So who are we? glad you asked. Jason Ho and Lena Legkaia-Ho are a husband and wife wedding and lifestyle portrait photography team based in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We both share a great passion for photography and love capturing moments in life that include everything from baby smiles to unforgettable sunsets.
We can be contacted directly via email at info@jaylena.com or by using the contact link on the main menu.
Jason’s Story
It was towards the end of 2006 when I was just about to embark on my working holiday in Vancouver, Canada, that I purchased my first Canon 30D DSLR in order to document my travels. Having not really used one before I was in a state of awe, and had a quick crash course from my good friend who I used to work with.
From that point on I started reading up on and learning everything and anything I could in regards to digital photography. I think at this point, is when things sparked. Having been working as a software developer for my entire career, I had found something that really allowed me to connect with my creative side. This then quickly turned into a passionate hobby of mine, albeit an expensive one!
Once finally in Vancouver, life paved its way, and this was where I initially met my beautiful bride to be Lena. My passion quickly passed onto her as we both enjoyed our days together going out exploring and capturing photos of our beautiful city and breathtaking surrounding areas. Lena then went on to take a photography course, and discovered that she too had a great talent in capturing moments, and together we decided to embark on this wonderful journey of transforming our passionate hobby into a challenging and rewarding profession!
Lena’s Story
I guess I should give you all my side of the story, and I’m not going to sugar-coat it like Jason did, I’ll give it to you with the good and the ugly.
I had many chances to learn photography as an art, but I passed them by, guess it wasn’t my time yet. My dad was somewhat of a photographer when we were growing up. There were always slides projected on the white sheet on the wall after a hike or a trip. He even developed and printed the photos in a little dark room he made himself. My mom was also quite the photographer in her younger days. Her first big purchase was a camera. She loved taking photos. But that slowly died down for both of them by the time I could really understand and appreciate it, they were simply busy with 2 kids of their own, and about 10 somewhat adopted kids in my dad’s outdoor club.
I grew up in an active lifestyle. My parents learned the hard way that forcing their children into ‘artsy’ activities was not the right way to go. My older sister suffered through 2 years of musical school, and besides singing, she didn’t enjoy it much. Her singing was, and still is not the greatest…both her and I suck at humming songs in Cranium! Thankfully, by the time my turn came to sign me up for extracurricular activities, my parents didn’t even bother with anything artsy, they signed me up for skiing and volleyball.
My real chance at learning photography came about in high school in grade 9 when we were officially allowed to pick our own classes. I didn’t take that chance either, I picked Yearbook instead. I enjoyed designing pages, and sticking photos into boxes on those pages instead of actually photographing the students. In grade 12 I was the co-editor of the yearbook, and I still quite enjoyed designing layouts and cropping photos to fit my boxes. When we were done with the book, there were a few months left of the school year, and my art teacher gave us free reign on what we wanted to do. Instead of using this free time to make use of the dark room and all the photo gadgets, I once again opted to do something else.
At this time it was still a film word out there, and my sister saved up quite a bit on her first job, and bought herself a pretty fancy (at the time) SLR camera. She was out and about taking lots of photos, and developing lots of film. I saw all of these photos, and I thought they were great, but once again I was busy doing something else. Having a ‘fancy’ camera around at my fingertips didn’t pull on any of my creative photographer strings.
So, throughout my university career all I had was a little point-and-shoot camera for all the trips, hikes and parties. I was taking photos, but never really thinking about them. I still enjoyed putting albums together though, I have a few scrap-books on my shelves!
Here’s where Jason comes in! He always seemed to have his camera with him whenever I dragged him somewhere. He was happy to take photos, and I was happy to pose for him!! One evening we decided to go to QE park and take some pictures together. I borrowed my sister’s ‘fancy” camera which hasn’t been used in years, and off we went. I loaded up a roll of film, which was also years old, and Jason tried to teach me all about aperture and shutter speeds. Being stubborn and unknowingly refusing to listen to Jason, my photo vocabulary didn’t improve, but I was having fun walking around and looking at the world through a little window in my camera. Oh, I should mention that all the photos I shot that day with my film camera are non-existent, since the film came out black, probably cause it was expired.
I started playing with Jason’s camera whenever he allowed me to, but I still couldn’t understand all the terminology, and as I mentioned I simply couldn’t learn it from my loving husband-to-be. Then I heard that my sister signed up for a photoworkshop to learn how to use her own new DLSR. So, here I was very intrigued by the fact that you can go and learn this stuff somewhere else. I’m not sure why I didn’t come to that realization on my own. I mentioned it to my mom, and she went and signed me up as a present for my upcoming birthday. This is where I got my foundation, and since then I have never shot in “green mode.” I learned what all the numbers meant, and how to use them for creative purposes. I even taught Jason a few tricks. From then on, Jason and I would quite often enjoy our evenings waking in parks and taking turns taking photos with the one camera and a few lenses that we had. We were both getting the practice that we needed, cause let’s face it, photography is all about practice!
At this point I was thoroughly bitten by the photo bug. And having someone right there by my side enjoying it with me was a great big bonus. I know he won’t admit it, but secretly we were both competing with each other. I absolutely loved some of his shots, and vise versa, so a little friendly competition sure helped us move along faster. From that point on our photography passion grew bigger and stronger, and it hasn’t stopped, it has brought us here!
We both love what we do, photography is our creative outlet from the scientific background we both grew up in. We have fun photographing together, finding those beautiful moments in people’s lives and capturing them so they last forever!
