Part 1: The Apprenticeship & The Hong Kong High-Stakes Era

I was born in Hong Kong and raised in a North Point government-subsidized housing estate, where our family of six shared a modest life. My father worked as an accounts clerk for NAAFI, serving the British armed forces stationed in the territory before the handover. Growing up immersed in that unique blend of British and Chinese culture, he placed high hopes on my schooling. But traditional academics were never my calling; my grades were below par—until everything shifted in Form 3.

That year, my form master ran the school photography club. Owning a camera was an impossible luxury, but we were occasionally allowed to handle one. That taste was enough. I became obsessed, devouring copies of Life, Time, Look, and specialized photography journals. When I first encountered the legendary Pirelli Calendar, the imagery mesmerized me. A conviction took root: I wanted to become a photographer. In my final year of secondary school, I poured everything into my studies, earning a solid matriculation result just to prove to my family—and myself—that I had the discipline if I chose to apply it.

Back then, higher education in photography didn’t exist in Hong Kong—not even at Hong Kong Polytechnic. For a working-class family of six, studying abroad was an astronomical financial impossibility. If I wanted to learn the trade, I had to do it from the ground up as a studio assistant. Full of ambition, I sought out Kevin Orpin, an Australian recognized as the preeminent advertising photographer in Hong Kong at the time. I was turned away on the spot. Only later did I learn why: it came down to my shoes. We couldn't afford sneakers, and my white canvas P.E. shoes were too battered to wear, so I had showed up in my formal school leather shoes—hardly the practical footwear of a working studio grip.

Undeterred, I took on whatever work I could find, from airport check-in agent to assistant for catalogue shooters. Two years later, a breakthrough arrived. A friend working reception at Professional Color Lab—co-owned by Kevin Orpin and located on Wyndham Street, right below his studio—recommended me, knowing how deeply I loved the medium. This time, Kevin hired me. That doorway on Wyndham Street became my ticket into the world of commercial photography.

Working as an assistant was night and day compared to my shifts at the airport. At the check-in desk, I watched the clock; in the studio, I gladly worked unpaid overtime just to pre-light the floor for the following morning—even if the setups didn't always match Kevin’s taste. As his sole assistant, I frequently slept on the studio floor without showering. Our walk-up building had no elevator, and Kevin kept all the gear in a rooftop storage room above the sixth-floor studio, meaning every location day began with hauling heavy flash packs and stands up and down those stairs.

I never thought about taking holidays. I was absorbing the machinery of high-stakes productions: how to plan, execute, and stay calm when tight turnarounds and budgets ten times or more of a photographer's fee were on the line.

When Kevin began directing television commercials—collaborating with Centro TVC in Kowloon Tong—he delegated side product shots to me. As I shot more independently, agency clients noticed, occasionally asking if I could handle projects whose budgets fell short of Kevin’s rates. Friction was inevitable. One afternoon, likely irritated after a rough lunch meeting, Kevin walked in, disliked my lighting setup, and kicked an autopole. The whole rig collapsed. Nobody was hurt, but the pole snapped, words were exchanged, and I walked out.

The co-owner of Professional Color Lab stepped in immediately, hiring me as an in-house photographer for a battery manufacturer in Yau Tong where he served as a director. Shooting batteries of every shape and size gave me total creative freedom to build a dedicated portfolio.

It wasn’t long before Kevin reached out to bring me back. I agreed, but only on new terms: not as an assistant, but as an independent entity who freelanced on his major productions while running my own business. Taking over the vacant space left behind when Professional Color Lab relocated, I teamed up with Kevin’s other assistant to split overhead and establish CD Workshop—he focused on fashion, while I took on commercial advertising.

By the late 1980s, commercial work was expanding rapidly. Production scale outgrew our space, prompting a move to a larger studio on Graham Street and eventually leading me to branch out on my own as David Cheung Photography.

Before long, major campaigns for multinational brands caught the attention of leading 4A advertising agencies. Networking was never my style—I avoided business lunches unless strictly necessary and relied almost entirely on word of mouth and peer referrals rather than cold calls.

One defining commission was the global airport campaign for Johnnie Walker Black Label, requiring 36 to 38 individual shots tailored to diverse billboard proportions worldwide. Because testing and production spanned 40 days, renting a Sinar 8x10 camera system, specialized lenses, and a Polaroid processor cost nearly as much as purchasing them outright. The agency signed off on the purchase, and the production fee alone was substantial enough to cover a down payment on a flat in Happy Valley.

Conflicting brand accounts were normally off-limits within agencies, yet both Marlboro and Kent—the industry’s biggest spenders at the time—retained me for their campaigns. On one high-stakes project for the Marlboro League, production costs ran so steep that an account executive had to sprint through Kai Tak Airport to hand me the deposit cheque before I would board my flight to Kunming. On arrival at the training camp, I had just 15 minutes per football star to light and capture each portrait. Upon launch across mainland China, the posters were so popular that the public stripped them from billboards, prompting Marlboro to commission another campaign the following season. It only struck me later that these were the very tier of premier accounts that previously went straight to Kevin.

