Ok so day two of competition is officially over, it’s almost 1am and I’m just getting a chance to think about a blog update with photos that I took four days ago. So far, the Olympics have been pretty amazing, but to be honest I reckon I’ve been so tired that sometimes I just have to stop and look around, and it’s only then that I realise I’m in the middle of something so great that I don’t have any scale by which to measure it.
In the past few days I’ve witnessed so many incredible things that I can’t possibly put into words in one short blog entry.
I was invited to a fancy Australian team welcoming party held by the Australian Olympic Commitee where I got to see some of my snowboarder mates in a different light – as representatives of our country, as Olympians. It’s hard not to get a little tear in the eye with pride!
I got to go to another fancy party, on the same night, hosted by Nikon and Canon for the 700 or so accredited photographers.
I’ve shot about 300 press conferences. Well I’ve shot about 15, but you know what I mean.
I’ve geeked out on the sheer amount of camera equipment hanging off each and every photographer here, and I smile everytime I see Nikon outgunning Canon by at least two to one, maybe even more. This is Nikon’s games – no question!
All this prior to the opening ceremony. The games haven’t even begun. (well they have, but not on this blog yet!)
Oh, and I got my first page one sport photo in The Australian newspaper!
Here’s some photos prior to the opening ceremony (after the cut). Continue reading ‘Playing catch up in Vancouver’
Just noticed today that the lab where I get my film processed has put up a nice little blurb about me on their blog here. Stephen Frizza at The Lighthouse is an absolute genius when it comes to processing and printing film. I have been getting my film processed by Stephen for many years now and he processed and printed my black and white portrait series which I exhibited last May at the MTV gallery in Sydney. It was all shot on 6×6 medium format Kodak Tri-x 400 and I was amazed when I went in to pick up my prints, Stephen is such a perfectionist and did an amazing job dodging and burning my 16 x 16 inch prints and not only is he a master printer he is also a really nice guy! I haven’t shot much film lately and am long overdue to drop off the few exposed rolls that have been sitting on my desk for months now. So do yourself a favour and go out and shoot a roll of film and take it to Stephen! Remember that feeling you used to get when you would go pick up your film/proofs/slides? You can still get that you know!
The image in the screenshot is of Australian Snowboarder Mikey Williams, it was shot in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2007 and was part of a series of 12 images that were exhibited. Image here.
This week I was super stoked to find out that four of my images have been included in a slideshow put together by Nikon Professional Services Australia, to showcase the work of their members. I’m excited to be included in a portfolio which includes many amazing Australian photographers including Mark Watson, Christian Blanchard, Paul Miller, Delly Carr and Simon Carter to name just a few. For best results click the high def button. The original appears on Nikon Australia’s site here
I was recently commissioned to do a shoot for Network Ten’s new reality drama “Recruits”, for advertising and promotion of the new show on billboards, bus shelter light boxes and print ads. The shoot took place in a lane way just outside the Sydney Central Local Area Command’s Police station. The series follows a group of police recruits from training through to their first days on the beat and beyond. It is the first time that level of access has been given to a t.v. crew in Australia, and looks to be pretty promising in terms of “reality” programming as it is a lot more real than say putting 15 people in house full of cameras! The brief was for the shots to be as gritty and real as possible and to try and show the personality/vulnerability of the recruits. I had under one hour to do the shoot as two of the probationary officers were actually on duty and could have been called away at any minute, so much so that one had to have his radio at his ear during all of the shoot. The shoot was challenging in the sense that the time with the three recruits was limited and the number of shots and variety of compositions was such that I knew an hour would not be enough. I used a little fill from a single Elinchrom Ranger head shot through a 40 inch shoot through umbrella to fill the shadows from the police hats and slightly drop the ambient light on the alley in background to create a bit more of a dark gritty alley feel. In post the saturation was dropped a little and the blacks pumped up a bit for the final print version, but overall very minimal re-touching. Click below for the original shot from the camera as well as some examples of the shot on bus shelter light boxes in Sydney’s central business district. The show starts this Monday at 8 pm on Ten. Continue reading ‘"Recruits" series promo shoot’
Ryan Tiene corks out a frontside 5 on the gap jump, Style Wars, Falls Creek, Australia
This past August while shooting one of the bigger snowboard competitions on the Australian calendar, Style Wars, I decided it would be fun to shoot photos of the other photographers.It was one of those events where I knew only a couple of my shots would get a run in the magazine, and it was also the first comp I had covered in that season where I wasn’t being paid to shoot for the event organisers or sponsors, So I decided to have a bit of fun and shoot the other guys shooting!
