to bring his A game for each talent, even though they are “competing with each other” for the spotlight. Our takeaway is that while we may work with multiple clients, it is important to bring our A game to each of them. He also extended this to shoots done for friends, which we can relate to as we provide a free shoot for prospective clients to sample our quality.

Having the best equipment is great but what helped him achieve his success are his values:

Values like integrity, creativity and a can-do attitude has helped him retain clients and score new opportunities. One example he provided was helping clients to shoot outdoors even if it was raining, with the requirement that the shoot was supposed to portray them with sunlight. Bryan mentioned that he said “yes” despite the harsh and non-ideal conditions, citing that this can-do attitude was what helped him land the job. 

Shooting celebrities is like shooting others:

Oftentimes, we glamourise celebrities and put them on pedestals. Bryan remarked that celebrities are like you and I, just that they have chosen to take on a public-facing job. They are nice people who value privacy alot more. For instance, you have to be mindful for example that you do not take a behind-the-scenes social media post when a celebrity has not worn make-up, to prevent accidentally showing them in a negative light.

Thank you Bryan and Sony for these invaluable lessons that we will take away for our own craft!