St. George Bank Bowl Cut
I just shot an ad for St. George Bank that was a blast to shoot. We spent the day shooting a kid with a couple different wigs on and we started off with a conservatively well-cut bowl cut haircut for each wig. I started hacking away at them with terrible scissors until the haircuts became progressively more awful and the crew and models were laughing between shots. It was a blast to shoot.
Client: St. George Bank Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi Art Director: Simon O'Niel
I recently spent several weeks traveling and working with Saatchi & Saatchi on a new ad campaign for the eye wear retailer OPSM. The job was a really exciting project for me to be a part of because it picked two small towns- Busselton, Western Australia and Napier, New Zealand- and found people of all ages and walks of life who use and need their product, eye glasses. Saatchi & Saatchi scoured through Australian and New Zealand census data to determine a town in each country that encompassed the broad range of types of jobs, incomes, ethnicities etc. that represent each country. We met with bushfire fighters, a horse whisperer, a bagpipe marching band, a master jeweller and a beekeeper just to name a few. I was really excited by the notion of shooting my favorite subject in advertising work: real people with real stories. These are just a few of the shots from Busselton, Western Australia. I'll post images from the New Zealand campaign which was shot in Napier, New Zealand in the near future.
Like most of the large productions I've been working on lately, I was shooting alongside a TVC production that was filming spots for TV and the web, while I was shooting images for the new catalog, website and everything print- in-store, billboards etc. We shot every day for 10-14 hours a day for 2 weeks and I ended up shooting portraits of over 100 people and a lot of landscapes along the way. Most days I would shoot alongside the TVC crew, grabbing shots when I could and stepping in when the TVC guys were done or had a few minutes to hand the subject and location over to me. In each city I had a day to shoot 25 portraits a day which broke down to a new location, set up and portrait every 20 minutes or so for 9 hours. An exhausting but exhilarating exercise as the opportunity to meet new people with great stories just kept coming. At one point I ended up getting pretty emotional at a small town bag piper rehearsal after feeling so lucky that these people would allow us to come in and be a part of their private experience, something I would have never been able to know about or be a part of if I was on my own traveling through this small town.
At the end of the 2 week assignment I'd shot portraits of more than 100 people, was tired, sore and really missed home but damn, I enjoyed that job. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
CD: Matt Gilmour Sr AD: Nils Eberhardt Sr Copywriter: Veronica Copestake The TVC/Motion campaign was produced by Tobias Webster at EXIT Films and directed by Stephen Carroll.
I recently had 2 huge jobs which both happened to bring me to New Zealand for shooting. We had a brief day with my fantastic assistant Maxy where he took us to an incredible black sand beach north of Auckland and we took a break from the crazy job and spent the evening surfing. I suppose it's a bit of cliche now to say that New Zealand is place full of lovely people and beautiful landscapes but it just is.
I did a test shoot with Sydney agency Bump Models a few weeks ago and got the chance to work with Alicia and her kids Ryan and Sara. I love working with kids and when I test I try to see how much I can get out of them within a time limit- say half an hour or an hour and a half or something like that. Most shoots that I'm hired for that use kids usually get planned in such a way that I have a limited time to get something and then I have to move on. For the test shoots I try to let the kids get crazy, come up with ideas as they're happening and let them play freely to allow them to come up with things naturally on their own. Nine times out of ten the parent is worried that the kids are being too wild and are apologizing for them and yelling at the children to be polite and do what I ask. I usually have to reassure them that the mayhem is perfectly fine and exactly what I want. At the end of the hour or two hours I've got a ton of great images and the kids are wiped out, the parents are relieved and everyone's happy.
The Monocle Magazine has just come out with a hefty new book titled, "The Monocle Guide to Better Living" and I have a two page spread inside featuring a shoot about swimming in Sydney I did for them last year. It's a beautiful book and it's great to have my images alongside other photographers and stories from around the world.
