Here is a collection of images from a monthly shoot I do with Melbourne chef Karen Martini for The Age's Good Food (Epicure) magazine.
These were photographed with food stylists Deb Kaloper & Lisa La Barbera.
A little while ago I photographed some portraits at the Royal Melbourne Dog Show for Good Weekend Magazine. The shoot went over three days.
There is a certain old school charm still present in these competitions with a lot of tweed & corduroy jackets as well as shoulder pads in colourful matching power suits for the ladies. I have to say that it was also great to photograph dogs that are well trained and sit when they are supposed to sit!
Competition was fierce both on the field and off the field with dogs having their whiskers straightened, their coats fluffed and sprayed with shining spray. I'd never seen so many dogs in the one place!
I've just put up some of these on my site as well.
I finally found the time to shoot some new work for my folio - there's always an excuse to put these ideas on the back burner. These were shot with a stylist and good friend Tina Vanspall of Vintage Movement here in Melbourne.
I find shooting personal work can be more difficult that commercial jobs sometimes as there are no perimeters, the sky is the limit to the style and execution of the work. For this shoot we were going for a vintage messy theme so Tina whipped up some new backgrounds and we made good use of some new props we have collected on our travels.
Here are some images I shot on a Diana plastic camera in New York that I have just had developed.
I spent all of my university degree and nearly all my assisting days shooting on various formats of film cameras.
While shooting on a plastic camera is really nothing like a proper film camera with aperture and shutter speed control, I still really loved the spontaneity of not being able to instantly see every frame that I took. I also loved film's restriction of only shooting one or two frames at a time - rather than a million frames as sometimes happens when shooting digital.
I have been shooting a different plate of food at a different Melbourne restaurant for 2 years now. Every single week for two years - thats a lot of restaurants and a lot of food! The images are part of a regular column in The Age's Sunday Life magazine.
I've loved getting out there a finding new places and discovering new food. I thought I would celebrate the milestone of shooting 100 restaurants (even though I've shot a few more than that by the time I've sat down to write this blog post) by sharing with you some of my favourites.
Of course, without a doubt, I always eat the food that I photograph!
Recently I had one of my portraits selected for a postage stamp for Australia Post. I'm pretty excited about this as it's always been something in the back of my mind that I wanted to do.
It's part of a series called 'Australian Legends' which features Australian Chefs, you can see the rest of the series here .
Last month I photographed the stills as part of Momentum Energy's 'Try The Switch' campaign for Melbourne advertising agency t20 group. It was a three day shoot alongside a tvc production company The Directors Group This is the third campaign I have shot for Momentum Energy and all of them have been really different which has been great. The billboards are up now as well as press ads in newspapers and other publication. If you want to see the tvc that accompanies these stills you can see it here
This was another image from the series that I was really happy with.
It's been a busy year for me here at BSP and I'm well overdue for a folio update. This is always a difficult task as I often find that I am attached to certain images and am desperate to put them in my book but sometimes they just don't fit. So I spend many days deliberating over it and having conversations both with myself and others on what should stay in and what should go.
The first step for me is to get small prints of everything that I feel might make it into my new folio and lay them out on the floor so I can see it all together.
Then I try to look at which images stand out as being the strongest, most interesting and appropriate, and also which images I feel will best fit together. The connection between the images could be anything from their mood, subject matter, texture, or colour. At this stage I start organising them into groups and eventually line them up into some kind of connected order.
Then I think about it for probably far too long!
I love having a printed folio to accompany my website as a marketing tool. In my opinion, people spend so much of their day stuck in front of a computer (like you and me right now) that it's nice to have the opportunity to look at prints and to actually have a conversation instead of always communicating online or on the phone. I will never stop producing a printed folio...
Stylist Lisa La Barbera and I had a lot of fun putting these images together. We shot at The Establishment Studios which is a beautiful props hire place that also has some really lovely spaces to shoot in.
These images were not commissioned, they are the result of some exploration of propping, lighting and composition that lisa and I were working on. I really love the narrative feel that they have and the subtle use of colour in them.
Here is a vodka drenched Polish cookbook I shot for publishers Hardie Grant. It was based around a restaurant in Melbourne called Borsch, Vodka and Tears who are a south side institution. These are a few of my favourite spreads from the book, and some behind the scenes pics as well.
Hugh Ford designed the book, Benny Roff wrote it and prepped the food at the shoot for us, and the lovely Sarah De Nardi did the styling.
The brief was to be a little messy which is great for me because I love shooting my food to look a little moody and gritty. The shoot was a week long and boy did I learn a lot about Polish food.
For my latest mailout campaign I have decided to send out camera cookies. Delicious cookies carefully crafted to resemble cameras.
The above cookie is designed to look like a camera from the 60's called Diana. The base is a butter cookie, and royal icing adds the colour.
This one is designed to replicate a polaroid camera from the 60's.
I also had some of my photographs printed on some of the cookies, so that they look like polaroid prints. They are completely edible and some of them are specific jobs I've done for clients.
I used stickers with my logo and website details to seal the back of the packaging and keep them fresh, then I wrapped them in brown paper and string ready to send. After my view master campaign, I am getting pretty skilled at wrapping boxes in brown paper!
I found these amazing images recently that really got me excited. They were taken by the NSW forensic police in the 1920s and are essentially mug shots of gangsters photographed in the police station or the jail.
Taken in the day where every type of photography was an art form, before there were point and shoot cameras and photography was easily accessible to the general public, these carefully framed black and white images are just fantastic.
Ralph Lauren has purchased the rights to use these images as part of their ad campaigns. No tracksuit pants or hoodies on these guys...
I'm fascinated by the composition of these and where the photographer has chosen to place the subject within the frame. The detail that the large format camera has produced is also really lovely.
Some police photographer put a lot of effort into creating these images and I bet no one appreciated it back in the day!
You can see more examples from this collection on The Age newspaper's website.