On the Road

Where've I been? I've been on the road... quite literally at times!

The last six months have seen me cover well over 50,000km with several large projects across New Zealand and a trip to the UK. I think I may of single handedly been keeping the petroleum industry afloat!

Life has finally settled down enough for me to once again show my poor neglected blog some love and share some of the work I've been doing.

Starting with one of my favorite projects, the images I've been creating with Iconic Motorhomes. Combining family, travel, and work while doing it all in absolute luxury, has been fun to say the least!

The team at Iconic let me loose with a handful of different motorhomes that they hire and sell. The brief was simple, 'take the beautiful vehicles and photograph them in the beautiful New Zealand scenery'. Easy hey? However when your model is over 8.5m long it's not as simple as you think!

Getting the balance of vehicle, scenery and perfect light saw a lot of attempts that just didn't go to plan, you simply just couldn't get the motorhomes in the right spot. Reversing down narrow tracks became a bit of a speciality! However perseverance paid off and all the early starts and late evenings were rewarded with little moments of absolute synergy. Like the black swans gliding into shot at Lake Tarawera, or the sky clearing to give a view of Mt Cook after hours of driving under leaden skies. 

One unexpected factor I had to deal with was the amount of people who wanted to talk to me about the motorhomes and have a peek inside! The Kontiki flagship model shown above at Westhaven marina was particularly good at drawing an audience! Not surprising though, It really was a bit of a rock star!

We achieved a good, diverse range of shots across both the North and the South Island, which will be appearing on their new website very soon.

A big thanks to Kay, Kelly, Richie and all the team at Iconic for all the organising... please can I go and do it all over again!

The Red Men

Last week gave me the opportunity to be involved in exactly the kind of shoot I love, a chance to drop in on a completely different slice of life!

Previously working with Sanjiv Menon from BRR and their client Giltrap, we had created some great environmental images of their farm machinery in action. This time the brief was to show the story and people behind the construction and development of the machinery itself. Queue the man cave of epic proportions!

The Giltrap engineering plant is down in the mighty Waikato at Otorohanga, so we hit the road early and enjoyed watching all the traffic going in the opposite direction for once.

A quick location scout when we arrived, showed us that we were going to be spoilt for interesting places to shoot. Robotic arms, welding, grinding, sand blasting, paint spraying just fantastic backdrops to some very interesting faces!

In this kind of environment there are plenty of things that will wreck your camera gear pretty quickly, so working smartly with mobile lighting gear was the key... that and running away swiftly! The sand blasting image was a prime example of this, you needed the operator and equipment in action to truly show the environment, but it very quickly became a case of 'run away'!

I have to say the paint spraying unit shown above was absolutely other worldly! A cross between Hell and Mars, with absolutely every single surface, object and indeed person, a lovely shade of the Giltrap red, surreal! I suggested it might make a good club venue in the evenings! Staying up wind of the suction wall was most advisable once the guys starting spraying!

There was plenty of welding being done throughout the plant and we got a variety of views from ground level, to overhead from a fork lift. This worked particularly well for the larger components and the robotic welding arm which was amazing to watch. Balancing the exposure to give long spark trails, hold the intense blue arc welding detail and the environment was a good challenge. That and avoiding arc eye at the same time!

The images spanned office, research and development, parts, production and finishing, it was a big day, but an incredibly satisfying one! To be honest I could of spent the week there making interesting images.

A huge thanks to Craig, Eric and all the fellas on the floor who put up with us sticking a camera in front of them, everyone was amazingly accommodating. Many, many thanks to Sanjiv for all the creative direction and being my 'voice activated light stand' which helped immensely!

Sky High!

I had a bit of a different ride to work the other day!

As part of a project to show the location and environment surrounding a commercial building within the city, I needed to get some aerials. Now the only way to get decent aerial shots from a helicopter is with the door open. Those of you who know me and heights, will be smiling at this point!

