Sometimes picking a career isn’t quite as simple as it seems. After a course in sound engineering didn’t quite pan out as planned, Michele Yong decided to fall back on a different talent, playing around with her regular old compact digital camera. Today, this 23-year-old stunner works as a fashion photographer in one of the greatest style capitals of the world: Paris.

Originally from Sabah, Michele took her then smaller collection of work to Kuala Lumpur and quickly found plenty to do in the world of Malaysian fashion. It began with a stint as official photographer for the 2009 edition of Malaysia International Fashion Week (MIFW). Michele credits MIFW’s organisers, the Malaysian International Fashion Alliance, for lending her the support and encouragement that have spurred her further down the path of fashion photography.

Cool, collected and devastatingly stylish, Michele turns into a voracious creature when she looks through her lens. Some have called her demanding, but Michele prefers to think of it as doing her best to extract every last drop of glamour out of a photo shoot. Learn more about Michele’s thoughts on fashion photography through these excerpts.

LifeAndStyle: Do you feel that you’ve changed at all as a person or artist since moving to Paris?

I think I’ve gotten a lot more finicky. I’ve gotten a lot more particular, but I guess that’s what you have to do if you want to achieve a standard, right? You’ve got  to be a little bit tough sometimes, which some people find a little bit hard to work with, but I try to compromise a little bit here and there, I just want to make sure that I deliver something that I’m happy with. That’s the most important thing.

LifeAndStyle: It is different now since it’s a more global platform now, though you did move to KL first before going to Paris. How did that happen?

Well, obviously KL is an easier step coming from KK, there’s a little bit more work there and I needed to get a little bit more experience because if I moved straight away to Europe it’s like jumping into the deep end, right? Working in KK, there’s not much to do. I was lucky enough to find quite a lot of work in KL.

LifeAndStyle: You seem to be surrounded by several very likeminded people in Paris. Do you feel that an individual’s community and environment are essential to artistic development?

I think so. Birds of a feather flock together, right? I mean obviously I would hang around people who have the same sort of style. The most important thing is that we work well together, the chemistry. Five Monkeys is our studio. We have five artists there, with three photographers including me and two graphic artists. It started out in September as more as a creative space for all of us to have somewhere work, but probably in March or April we’ll start a collective with some outsider artists.

LifeAndStyle: That sounds a lot like Andy Warhol’s Factory, actually.

I never really thought about it that way, but it is hard to get work there, especially if you’re a freelancer, like a small fish. It seemed like a much better idea to have a group of people available to give to clients. Almost like a talent agency, in between one and a studio.

LifeAndStyle: You’re extremely talented and also very young. Has age ever been an obstacle in your line? Do people underestimate you because they assume you’re inexperienced?

I was lucky enough to never have a big problem. I think partially it’s because when they meet me, they feel that I am not really my age.

LifeAndStyle: You’re a little terrifying.

[Laughs] Intimidating, yeah. Most of the time when I meet clients, I don’t tell my age unless they ask me. I think in this day and age, that’s not really an issue especially in the artistic world. It’s not like other industries where it might be a factor. Actually I find that the younger you are and the better you are, the keener they are.

The good thing about this industry at the moment is that there’s a lot of focus on bringing up young, creative people, like young designers, photographers and artists, so it works out well. I feel like it’s always been like this for the creative world. I mean years ago I’d read articles about really young painters. There hasn’t been much prejudice with people who are young.

LifeAndStyle: What is the best thing about your profession? Why do you do photography?

The satisfaction of having people be really happy about what I produce for them. When I work with models, for example, and I send them back to the agents, then they love them enough to post them on the models’ comp cards, I feel really good. I feel like they like my work, it’s helping them, and it’s good enough that they would use them for comp cards.

I have some clients who have me shoot for their campaigns and their lookbooks, and some of them are quite dependent on advertising. When they see the results that my photos can have from their advertising, I feel really good as well. I mean it’s not always like this, sometimes the whole thing just doesn’t work out at all. There are good days and bad days, I just want to have more of the good days.

LifeAndStyle: It must be so nice to be in the company of creative people and not have to do your own makeup and styling anymore.

[Laughs] It used to be like that, now there’s professionals doing it and I can just focus on the photos. In any kind of work I think the most important thing is job satisfaction, anything you do, that’s the most important thing.

LifeAndStyle: How would you encourage someone who is a hobbyist and would like to break into professional work?

The first thing you can do is to photograph as much as possible, learn from other photographers. Don’t copy but learn from the techniques, then make it your own. It’s very important to develop your own style. Just shoot a lot, but you have to develop a thick skin because art is very subjective. No matter how much you know technically, it won’t please everyone, and that’s not so easy to accept. It’s a tough industry, there are so many talented people but too few jobs.

LifeAndStyle: We interviewed Chris Chong recently and he was talking about the brain drain in Sabah, how so many talented locals leave to work elsewhere. Do you feel that you’ll be coming back some years down the line to share what you’ve learned?

To share, maybe, but to expect the industry to grow to an international level? I think I’ll be dead by then.

W: micheleyong.com