The popular Blue Mountains tourist destination Scenic World has recently added a “Welcome to Country” smoking ceremony led by local Aboriginal Gundungurra custodian, David King.
AD Campaign: Mountain Culture Beer Co.- Camping & Hiking
I recently shot a series of images for the award-winning brewery, Mountain Culture Beer Company, based in the Blue Mountains. One of the owners of Mountain Culture, Harriet McCready, approached me because she wanted a lifestyle shoot for the brewery which captured the essence of outdoor lifestyle imagery of the 1970s and early 1980s. Part of the focus of the imagery was a stylistic choice based on the colour palettes and large film grain of the magazine advertisements of the time. What Mountain Culture really wanted to capture though was the easy-going approach to outdoor life that those old ads reminded us of- the simplicity of camping and hiking that used to be about throwing on some minimal gear and heading out into the bush. Mountain Culture wanted to have a nostalgic taste of the mountain lifestyle unadorned by the new gear and high tech fabrics that make up the modern outdoor experience.
SCENIC WORLD: TERRACE BAR
Recent lifestyle and landscape photography for a series of ads announcing Scenic World’s Terrace Bar. Open seasonally, the Terrace Bar allows for locals and tourists to enjoy evening music, food and drinks while taking in the stunning surroundings and sunsets of the Blue Mountains and the Three Sisters.
Mountain Culture Brewery's First Ad
I was asked by Mountain Culture Brewery to do a photo shoot for them- they needed an image for their first ever two-page spread ad in a major magazine. If you’re not familiar with them, Mountain Culture Brewery opened up in Katoomba a few years ago and immediately won “Best Brewery of the Year” in Australia, has produced the number one beer in Australia called Status Quo, and is now considered one of the best breweries in Oz and they make seriously good beers and have a lot of fun doing it. They didn’t really know what to do but being as gifted in marketing as they are in beer making, the brief from the owners was “We’re thinking something along the lines of a 1980s Burt Reynolds centerfold.” Owner and head brewer D.J. McCready turned out to be a male model natural.
It’s probably the hardest I’ve ever laughed on a shoot and I made sure in post production to give it some sweet 80s glamour soft-focus highlight bling.
ORIGIN Energy: Solar for Industry photo shoot
I recently shot a small library of images for Origin Energy’s solar division for both industry and residential uses. I’ve been using a drone more often lately in my advertising shoots where we need a variety of landscape shots to tell the whole story. This was definitely a shoot where using a drone was actually a real necessity and would have been impossible using a helicopter as I probably would have done 5 years ago.
AD Campaign: NRMA
We recently worked with Houston Design Group in Sydney to create a range of lifestyle images for NRMA /National Roads and Motorists' Association. Outside of their insurance and roadside assistance programs, they've recently developed partnerships with camping and caravan parks around Australia as well as new phone apps that help travelers and NRMA customers with a variety of tasks. We created a small image library for NRMA around these new products for them that focused on family road trips, travel and app use.
Client: NRMA
Agency: Houston Design Group
Ad Campaign: Weipa Tourism for Rio Tinto
A few months ago I traveled to Weipa in the western Cape York peninsula in Queensland to shoot a campaign for Rio Tinto. Weipa is a small, remote town with a huge bauxite (raw aluminium ore) mine that wants families to come and put down roots as development and local investment looks to grow in the coming years.
Client: Rio Tinto / Weipa Tourism
Agency: ChannelZero
Creative Director: Ben Croft
Ad Campaign: Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross
A few months ago I shot a bunch of images for Mitsubishi for their new car in Australia, the Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross.
When we did this shoot this was the only Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross in Australia. It has a busy schedule and the only days I had to shoot it just happened to coincide with the Melbourne Cup race in Victoria, which is something of a holy week there. We couldn't find a location scout who was available (i.e. wanted to take time out of the Melbourne Cup festivities to find locations) so I had to go down to Victoria a week early and find my own locations. Because I really didn't know the Victorian countryside I started every morning looking at Google satellite maps for terrain and roads that might have something interesting to shoot on- especially private properties that looked like they had roads on them that we could get permission to use. I would then spend the next 12 hours driving every day combing over every road in that area and then try and contact homeowners that might have a nice road. After driving around 1000kms of small backroads, at the 11th hour I finally found a family that let us shoot on their land. We couldn't have asked for more amazing weather.
To do the aerial shots I worked with Flying Dragon, a drone company that specialises in high-end cinematography. I had experimented with several readily available drones like the Phantoms and the still image quality just didn't stack up for the size we were going to have to use for the stills. We had to use a camera that was over 30 megapixels to satisfy their print needs and the only drones that can hoist up a camera large enough to do that are the heavy duty 8 blade drones that require professional pilots and cost a fortune. The operator was in charge of the flight controls and navigation on one monitor and I controlled the camera gimbal and captures on the other. I have to say, despite the challenges of short flight times due to battery power, I definitely preferred using a big drone to hanging out of the side of a helicopter.
Client: Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross
Agency: Richards Rose Executive
Executive CD: Adam Rose
CD: Liam Hillier
Ad Campaign: Mistubishi ASX and Outlander
I recently had opportunity to shoot images of the new Mitsubishi ASX and Outlander in a car campaign for the Sydney agency Richards Rose. I spent a week in Melbourne working on the shoot, shooting alongside a large TVC crew and taking the cars off whenever I had a chance to shoot whatever I could grab. It was a lot of fun and the weather was surprisingly wonderful for Melbourne in the winter.