A few months ago I was asked to shoot stills alongside a TVC production for Aussie Bodies. I shot portraits of several famous Aussie athletes and an everyday yoga mom in action for the Australian protein and supplements brand Aussie Bodies for use in print and online. Each story was a pretty inspiring one:
Read MoreMangoes in the summer in Australia are amazing- during my first summer here in Sydney I went crazy for them. Every Sunday I would buy a box of 20 mangoes for 20 bucks and spend the next couple days dripping with juice, eating them over the sink. My mother-in-law grew up in South Africa and her fondest memories of Christmas always involved piles of mangoes (and that's all that she ever wants from us for Christmas). Needless to say, I was pretty excited when the people who represent Aussie Mangoes contacted me to do some shots for them.
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Last week I covered the Bondi Kite Festival for a local Bondi magazine "Life in the Bubble" and had a great time getting my feet wet in the Bondi surf while shooting these amazing kites. More images and the story can be seen here: http://www.lifeinthebubble.com/issue/2012/may/windsofchange
Last month Monocle Magazine featured the most liveable cities in the world and of course, Sydney was one of them. They wanted me to travel around the Sydney area and document the people and places that makes swimming feature so strongly in the Sydney lifestyle. I traveled around the northern beaches like Balmoral and Manly and many of the eastern beaches like Clovelly, Maroubra and of course, Bondi. I'm a big swimmer myself so I was really looking forward to hitting the spots that I love and getting the chance to find some new ones.
Read MoreLast month I was asked by the UK's Redwood Media Group to shoot a story featuring Mazda's new BT-50 model for its award-winning online presence, Zoom Zoom Magazine. They wanted to tell a story about a day in the life of a BT-50 owner with a natural, reportage feel- showcasing its versatility by following the owner through rough terrain, a surf trip, a trip to the zoo "glamping" (glamorous camping) with his nieces and capped with a night out on the town.We had a looonngggg shot list for the 2 day shoot and I was working alongside Jefferson Grainger, from Corporate Video Australia, who was shooting the motion segment of the piece for the web.
Read MoreLast month Monocle Magazine sent me up to Australia's Northern Territory to cover a story on their burgeoning capital city, Darwin. Darwin has become big news in the last few years as the United States has promised to begin stationing several hundred troops there in an effort to re-establish a naval presence in that part of the world. There's also been some massive investment in natural gas by the Japanese and French to the tune of $39 billion AUD. Monocle wanted to find out how this new interest in Darwin might change the city and what the people and government thought about it. I teamed up with Darwin journalist Eric Tlozek to meet some VIPs there and shoot everything I could with the 2 days that I had.
Read MoreThese images are for the third ad of the GoodStart Early Learning campaign that I shot with the ad agency The Monkeys. To continue with the concept used in the first images that I shot for this campaignwhere the tagline is physically integrated into the image we wanted to create life-size letters that the children could interact with. When I first saw the concept drawings for this ad I was really excited with the idea of the kids running around and interacting with the letters in the shoot.
Read MoreIn December I worked with the impressive Sydney agency The Monkeys on a three image campaign for Australia's GoodStart Early Learning Program. The GoodStart program has hundreds of early learning centers around Australia focused on children's learning development in the crucial first 5 years of their life. Our approach to the shoot was to capture children engaged in discovery and play with their environment and the tagline, "Minds Now Open," becomes an integrated part of the image and the activity.
Read MoreThis past July I had the fantastic opportunity to go to New York and work with Saatchi & Saatchi and Strawberry Frog to shoot a series of images for the global relaunch of the Pampers Village website. Pampers Village is a site overseen by Pampers as a resource for parents and parents-to-be that serves as an information hub and an online community. The site covers a huge range of information for parents from learning about prenatal care to preparing your child for her first day of school.
Read MoreBack in April, a design firm based in North Sydney called Delivery Inc hired me to shoot some imagery for a new real estate development there called The Belvedere. The challenge was to find compelling imagery that told a story about working and living in North Sydney for them to use on the web, in print, in billboards, etc. I had only been living in Sydney for a few months at that point and hadn't really been to North Sydney so I needed to do some exploring. I spent 16 hours walking many miles crisscrossing North Sydney, Milsons Point and Kirribilli and shot many, many images. It was exhausting but a lot of fun.