You essentially get into a harness which is anchored to the floor of the helicopter and the middle of your back. Apart from having to put a lap belt on for takeoff and landing you are pretty free to move about as much as you dare. Obviously you need to tether all your gear for safety and leaving loose change in your pocket may not be the brightest idea!

It's a fine balance to keep your shutter speed high enough to eliminate the vibration of the chopper and eliminate the constant motion as you circle the subject. If you lean too far out you get hit by the wind and downdraft and if you don't get far enough out you have lots of nice pics of door surround and the rotors!

Helicopters aren't cheap to run or hire and when you are paying for every six minutes you are in the air, the sound of the clock is very loud indeed!

Thanks to the good folks at Inflite Charters who made life very easy for me with their professional and friendly service, I can't wait to do it all again!

The Barber

I've had quite a few people inquiring about the picture of the barber that is currently on the front page of my website.

It's an image that is part of a long term project I started at the end of last year with local businesses. The man in the picture is Jose Ramos who owns the Browns Bay traditional barber shop. I had walked past his shop so many times and was always fascinated by the array of paraphernalia on display.

So I decided to approach him and see if he would be interested in having a portrait done. With all the detail inside his shop I knew the exact style I wanted to achieve, the challenge being that the shop is actually a very narrow space.

Not wanting to interrupt his flow of customers, I only had a small window to get the shots I needed. I set up a single speedlight in a brolly box and got my camera and tripod ready to go. In the space of two minutes I took some shots of the environment and then only had time for three shots of Jose before his next customer came in. No pressure, phew!

The image was then made up as a composite with the background getting treated first and Jose placed into the image and blended to the environment. This gave me the most flexibility with the tight timings onsite and allowed me to cheat the perspective of such a small space.

It has really surprised me the amount of people locally who have commented on this image after Jose posted it on Facebook. It has certainly got many other local businesses interested in working with me on the project, which is all good!

I will post more of this project as it comes to fruition! And for those of you who know me, no I didn't get a hair cut!

A 'Great Adventure' indeed

Recently I was fortunate enough to be involved again in the Great Adventure Race for Cure Kids. Alan Nelson had once more put together a thoroughly challenging course which ran from the Firth of Thames into the Hunua ranges and back to Orere Point on the coast.

An interesting drive in the dark saw me there at 6.30am and heading out onto the course with some of the support crew. All volunteers, they are an amazing bunch of individuals with a wealth of outdoor, search and rescue knowledge. Oh and did I mention one of them is in his eighties, extraordinary and inspirational people!

Covering the event with another photographer, the plan was for them to photograph all the transition areas while I headed out on the course with the teams. This was not a job where I was going to be short on exercise!

Hiking out onto the course as the sun rose was just magical, with amazing views out across the Firth of Thames to the Coromandel. I ran, trekked, climbed with teams as they navigated their way from the coast into the hills across the first five checkpoints to a river crossing. Fast paced and ever changing light kept me on my toes!

From here I returned to the start to pick up my car and headed to the first transition station where the teams switched from foot to pedal power. Always surprising how quick the first teams go through, no chance to catch your breath or you miss the action!

Next was a mad dash to the FourFourty Mountain Bike Park to catch the competitors as they headed into the forest. The challenge here was catching the action in the low light of the dense trees, without everything looking overpowered by the flash. Much to their delight teams found me lurking behind trees at the bottom of steep drops, which gave me some great shots.

Back into the car and a drive out to the coast gave me my first breather of the day and the chance for a sandwich! With my water bottle refilled and a change of cards in the cameras I set out along the coast from Orere Point to Puatiti point. More stunning views and not a soul around, I positioned myself in amongst the rocks i knew the teams would have to negotiate and waited…and waited.

I knew it would take even the fastest teams a while to get to me, but you are on constant alert. After what seemed like an age, repositioning myself many times as the tide went out, suddenly some heads appeared amongst the rocks and the PWC Wellington team clambered fully into view. Within seconds they were past, onto the beach and in the home stretch to the finish line. Close behind them came the Fonterra Flyers who somehow still had big smiles on their faces, just as I remembered them from the previous year!

