Last 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 MoreAd Campaign: GoodStart Early Learning 3rd ad
These 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 MoreGood Weekend Magazine crew rowing story
A few months ago I was asked by Good Weekend Magazine to go down to Canberra and shoot images to go along with a series that they were doing about a few writers trying their hand at training for a day in an Olympic sport. I followed writer Mark Dapin as he went through a light version of the incredibly intense daily workout regimen and technique routines of the crew rower.
Ad Campaign: GoodStart Early Learning
In 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 MorePampers Village- Images for Global Website Relaunch
This 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 MoreGood Weekend Cover and Story
A story I shot a few weeks ago for the Sydney Morning Herald's weekend magazine, Good Weekend, just appeared this past weekend as the cover story. It was one of those happy instances where printing on matte newspaper stock made the pictures look fantastic and I was really happy with the end result.
Sydney Magazine Shoot- Sonoma Bakery
I did my first shoot for Sydney Magazine covering the day in a life of a loaf of bread as it's made by Sonoma Bakery every day. I was pretty excited for this story because I'm big into cooking and baking- I make my own beer and cheese and had been baking bread for a while but I hadn't really had much luck with the sourdough. It was inspiring to see a bakery at the production level of Sonoma still using the best ingredients and making everything by hand.
Read MoreInterview by THIS IS THE WHAT
Last month I was interviewed by photo blog This Is The What run by a photo editor from New York. You can read the interview here: http://www.thisisthewhat.com/2011/07/10-minutes-with-joe-wigdahl/.
Cover and leading story for Good Weekend
I shot the images for the cover story of this past weekend's issue of Good Weekend, a major Australian magazine distributed in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age every Saturday. It's Australia's equivalent of the New York Times Magazine. I'd like to say it was a challenging shoot but getting teenagers to look like they're playing video games is just about the easiest thing in the world. It was my first Australian magazine cover and my first time working with the people at Good Weekend and I had a great time.
New lifestyle work for a Sydney real estate company
Back 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.
Hey Graduates!
This is a really good article on internships and an employer's obligations to interns (and the government) when taking them on. It's important to know the difference between offering opportunity vs. exploitation. I wouldn't be a photographer without the internships I was offered and I was fortunate enough to have fantastic on-the-job experience from amazing people. I worked alongside others who would tell me about horrible hours doing dry-cleaning pickup and fetching lattés only to get screamed at for zero applicable work experience. Of course, there's going to be a lot of bummers about starting off on the bottom rung and getting the unpleasant jobs, but try to see if your internship is a mutually beneficial experience for you and your new boss. Keep in mind that a really negative experience may be as important as a really positive one.
If it doesn't feel like a mutually beneficial experience why not ask yourself a few simple questions-
1) Are you learning anything?
-Even if your boss isn't spending hands-on time with you to show you the job, or if the boss doesn't talk to you at all, there are learning lessons all over the place. As an intern and an outsider you have the opportunity to peek in on a business or individual you admire and see how it works and how it doesn't-
-Is the business organized or not? How does that impact the business, the working environment, the product and the people that work in it? The handful of times I worked with a photographer I didn't like I learned something about what not to do when I would became my own boss someday down the road. The converse applied to the photographers I loved.
2) What were/are your expectations of the internship position?
-Did you expect to have a full-time paying job with benefits in six months with working expertise or were you looking for something to do for the summer while you applied to grad school? Knowing what you want and what your future boss expects of you in your internship and what the internship position is will be a big help in managing your disappointment. Simply asking honest questions about this on the outset can clear this up for you and manage expectations.
3) What do you hope to walk away with? If you don't know this already or aren't able to ask yourself this and get a (somewhat) clear answer you should move right to the next question...
4) Are you really right for the job to have a future in it?
-Maybe you always saw yourself as a photographer or a designer or whatever but it's a hard question to ask one's self if the dream and the reality don't align. Use the internship to find out what your strengths are and move towards that. It's a process of discovery. Average life span in the U.S. is 78. You've got a couple decades to screw up and start over a few times and no one except your credit rating agency is keeping score.
5) Are you getting a brand name with the internship?
- Some internships are totally abusive, meaningless, exploitative and/or a waste of time but the caliber of the name you're working for opens lots of doors. It's your call.
A lot of people will be getting out of school this May in a tough job market and will be tempted to take work that will be called an internship but may have the patina of "unpaid menial labor" instead...check out this article and learn about your rights and what you should expect.
Take care and have fun with it.
Oh- as an addendum I would add one more piece of advice...it might be wise to clean up your presence on the internet before you apply for internships. Don't think that just because it's an internship that your potential new employer won't google you to see what your work is like. I've had a few instances where I googled an internship applicant and in a 2 minute search saw that they posted writings or pictures of themselves naked, doing drugs, writing graffiti, having eating disorders, self-harming etc.
You're free to post whatever you want online but that also allows everyone else the freedom to judge a private life you've decided to make public. And posting proof of illegal activity just really isn't smart. Seems like common knowledge but I guess it isn't.
