New Work: Lifestyle shoot with Justin and Amelia

I've been shooting some new work lately and have been doing some shoots with some of the talent from Bella Management here in Sydney. I had approached Bella Mgmt with some ideas and one of which was about a couple on a roadtrip, dirty and sweaty from days on the road in a crappy car and they're lost in the middle of nowhere. I don't really do very much work that falls into the fashion realm so I tend to want to mess up their hair and clothes and make it feel more real I guess. I was kind of surprised they went for it and ended up loving the shots. Can't wait to do more of these.  

Smithsonian Magazine: The Blue Mountains

A few months ago I was contacted by the U.S. natural history publication the Smithsonian Magazine to shoot a story on Charles Darwin’s exploration of the Blue Mountains- it’s one of my favourite places in Australia.

It was a shoot that I became more passionate about as I worked my way through the assignment; it was an odd coincidence that I was hired for this shoot- a few weeks before the magazine asked me about doing the assignment my wife and I had decided to move our family to the Blue Mountains. It was a pretty exciting opportunity to explore a whole region that would be our new home. It was early spring when I started the job and the Blue Mountains is much colder and rainier than Sydney, so instead of doing the whole shoot in one trip, I actually had to drive out to the mountains every weekend for a month to get a break from the rain and fog and get all the shots I needed.

Evening at the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains

The ancient Wollemi Pine and the Wolgan Valley where it was found.

Wentworth Falls Landscape

The Jenolan Caves

In Glenbrook and also in the Wolgan Valley I saw hand paintings in caves which are said to range from hundreds to thousands of years old and it struck me how much more of an impact seeing hand prints made on me than carvings or drawings I’ve seen at other sites. To see a hand print of someone from thousands of years before is to see their size, their age and their physical humanity and connect with them in a way I hadn’t really sensed before. I noticed one set of hand prints where the person must have broken their hand at some point and it healed badly because one of the fingers bent away from the hand in an unnaturally awkward angle. I felt like I was reading some form of ancient text about who lived on this land.

Hand Paintings in the

Often when I'm shooting a morning landscape I'll get to the location well before dawn and shoot through the sunrise for an hour or two. Even in a not-so-mindblowing landscape there is usually a moment where the light and the morning atmosphere does something that makes everything light up in the right way. For these shots of what is known as the Jamison Valley in the Blue Mountains off of Sublime Point in Leura, I felt like I was watching a light show- the sun, the mist and the eucalyptus vapor in the air kept changing colors and lighting up the landscape in surprisingly different ways. Every 10 minutes was something different. Finally when I was done I set the camera down in the grass while I was packing up my gear and tripod and grabbed a quick shot- I realised that that was probably my favorite shot of the morning.

Landscape of the changing light of a sunrise in the Blue Mountains from Sublime Point in Leura

Sunrise over the Jamison Valley

I spent a day doing a massive hike in the bushwalk around the Three Sisters. I started off at Scenic World taking the world's steepest train down the escarpment and walked for hours around the bush track. I wasn't keeping track of time and missed their last elevator back up, so I ended up having to climb the near-vertical staircase up the Three Sisters with a backpack full of heavy camera gear after I was already tired from hiking all day. By the time I walked back to my car and put the keys in the ignition I closed my eyes for a second and ended up sleeping for an hour and a half in the drivers seat with the door open.

Three Sisters Panorama

The cottage that Darwin stayed in was located on the property of the Emirates Wolgan Valley Resort- the most expensive hotel in Australia. I had arrived on a Friday afternoon and it coincided with their absolute busiest time- when the guests are all arriving for the weekend. There were Ferraris and Lamborghinis in the parking lot and guests landing at the helicopter pad and I was given about an hour to shoot what I needed to get before they had to devote their full attention to the guests. Since the magazine budget clearly did not involve staying at the spa, after I was done shooting I had to drive about an hour before I could find a place to stay. The local town was having a big lawn bowling competition and all of the rooms were booked out to drunken retirees enjoying their night out with the boys. The only place I could find to sleep was a room above a loud pub with a bunch of guys arguing about rugby. My bed must have been a junior bed because my feet hung off the bed past my ankles and I could hear a guy in the room next door watching porn on his phone all night. The difference between the Emirates Spa and the sleeping situation I had arrived at could not have been more stark. I had a late dinner at a local bar and was called a "fancypants" by one of the locals. I couldn't really figure out why other than the fact that I was wearing glasses and reading while eating dinner. I guess I was being a fancypants.

I had taken some big hikes getting (sort of) lost looking through a cave system in the Wolgan Valley for some hand paintings that were just too hard to find.  Instead I got sunburn and bug bites. After finding only a few hand paintings I struck out for the Mt. Tomah Botanical Gardens which have examples of wollemi pines growing in their gardens. It was the end of the shoot, I had gotten everything ticked off my shot list and I was looking forward to going home the next day.

I was supposed to meet Darwin's great-great-grandson Chris Darwin and shoot his portrait, but despite our best efforts we just couldn't make it happen- he had booked passage on a very slow container ship from France to Australia to reduce his carbon footprint and didn't get back until after the story went to press.

The story that the images accompany can be found on the Smithsonian's website here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/australia-put-evolution-darwins-mind-180953651/?no-ist

The Monocle Guide to Better Living

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.

Good 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.

Good 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.

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.