Time in New Zealand

I’ve tried to write this post for a few days now, but I’m not sure exactly what I want to say.

When you spend too much time away from a thing, it can be difficult coming back to it. You start to overthink it. You begin to wonder why you ever did the thing at all, or why you even want to do it again. You can paralyze yourself with worry and doubt.

I’ve kept this blog for well over a decade, but I don’t post nearly as often as I used to. Things change. At some point, I got bored with my photographs, and with whatever I had to say about them. I began to feel like just another voice, clamoring to be heard over all the noise. I prefer the quiet.

I still take a lot of photographs, I’m just a bit quieter about them. I’m trying to do things differently when I can, experimenting and taking more risks, but it doesn’t come as easily as it used to. There’s something to be said for youthful abandon and misplaced confidence. It’s more difficult to posture when you’re more aware of your shortcomings.

I spend a lot of time thinking about art and photography and what it means to have your own voice in a thing, and how that voice can change over time. How it becomes weathered and more comfortable with itself, but also, for me, how that comfort has inversely affected how much I want to talk about my work.

In the simplest terms, I’ve tried to be a sponge, to soak up beauty and to put that beauty back out there in whatever small and unique way I can. And maybe I don’t need to talk about anything more than that. Maybe that’s the post.

So here are a few pictures I think are beautiful and that showcase a bit of beauty in the world, from the north and south islands of New Zealand, and one or two from Australia, while I was skipping through. Let’s not make too much of it.

On Assignment | 9:35am

Two quick images as I start my edit for the fashion editorial I shot this weekend. Pham Thu Trang was great to work with and possibly the only model that has ever helped make lunch and clean house during the shoot. I seriously can’t understand why she isn’t plastered on every billboard and magazine cover in this country. Highly recommended. More later.

EDIT: And by this weekend I mean Wednesday and Thursday. Yes, I am a professional photographer and a grown man and sometimes I completely forget what day of the week it is.

New Work: Kind of Fashion 02

This summer I roped in two different fashion shoots, and I’ll be shooting another street fashion feature next month for a regional travel magazine. It’s interesting these jobs coming in, as I’d never shot anything like this before and had no previous fashion work on my website. But the companies all liked my other images and thought it would translate well. Which I’d hate to disagree with.

These images were shot with Noi Pictures and Metiseko, a new French-owned design and interior company in Hoi An, Vietnam. It was a brutal shoot with a long shot list and us fighting against the elements the entire day, but it was also a lot of fun. Everyone gave 200% and worked their asses off. Which almost always produces good work. This is just a small sampling. You can see more (kind of) fashion on my website, HERE.

New Work: Kind of Fashion 01

It’s difficult to talk really in depth about a fashion shoot. Intellectually I mean. Or at least in the way I’m used to talking about photography. Though maybe some will disagree. For me, a fashion shoot is what it is. Which is fun and hopefully a bit creative and interesting and weird and all that. A chance to play around with some stranger ideas that would never fly at a magazine or newspaper. An opportunity to say things like, Hey, I think we should do this shot underwater. At least that’s how it was on this particular shoot with Sula Clothing, out of the UK. They were awesome. We holed ourselves up in an old house along West Lake with two models, several cameras, 30 outfits and a makeup person that slept on the couch for the majority of the time there. I tried to keep things different but connected, and we came away with some images I’m really proud of. I can’t wait to work with them again.