Joe Wigdahl 1/3/17 Joe Wigdahl 1/3/17

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

Joe Wigdahl 25/8/15 Joe Wigdahl 25/8/15

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.

Joe Wigdahl 5/2/13 Joe Wigdahl 5/2/13

Australian Mangoes

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.

After a little searching we ended up lucking out and finding a fantastic family for the shoot. It's not always possible, but if I have the opportunity, I always prefer to work with a real family as opposed to a family made up of assorted talent. The main reason is that, well, it's real. I always think that it serves the client in a better way because they can say, "Yes, this really is a real family enjoying themselves" and it helps me do my job faster because we don't have to worry about any awkwardness- we can dive right in. It also helps with how I approach these types of shoot days. I'm usually presented with a shot list in the brief and I use that as a guide to how the days will flow. Once we get the wardrobe, maybe some props and other lighting/tech things set up I like to push that stuff out of my mind and begin the shoot. In this case, I spent the days cooking and eating with the family, cleaning up, having dessert and then running around in the back yard in the sprinklers with the kids. The end result is that we have a lot of fun and we get a lot of real moments of a family spending time together. I'd say the only negative thing about doing this shoot was that the mom was a little exasperated that I had gotten the kids so wound up and had fed them something like a dozen mangoes each- I think she was a little worried that they were never going to go to sleep again. I got to go home with about 20 kilos of mangoes and spent the next week making mango chutney, mango jam, mango pavlova...