I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, by the hardest working person I know…my mother…obviously! I graduated from what I, as well as everyone else who also attended there, would consider the best University in Canada (Queen’s University, I’m sure you’re all very impressed!) and started working for an Investment Bank pretty much right away. Fast forward 9 years (don’t worry, not much happened in
those 9 years…it was a lot of working, eating, sleeping, and some movies…I got a cat…and then another cat…and that’s about it…). Where was I? Oh right, 9 years later….for fear of turning into a crazy cat lady (in addition to life suddenly deciding to wreak havoc in my perfectly normal, barely existing existence), I decided to quit my job, sell everything I had, travel the world and become a professional photographer. My interest in photography started in high school when I inherited my cousin’s clunky Canon manual film camera (and by inherited, I mean that I swiped it from a box I found in his basement under some decapitated ninja turtles and some moldy lucky charms…). Despite being inundated by my Asian tiger mom’s insistence on me taking every extracurricular afterschool program ever invented by god and man, I managed to figure out (without google, a lot of film, and every spare moment I had, in my school’s darkroom) how to properly shoot award-winning, thought provoking, mesmerizing, haunt-you-till-the-day-you-die, photographs. Photography for me is like a drug (a good one that is not toxic or addictive – for example….ummm, you know….hrmmm…), you can never really quit the habit for good, you dabble in it during off work hours, and only talk about it with other people who also dabble in it, and then one day, you wake up and realize that you’re a full blown addict…(I’m still talking about photography here)…Luckily, during my 9 years of servitude, I managed to keep my dirty little affair with my camera alive by booking the occasional engagement shoot, headshot, portrait session and wedding. Nowadays, I've decided that my affair with my camera is no longer an affair, it's more like a marraige...alot of work, frustration, moments of pure bliss, and at the end of the day, worth every minute of everyday. Well, that’s it…not that dirty, and definitely not so quick…but like everything else in life, “talk is cheap, show me what you’ve got!". So feel free to check out my work and hopefully you'll enjoy seeing my photos as much as I’ve enjoyed taking them! I am currently based in Toronto, Mexico and Central America, but am available for bookings internationally, and would love to be part of your special day! Speak soon,
Lesley Lui