Once I had shot as many teams as I could in the coast section, I raced back along the long stretch of beach to my car and headed to the finish line. Teams arrived in various stages of exhaustion for the next couple of hours, to a fantastic reception from everyone at the finish line.It really is an amazing event to cover and I take my hat off to all the teams, support crews, course officials and everyone from Cure Kids who make it happen! Just brilliant to be a part of something so worthwhile.

A 15 hour day, 12 hours on my feet, I slept well that night!

Shortland Street goes boom!

Towards the end of last year I was asked to work on an unusual assignment, one that really did end the year with a bang! My good friend Rohan Rimmer put Amie Mills at Blacksand in touch with me. The team at Blacksand had come up with a great transmedia campaign for the TV show Shortland Street while it was off air over the holiday season.

The final show had climaxed with an explosion and left viewers with the classic cliffhanger, wondering who had survived and who hadn't. They had worked out 34 days of clues to keep fans on tenterhooks! Some were video clips others audio clips and where I came in was to produce still images to throw in the mix.

The first set of images needed as clues had to look as though they were shot at the location of the explosion the following morning by a passer by. Of course the props had to look as though they had been through the explosion... enter the trusty BBQ! It was more than a little sketchy at times, but I managed to grill everything from Jandals to fence posts, all very well done! God knows what my neighbours thought with all the toxic smoke that was blowing over the fence!

Next stop was to find a location that would match in with the reference footage I had been given and after a couple of false starts I found the perfect spot at Stillwater north of Auckland. It was remote enough for me to put up crime scene tape (you wouldn't believe how hard that was to get hold of) without any inquisitive passers by getting involved. I had a field day shooting melted Jandals, Santa hats, tinsel wrapped fence posts and gas cylinders all strewn around the place.

The next shots were of a variety of actual props from the show, supplied to us by South Pacific Pictures. The key here was to find abstract, interesting angles and lighting that didn't give the game away too easily! We had everything from beautiful Maori feather cloaks to bomb wiring to play with, giving us plenty of scope to create interesting images. Amie also put together a very convincing detectives desk which with some clandestine lighting looked absolutely great. She also created a large evidence board which we shot to be used as a huge billboard outside the TVNZ building.

My final contribution to the project was to retouch in some palls of smoke on some of my location shots and fire damage to a gas bottle laying in the grass... even I wasn't silly enough to throw that one on the BBQ!

Down on the farm with Giltrap

A very happy healthy and prosperous New Year to all! My run up to Christmas was a very hectic one so I'm afraid the blog got a bit neglected! But I've dusted the mince pie crumbs off, peeled myself off of the lounger and am back in the saddle again! 

Towards the end of last year I found myself standing in cow pats, shocking myself on electric fences and running away from clouds of lime fertilizer… and loving every minute of it!

I got a call from Sanjiv Menon at BRR who had taken a look at some of my work and decided I would be a good fit on a project he had. His client Giltrap are a supplier of high end agricultural machinery to the Australasian market and as part of a recent rebrand were looking for some fresh imagery for their advertising.

Rather than concentrating on the technical aspects of the machinery, as had previously been done, he wanted the images to convey the environment they are used in. Particularly the many different times of day and the long hours that farm machinery is used! Cue the early starts!

As a back up I had come prepared with generators, 4kw of lights and all sorts of gizmos, but it quickly became apparent with the terrain involved and the need for mobility around the machinery, most of it was staying in the car! Luckily the weather gods were smiling on us and although we had to pick our moments, we could work with available light and some bracketing to cover our exposures.