Client: Mitsubishi
Agency: Richards Rose
Producer: Katie Morton
CD: Christopher Johnson
Sr AD:George Bassiakos
Brickworks Portraits
I recently worked with the Sydney design firm DesignSuite on a range of portraits of some of the people who keep the huge Australian brick and tile manufacturer Brickworks running.
Campaign: Destination Gold Coast
A campaign I just shot for Gold Coast Tourism has just started to roll out. We set out to look past the party reputation that the Gold Coast is well known for and tried to capture the sense of how beautiful the Gold Coast and the area around the GC really is. There will be more shots from the campaign to come but this is what I've got so far...
Client: Gold Coast Tourism
Agency: JWT Sydney
Campaign: 2016 English Rugby Team for Canterbury Clothing
I just recently shot a campaign for Canterbury Clothing featuring the 2016 English Rugby team. The English rugby team was in Brisbane doing some training before their big match against Australia in May. As part of Canterbury Clothing's new "Only the Committed" campaign I was asked to shoot portraits of each of the team members and then shoot some of the new clothes for their catalogue in a really beautifully run down old factory in an industrial part of the city. The main challenge was that the schedules of the athletes just simply didn't allow for us to take them all to some really cold and windy warehouse over an hour away from their training grounds to shoot portraits of them. We ended up shooting the portraits in a hotel room with the portrait lighting matching how I was lighting the warehouse location and then everything was stitched together in post.
Aside from the main challenge of getting that to work, I had to try and get something that felt like a sense of intensity of emotion from the players while I only had a few minutes to shoot each (and while their teammates were standing behind me doing everything they could to make them laugh). I got my fair share of ribbing and insults from the team as well and I ended up getting the nickname Professor X from the players by the end of the day (I'm bald.) After a frantic shooting pace shooting portraits and some laughs we wrapped up and headed out to the warehouse. We spent the day shooting the products and filling up the warehouse with smoke machines to get that really gritty industrial atmosphere.
It was a blast.
Client: Canterbury Clothing
Agency: Pentland Brands Creative
Director: Stuart Ross-Sheeran
Art Director: Blake Calderwood
Production by Chee Productions
AD Campaign: Australian NBN
I just shot an image for a new campaign for the Australian National Broadband Network. The shoot was part of a larger TVC ad featuring a story of two deaf women who take advantage of the new high speed network by chatting (through sign language) over video.
Client: Australia NBN Agency: BWM Dentsu
AD Campaign: Qantas Airlines
A new ad campaign that I shot for Qantas Airlines hit the streets last week. I spent the better part of last month working on it and among the many things that were great about this job were that I had the opportunity to use a Boeing 737 and a jet turbine worth several million dollars as props. I was really excited about the job because it was really about highlighting the real people and their stories behind every Qantas employee.
Creative Team: Agency: BWM Dentsu Asheen Naidu – Executive Creative Director Sarah Parris – Senior Art Director Kevin MacNamara – Senior Copywriter Bonnie Ledsam – Senior Account Manager Simon Holdaway – Senior Print Producer
VicHealth- Team Up Fitness
I recently shot for VicHealth's new campaign "Team Up!" with DDB which is focused on getting people started on a healthy fitness regimen in the state of Victoria. We wanted to take the intimidation factor out of beginning an exercise regimen and emphasise the social component of doing something like joining a yoga class or running with a friend. I shot stills as well as directed 2 short spots for the campaign.
Client: VicHealth- Team Up
Director: Joe Wigdahl
Camera / Editor: Ash Koek
Art Director: Niki Horan
Agecy: DDB Melbourne
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Campaign: Carnival Cruises
I recently shot a big ad campaign and image library for Carnival Cruises and the images have just started to hit the streets. We spent about a week on the Carnival Cruise ship The Spirit island hopping around New Caledonia and then sailing back to Sydney. I really loved this job because we brought on 2 real families for the shoot and we just took pictures of them having a lot of fun. No acting, no hair and makeup or wardrobe. Most of the photo shoot went along the lines of "Hey, can you guys eat some ice cream and then go down those water slides over and over again?" Then the kids would basically go nuts, everyone would run around and I would try to keep up, shooting as much as I could. We would shoot all day every day and then have dinner together at night and had a pretty happy routine- the kids were always looking forward to our next activity because they knew that I was going to let them go crazy. At the end of the shoot the kids cried because they were going to miss us so much. There were so many fun, genuine moments that I just picked a few of my favorites here.
Campaign: ResMed Sleep Apnea Machines
A while back I shot a campaign for ResMed- a company that produces top-of-the-line sleep apnea therapy machines. Sleep apnea is a medical condition where, for a number of reasons, people may stop breathing during sleep. This can happen from a few times a night to dozens of times an hour and can become a major medical issue. It lowers the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream, it puts stress on the heart, it causes a lot of problems. The ResMed devices, also known as CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machines are basically silent air compressors that push warm, humidified air into the patient's nose or mouth while they're sleeping so that they're still getting air when their body would normally stop breathing.
We had a massive shoot schedule for this job so that the client would have a library of images for their multiple needs- I've only posted a handful of the tearsheets because there were so many different images and uses. We shot product photos and lifestyle images to cover a broad range of use from brochures and in-store displays to web and advertising and we had to shoot multiple scenarios covering the broad demographic range of their customers.
Client: ResMed http://www.resmed.com/au/ Agency: Tonic the Agency, Sydney Producers: Z-Space
Red Rooster's New Look
The Australian food chain Red Rooster has started to go with a totally new look. Alongside a totally new design of their restaurants they're also going with a new look for their ad imagery. I was asked to shoot some shots for print alongside a TVC crew that was filming some new spots for Red Rooster.
