By Conor Risch

To build a career in a small market like Singapore, says Darren Soh, you have to be a generalist. "If you specialized in any genre or field of photography, or if your pictures were only of a certain distinctive style, there's a very good chance that you would go hungry."

As an undergraduate, Soh interned for an English-language tabloid in Singapore, where he expected to get a staff position after graduation. A hiring freeze at the paper, however, made him doubt his ability to make a living as a photographer, so he entered a graduate degree program in communications. But in 2005 he volunteered to cover the Indian Ocean tsunami for an NGO. When he returned to Singapore he quit graduate school and dedicated himself to photography full time.

He cobbled together a portfolio from his newspaper tearsheets and personal work and began cold calling editors. "It was a rather painful and disheartening process that went on for about a year," he says. His first magazine assignment for a free tabloid didn't cover his expenses, he recalls, but it provided him tearsheets. Soh now does most of his commercial and editorial work in Asia for Singapore-based clients, but he is working to gain more international clients. His personal work, for which he maintains a separate Web site, is where his style comes through, he says.

Soh is interested in finding new ways to photograph things that have been heavily documented. For instance, when the first-ever Formula One night race took place in Singapore, instead of taking action photographs of the racecars or the crowds, Soh made 4 x 5 pictures of the empty racetrack as a night landscape. Soh likes to experiment. "The process of discovering whether it works or not is sometimes just as important as the pictures themselves," he says.

"The feeling you get when you realize what you tried actually worked, it's really incomparable."

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