We had a fantastic farm environment to work with just outside Te Awamutu in the Waikato. Gary who owned the farm was just about the most helpful person you could meet, absolutely nothing was too much trouble for him! As you can imagine getting heavy farm machinery in the right place, at the right time, with the right light, had it's challenges! However not once did Gary show the slightest impatience with the townies requests and took great pride in helping us to get it right! Eric from Giltrap was also on hand as a mine of information and pretty damn handy with a tractor too!

We spent the first day working out all the best locations and timings for the shots. It was important to make sure the machinery was being used in the correct environment at the right time of day. The target audience wasn't going to put up with shots just because the photographer said it was artistic! We proceeded to get shots of log splitters, effluent stirrers, spreaders and forage wagons. We had some very interesting rides on the back of quad bikes to check out various locations and I don't think Sanjiv and myself stopped grinning! What an office! Gary once again delivered above and beyond when he drove the spreader over terrain I would of been nervous walking up! We continued until the sun finally dipped behind the hills around 8pm and took our tired limbs off to our motel to review the days work. Time for a few hours sleep!

Day two saw us up at 4.30 in the morning with a sunrise shot all planned out, bales were loaded and machinery was moved into place. Right on cue a bank of cloud decided to form on the horizon and we had to frantically move the machinery! With one tiny window of opportunity before the cloud completely obscured the sunrise…the trailer came unhitched from the tractor and with several tons of hay started rolling backwards down the hill! Now this wasn't a small field, but right bang in the middle was a concrete feeding trough and you guessed it, the brand new trailer unit was heading straight for it! Gary quick as a flash spun the tractor round and with a bale loaded on the front forks, overtook the trailer and swung round to stop it hitting the trough! Luckily it stopped about a metre short! Far too much excitement for 5.30am! So plan C then and thankfully this one worked, we ended up with a great image!

With no time to catch our breath we made the most of the early light and captured several more pieces of equipment in action, including the image of the bale feeder above. Next was a rather interesting encounter with a fertilizer spreader full of lime. Knowing we only had a few chances to get this one right as once the lime was out, it was out. We'd worked out our positioning, got the views we wanted, allowed for the wind direction…what could possibly go wrong? As the spreader was fired up and I started shooting, the wind direction completely changed and a huge cloud of lime started pursuing us across the field! I kept clicking until the last minute, grabbed my camera and then three of us ran for the nearest pickup! Eric, made of far sterner stuff, closed his eyes, held his breath and was last seen being swallowed by the giant cloud! When the dust settled we retrieved my tripod and Eric, both of which resembled snowmen! She'll be right mate!

I have to confess I absolutely love this kind of shoot, the opportunity to be out on location in beautiful surroundings, thinking on my feet and meeting people from a completely different walk of life. Just brilliant! A huge thanks to everyone involved for all the help that was given to make the shots happen, a truly great bunch of people to work with.

I think gum boots may be joining my list of photographic equipment!

Northland

I recently headed up to Northland to gather some stock, and not so stock images for my library. Here are a couple of my favorites.

The first is from the harbour at Opua where you can take your car across to Russell on the ferry. I set myself up on the ramp where the ferry docks, the sun had not been up long and all was calm and quiet... and then I heard some diesel engines rumbling through the silence, the first ferry of the day was coming! To be honest I hadn't originally intended for the ferry to be in the shot but as it came into view it totally completed the scene, a lucky break indeed! The biggest problem I had was keeping my footing on the algae covered ramp, but I wanted to keep close to the water so I would have nothing but reflections in the lower half of the image.

The next image was taken in the Bay of Islands at the Waitangi treaty grounds inside the beautiful Maori meeting house, Te Whare Rūnanga. I've always marveled at how amazing and intricate the detail in these buildings is. Surprisingly enough I found I briefly had it to myself, but realised I had left my tripod back at the car! Doh! I had a quick scout around to see if I could sit my camera on anything for the long exposures I needed and luckily enough found a guitar case sitting behind a screen ready for a cultural show! So I rather precariously balanced my camera on top of it and used a cable release so as not to disturb it. It worked a treat even though it drew some strange looks from the next group of people who entered!

