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
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
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.
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.
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
Portrait of Kirrilee Edwards, winner of the 2014 Head On Photo Prize
I was thrilled last night to learn that I had won the grand prize for the 2014 Head On Portrait Prize for this image:
The image came from a story that I shot for Good Weekend Magazine about the children's hospice organization Bear Cottage and some of the families who rely on their resources and care. This image in particular came as a result of a wonderful experience meeting the family of Kirrilee Edwards. I felt really welcomed to be with them, to feel their warmth, their sense of humor and love. The Edwards family is a big family and they faced a profound number of struggles because of Kirrilee's devastating illness, but what I saw was an incredible closeness. I felt the best way to give the sense of this family was to show how closely connected they were to Kirrilee and each other. A few months after I shot this image Kirrilee passed away.
I feel an immense sense of gratitude that the Edwards family would let me into their home, welcome me in the way that they did and allow me to be a part in telling their story. For that reason I'm giving half of the prize money that I've won to them. I'm including information below to make donations to Kirrilee's family and Bear Cottage.
Make a Donation to the Edwards family via direct deposit: Troy Edwards Commonwealth Bank of Australia BSB: 062 601 Account: 103 506 78 Memo: Kirrilee
Make a Donation to Bear CottageInformation on Bear Cottage
You can read my original blog entry here about Kirrilee, the shoot and the other families: http://www.joewigdahl.com/sick-kids/.
UPDATE 21/05/2014: Several news outlets who have picked up this story have erroneously stated that Kirrilee was dying or on her deathbed when this image was taken and this is not true. She was at home and healthy at the time of the photoshoot. It is true that a few months after I shot this image Kirrilee passed away at Bear Cottage.
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.
Mangoes 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.
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 MoreGood Weekend had an assignment for me a few weeks ago to cover a story about several families with children who are critically ill and have terminal illnesses. In two cases the children were born with a devastating disease that made it unable for them to develop mentally and physically as a normal child would.
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 MoreI 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.