My obsession on set became legendary. Years later in Shanghai, a former client recalled having to work hours of overtime because, even after he had signed off on a final Polaroid, I insisted on refining the lighting for another two hours. A producer in New York once bluntly asked, "David, are you on drugs?" I have never touched drugs in my life; the drive came purely from the work itself. Studio sets were my playground, and when it came to light, "good enough" was never acceptable.

Yet the relentless pace of Hong Kong's advertising world carried real physical consequences. Art directors and creative directors rarely arrived on set before late afternoon, spending mornings in meetings and holding up layout approvals until five or six in the evening. As a result, major shoots invariably turned into overnight marathons. Assistants worked through the night while the lab processed early morning tests so I could evaluate film runs by 11:00 AM. Midnight dinners and zero rest gradually took their toll, leading to a long battle with hypertension that lingers to this day.

Part 2: The Transpacific Transition, Family, and Returning to the Craft

In 2001, I relocated to Los Angeles, stepping into an entirely foreign commercial ecosystem. In Hong Kong, commercial photographers rarely pigeonholed themselves; apart from fashion, I had built a career taking on virtually everything. In the United States, the market operated on strict specialization. Food photographers shot only food; architectural shooters handled only interiors.

I was the odd one out—the "red-nosed reindeer" of the American market. A creative director at a general-market agency once praised my portfolio as "grand and timeless," but delivered a blunt reality check: if an art buyer needed a campaign featuring children, they would hire someone with a book exclusively full of children. My book was simply too diversified to package cleanly, and he urged me to narrow my focus and carve out a singular signature aesthetic.

I tried to adapt. I even experimented with American-style street photography, but walking in others' footsteps felt unnatural. Reviewing the frames on my screen, everything looked derivative, like work someone else had already mastered. I wasn’t a candid observer capturing decisive moments like Henri Cartier-Bresson, nor did I want a stylized, single-note world like David LaChapelle.

I had to ask myself: why force myself into someone else's box? My greatest strength had always been meticulous planning, set engineering, and technical mastery in the studio. Free from the breakneck pace of Hong Kong, I conceived the "Another Me" series—my personal tribute to the visual ambition of the Pirelli Calendars that had inspired me decades earlier.

The concept was uncompromising: twelve standalone images created by a single photographer, with zero repetition in style across the series. Rather than relying on a predictable visual formula, each frame would be built around rich, layered symbolism—carrying the narrative depth of an essay, a poem, or a short film. Meanwhile, commercial momentum returned through trusted creative allies. A former creative director from Hong Kong launched an agency in New York targeting the Asian American market and brought me on board. As word of mouth spread, commissions followed across Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese brands.

During a 2008 vacation to Shanghai, another former collaborator offered me a shoot in the city. The offers snowballed quickly enough that commuting across the Pacific became unsustainable, prompting a move to Shanghai in 2009. There, I met my wife. Shanghai offered what LA lacked: high production variety, creative excitement, and a steady stream of demanding studio briefs.

In 2016, I fully self-funded and produced the first chapter of Another Me, titled "Twin." A month after wrapping the shoot, my wife became pregnant—bringing an overwhelming surge of joy along with new family responsibilities.

I paused the series until 2019, when I completed the second piece, "War Figures." Just as momentum began to rebuild, COVID-19 struck in early 2020. Amid sweeping lockdowns and rapid political shifts, we left Shanghai and returned to Hong Kong, where I stepped away from commercial photography until 2023 to prioritize my family's safety and well-being, serving as a full-time father while my wife cared for her terminally ill father.

I returned to Los Angeles in November 2023. The city felt instantly familiar, yet so much had shifted across the industry. Through my long-standing New York agency connections, I took on campaign assignments for the California Department of Public Health. Soon after, I completed a commercial assignment for two restaurants at Pala Casino Spa Resort, coordinating tight physical setups while sharing floor space with an active TV commercial crew.

Alongside select commercial assignments, my primary creative purpose is completing the remaining ten chapters of Another Me. The series remains rooted in absolute one-shot photography: physical props, optical set builds, and real-world studio engineering. To the casual observer in an AI-driven era, they may resemble digital composites or synthetic prompts, but every highlight and reflection is an illusion captured directly from physical reality. Each piece stands as an independent, narrative-rich work of visual symbolism—rekindling the dream first sparked by the Pirelli Calendar over forty years ago.

In parallel, I am opening my studio archives through the Seed page on my website, deconstructing the mechanics and technical solutions behind my career. Whether it guides an emerging student or sparks an idea for a working peer, passing down this craft is my way of saying thank you to Kevin Orpin, my clients, art directors, producers, and assistants—every one of whom served as a mentor along the way

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