I'll process all the other images when I can in between assignments and post some more as I do. Now where can I go next please!

Charlotte S

I've been eagerly waiting to post some images from a shoot I did with a great company called Charlotte S. They are going to be releasing some new and unique beauty products to the market. The plan was to have them in the shops for Christmas, but due to some delays it looks like being in the New Year now.

Candice and John who own the company have kindly allowed me to post one of the images from the shoot. It's one of many favorites I have from the day we spent in the studio with our model Luna.

We had a range of scenarios to photograph from a very natural look, to a smart/ casual business feel, right through to the sophisticated evening look you see above. Candice was a dream client who had a clear vision of what she was after but allowed us creative input to achieve the results. Not only that but we were fed and watered like royalty. I don't think I have ever been so well looked after by a client, so thank you very much Mr & Mrs S!

I put Luna forward for this assignment as I have worked with her before and she really does make life easy with her professional approach and ability to adapt to a variety of looks. On this occasion she even handled her own hair and makeup, which kept things easy and economical.

The shot seen here is one of those situations that wasn't initially planned, but developed from being let loose creatively. We were shooting at Kingsize studios, a great place with heaps of gear and well thought out spaces. The background in this shot is actually the reception area to studio 3, one of their upstairs studios. We moved the reception furniture and placed the white couch from the studio into the scene. I have to confess that this couch has been a prop in a few shots over the years and i'm sure i wouldn't be alone!

The mood lighting was created with a gridded beauty dish, a medium octabank as fill and a gridded 7" reflector as a rim light. The dress selection, hair and makeup completed the scene perfectly. A great collaboration of ideas gave us a great result.

We made great time with our schedule and so I suggested some spontaneous family shots with their lovely daughter Charlotte who arrived from Kindy and she was only too happy to be in the limelight! A fun way to end our day.

There was only one complaint from Candice… 'You've given us too many great shots, we want to use them all'! And that's the kind of complaint I can live with.

Kids, helicopters and lots more

I've had a few people asking me about the image shown at the top of this page. So here's the story behind it.

The shot was actually taken while I was on an fantastic assignment for the Cure Kids team. They had arranged a dream weekend in Queenstown for a dozen of the kids who had been through serious challenges in their young lives. A team of helpers, celebs and staff were on hand to make sure they had an amazing time, so a group of around fifty in all.

My job was to capture all of their incredible adventures over the weekend and boy was it fast paced! They went luging, bungy jumping, snowmobiling, flying in helicopters, golfing and jet boating! Not to mention some amazing lunches and dinners supplied by very generous local companies. It really was an epic event to cover and I don't think my feet touched the ground as I tried to capture everyones special moments. You are certainly not going to get fat doing this job!

The kids just blew me away with their energy and ability to take everything in their stride. The helicopter flight from Coronet Peak ski field down to The Hills golf course was a prime example. Some of these kids were from very small town New Zealand, not often seeing a taxi let alone a helicopter! It was sprung on them that they were going in a helicopter to get down from the mountain and they were all "sweet, no worries", even the real young ones.

The panoramic shot with the helicopter is actually a series of stitched images that I took as the first chopper arrived. It is made up of 5 images that I put together in Photoshop and came out pretty well considering it was shot hand held, whilst being buffeted by the rotors of the helicopter.

I grabbed the shots inside the second chopper and love the look on the kids faces, 'just another day at the office'. I had to bounce a flash of the roof and shoot over my shoulder which had it's challenges while harnessed in! The final shot is the helicopter bringing in the last kids to the Hills golf course. The herd of animals you can see below are actually on hundred bronze statues of wolves with a warrior. Truly spectacular, as was the rest of the Hills course which we got to see on a convoy of buggies.

This was such an amazing and humbling event to be involved in. Once again I found myself feeling very lucky for the people and places that photography allows me to experience.