Royal Caribbean Cruises

Summer of 2007. We travelled to the Caribbean to photograph the Rhapsody of The Seas - a 2000-passenger cruise ship belonging to Royal Caribbean Cruises that would later make Singapore the springboard for its cruise journeys around east Asian waters.

Primary photography had already been completed when the ship was christened. We were tasked with shooting the portfolio that would be used to attract future cruise goers in east Asia.

For planning and practical purposes we flew in talent from different parts of the world even though all three were Asian. Isabelle was from Hongkong. Palmer - an American by birth - was then based in South Korea. Little Ivy whose parents were originally from Vietnam lived in Texas. My crew and I were Singaporean.

We must have appeared a strange bunch of sorts, with our mixed bag of accents. In the wake of the Twin Towers incident, the thought of having to strip down to our underwear at every customs checkpoint wasn't far from our minds. But despite that, customs and immigration didn't really come down that hard on us even though we came close to missing our flights a couple times.

Still, we eventually made it in time to meet the ship in Galveston, Texas and set sail just before a hurricane blew into port.

The early days of the trip were a mixed bag of excitement and trepidation.

(Excitement, because this was a 7-day long cruise that would take us through the Gulf of New Mexico, to Roatan, Honduras in South America, with calls in Costa Maya and Cozumel in Mexico. We'd even get to see the ancient Mayan temples in Chacchoben.

(Trepidation, because somewhere between Seattle and Texas more than half of our luggage went missing. Misplaced, as it was, by the airlines.)

We had to spend a day and a half in Houston before our rendezvous with the ship, and I scrambled to get my hands on as much lighting gear and grip from a local source as I could muster.

Vivian’s (our make-up artiste) kit had disappeared too, along with all of her personal luggage, but she managed to stock up on underwear and foundation before we boarded.

In all between us I don’t think we slept much from all the worry. (Mel and Jay must have been somewhat relieved that they had less to lug around and set up, but being the considerate chaps they were simply tsked-tsked and clucked away in empathy.)

But no one had any real reason to complain.

This felt more like a working vacation and one should always be grateful for such assignments when presented with them, however challenging they may be. (Nudge nudge, wink wink...)

The ship was packed. (Note to self: Buy Royal Caribbean Stock). So we shot every opportunity we could. Between mealtimes when the crowd was thinner. At night after everyone had retired. In the early hours of dawn. Between sudden downpours and fire drills. At ports of call...

Ofttimes I used a long lens to isolate our talent from the human sea where I could. And we became experts at crowd behaviour, able to predict when the traffic on deck would thin out.

(Or did our fellow passengers simply gave us a wide berth whenever they saw us coming.)

The client, bless her soul, had the patience of a saint and the faith of a zealot and she gave us all the support she could round up from what was essentially a fully operational ship and crew that was laden bow to stern with passengers of the paying kind.

I think we slept an average of 3 hours every night during the entire production. But coffee and adrenaline, laced with camaraderie and friendship are a great antidote for exhaustion and we had that in gallons between the eleven of us.

This was, arguably, one of the most technically and logistically challenging productions I’ve undertaken in my time as a professional photographer.

But we’d managed to pull off the shoot indecently well despite losing some of my precious gear, a favorite penknife and quite possibly the only tux I've ever owned.

Still, would I do it all over again, you ask?

(Do cows have udders and pigs have snouts.)