I have been working on a series of portraits for an upcoming editorial in Australian Snowboarder Magazine. The series is to document the real jobs of a bunch of up and coming snowboarders in Australia. These riders all work real jobs to fund their travel during the Northern hemisphere winter. It is a common misconception here that just because these kids grace the cover of magazines, they must be a fully paid professional rider. This editorial will show just how far these riders go for their love of snowboarding, and their dreams of one day getting paid to do what they love. Snowboardermag.com.au has posted some behind the scenes images and video from the shoot here. I will post up some out-takes and image mock-ups as soon as I get clearance from the magazine picture editor.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve updated, not because I haven’t been shooting, mainly it is because I have been trying to change over to a Wordpress blog. I have been using most of my spare time trying to implement a new theme and template and today have decided for the time being I am going to give up. It has been far too time consuming and I’m officially over it! I am not a web developer and struggle with even basic HTML, so for now, I’m sticking with this blog!
I have been shooting a lot since my last post so I will put up a selection of pictures I have been taking the last two months.
There are some exciting projects coming up and hopefully I will be able to get this updating happening a lot quicker than before!
It’s been a while since updates but I have been doing a few random shoots lately so I’m going to post a few today.
Last week I was asked by Rip Curl to shoot their annual “Girls go surfing day” at Manly beach in Sydney. It’s basically a program set up by Rip Curl to get women involved in surfing and the day is subsidised by a bunch of sponsors, which means girls get a couple of hours surf lessons, all the gear and food for something like $40, which is pretty rad! Junior women’s surfing sensation Tyler Wright was there to help the girls out on the day. For those that don’t know who Tyler is, she’s the 14 year old that beat pro veteran Layne Beachley in her own competition, the Beachley Classic, a few weeks ago. It was quite the upset as this was the contest that Layne announced her retirement from professional surfing at. I’m sure she would have much preferred to have gone out with a win, rather than being flogged by a 14 year old! More shots after the cut.
Well it’s been a long couple of months, but the website is finally back live and working!(click here to see) For those that missed the drama that unfolded, here is a play by play of how a simple website which has been working fine for a number of years can all of a sudden turn into a massive nightmare!
The headache began whilst I was on an Australian Snowboarder Magazine editorial trip in a remote valley of New Zealand’s south island. I was there to shoot a story about “Heli Park” an amazing little Heli ski lodge set in one of the most breathtaking valleys I’ve ever seen! Heli park is so remote there is no internet, mobile phone coverage or T.V out there; you’re disconnected from the outside world and it’s a great thing! While I was enjoying the serenity of spending four days with a couple of good friends in paradise (with a helicopter on standby parked out the front!) I had no idea that my website had been targeted by some nasty web parasites apparently originating from Russia. I was uncontactable, and friends had been trying to let me know something was up. What made this random situation all the more troubling was that I had just been featured on two of the biggest news websites in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.com. They ran a gallery of some of my best winter action shots and a little story about dream jobs. I was featured as the snowboard/ski photographer. They linked out to me, which normally would have seen an unprecedented amount of first time visitors to my site, however the Russian hackers had other ideas and their little parasites that trawl web server’s looking for back door vulnerabilities sure found one in my website. This so called “sequel injection” (as I was later to find out) rendered every image on my site non-viewable and users of a Windows machine were greeted with a message that they had just received a Trojan from me! Talk about bad timing, I don’t think it gets much worse. As soon as I reached civilisation again, I was greeted with this news, and a few 80 dollar phone calls to my web hosts in the US later and things were all sorted out – or so it seemed. The back door was shut and I was assured that nothing could penetrate my site, well it did and it did four more times in the space of a single week! It was decided best that my site be shut down until the whole thing could be re-coded into something much less vulnerable to random Russians! So here we are, nearly two months later and it’s finally back up! Everything looks and feels the same although I’ve put up quite a lot of new images as well as some old favourites that I just can’t seem to let go of. I’ll be adding more images over the next couple of days, but am relieved that it’s finally back up and one less thing I need to be working on everyday!
So it’s been a while between posts here. I’ve been busy trying to get my website back in order and live, it’s been a struggle but the good news is that the content has all been re-uploaded and the website has been re-coded in PHP, and I have a brand new content management system. Today I was going through some old boxes and found some film from a New York trip that I couldn’t remember ever having scanned, so I dusted off the cobwebs from the film scanner and got a few of them scanned. One thing that kept going through my mind while I was scanning was just how incredible film looks! Even when it’s scanned (and essentially digitised) it still has that look and feel that I believe cannot yet be replicated by digital cameras. The dynamic range of a well exposed image shot on Kodak Tri-X or the colour and saturation of an image shot on Fuji Provia or Velvia, is just not there with digital. It has been a day where I have promised myself that I must shoot more film in the future, especially black and white.
