Billabong 2010 Catalogue Shoot New Zealand

I've been in New Zealand shooting the 2010 Billabong winter catalogue for the past two weeks. The weather hasn't been very nice to us this year and I'm writing this while it is raining and super windy outside.
We've been staying in a great little house in the Cardrona valley complete with perfect mini ramp out front - unfortunately we've only been able to skate it twice, due to the rain!
The South Island of New Zealand is crawling with pro skiers and snowboarders at them moment. After dinner a couple of nights ago we went for a few drinks in town and inside the bar was literally a who's who of international snowboarding stardom - yes, even the "Flying Tomato" was there!
At our house is the Euro and Aussie Billabong teams and the house has also been a drop in for other traveling pro shreds. Staying at our house are photographers Eric Bergeri, Vanessa Andrieux and myself, along with pro shreds Anne-Flore Marxer, Wolle Nyvelt, Sylvain Bourboison, Robbie Walker, Clint Allan and Erin Tanner. Rookies - Michaela Davis-Meehan, Nick Wood and Jesse kennedy and the gel that holds everything together, team managers David Pitschi and Woody Sedgman. Yeah, it's pretty much a mad house!
The Billabong USA team is staying a bit closer to Wanaka.
Nightly tournaments of Fifa 09 on the Xbox 360 turn our house into a screaming den of French rage and cursing. These dudes take their football seriously - even if it is only a video game!
The riding is pretty serious too, and although I can't show much until the catalogue is done I can say it is a pleasure to work with so many professionals on a daily basis!
Here are a few B-roll shots from the trip so far. Look out for a full editorial feature in Issue 1 of Australian Snowboarder Magazine next year.
I'll do a more photo nerd specific update later.

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Some recent snow work

It's been a while between posts, mostly due to the amount of work I've been doing - shooting, driving, shooting, re-touching, more shooting, delivering finished images etc..Anyway, I can finally show some recent snow shots which were taken just a few weeks ago in Thredbo. The images have been published in the third issue of Australian and New Zealand Snowboarding as part of a story I wrote and shot about the Thredbo terrain park team and pro snowboarder Charles Beckinsale's incredible skills behind the controls of a snowcat/groomer. Charles is an amazing park builder and he built a great little unique feature up the top of Thredbo just out of sight of the main run. The idea was to get something a little different mid season and try to make the third issue of the current year's magazines as most images in the mags are shot the previous season.
The weather wasn't super kind to us and we only ended up having a small window of a day to shoot the feature that had taken just over two days to build. Thredbo resort has to be commended for supporting the vision of their terrain park managers Sammy Towers and Charles Beckinsale. There are a huge bunch of extremely talented skiers and snowboarders here in Australia and it's a shame they have to travel overseas to ride decent challenging parks and terrain. It's great to see these one off builds for film and photoshoots finally happening here in Australia, everyone benefits! More images below the cut.

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Day of the Undead

Today I went down to a Zombie Lurch in Sydney. Basically a bunch of people who love the undead and dressing in full costume, get together once or twice a year and lurch (march, shamble or shuffle) through the city to a pub or other venue where they then party zombie style!
This year's event took place in Newtown, Sydney, and was pretty awesome! The zombies gathered in Sydney Park, St. Peters and limped, dragged and lurched up King St. making for a pretty cool spectacle. The looks on driver's faces as they were stopped in their tracks by a mob of zombies covered in fake blood and special effects make up was priceless!
My favourite zombies were the bride dragging a severed leg, and the prom queen with a knife through her head. Also worth a mention was the guy with the meat cleaver hanging from his belt and the shark attack victim.
The undead really know how to have fun!
Lots of photos after the cut.

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Wild Sydney Weather

Yesterday the weather turned quite nasty here in Sydney and I noticed the swell was pretty big and that dangerous surf warnings had been issued.
I grabbed my cameras and headed down to my two local beaches, Coogee and Bronte. Coogee is usually a pretty mellow beach and doesn't often get big waves but it was like a giant washing machine, windy and super messy. Bronte was much the same except that there was a bunch of young groms hanging on to the rope on the edge of the ocean pool and getting themselves smashed by the double and sometimes triple overhead sets that were coming through.
All in all, great entertainment for a Sunday arvo!
Click below for more shots.

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Behind the scenes of a product shoot

About a week ago I did a product shoot for Australian & New Zealand Snowboarding magazine here in Sydney. The shoot was for a buyers guide style product page and was shot on location at a bar in Sydney called the Minus 5 bar It should be called the minus 14.7 bar as that was the real temperature inside the walk-in freezer/bar. When the owners first gave the go ahead to do the shoot there, they told us we could not shoot for more than 45 minutes at a time inside the bar as apparently "the human body cannot withstand exposure to that temperature". Being the seasoned snow climate people that we are we laughed this off and replied that we often spend whole days out shooting and riding in temperatures much colder than -5 C or even -14.7 C, however that kind of backfired on us when we turned up on a balmy autumn Sydney morning dressed more for a semi cool night than say 3-4 hours in a commercial freezer the size of a small house!
Australian snowboard legend and all round top bloke Nick Gregory came along to assist me and to get some experience outside the snowboard bubble (well kind of outside the bubble!) Nick also didn't really think about the prolonged freezer experience when dressing as he wore classic Aussie tennis shoes without socks!
Nick was kind enough to roam around with my second camera body and snap off some shots when he wasn't helping me move frozen flash equipment around the bar.
The finished shot will be seen in the first issue of Australian & New Zealand Snowboarding, which will hit the news stands in May.
Click below for more of Nick's shots.

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Saves the Day and Rival Schools - Sydney

I went to the Alkaline Trio/ Rival Schools/ Saves the Day show last night in the Manning Bar at Sydney University. I didn't originally intend to take photos and didn't have a photo pass, but decided at the last minute to see if I could smuggle a D200 and 50mm 1.4 in.
After getting through the bag check with camera undetected it was time to have a few beers and push up close to the front and snap off a few shots. I didn't have much mobility up front as I couldn't get in front of the barrier. Still got a few decent ones though. There's a couple of Alakaline Trio shots at the end. I stayed in the crowd for their set. More photos after the cut.

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Basketball

SO my flatmate, Chris plays Basketball in a bit of a low key local comp and i figured I'd tag along last night to see if I could get a couple of shots! I've never shot Basketball before and found there were more than a couple of hurdles! More shots and details after the jump. I knew the first issue would be the amount of light in the gymnasium. It is held at a local school so I knew right away the lighting would be lacking. The other problem was the amount of space, there was pretty much two metres between the sidelines and the brick walls of the building, not a lot of room to move around the court. The bricks proved to be a bit distracting too, although one can't always hope for a full stadium with a big out of focus crowd to "clean" up the background!

All these shots were at 2000 ISO! It's not pretty, but even at such a high ISO i couldn't get a fast enough shutter speed to control the action. 8 out of 10 shots had motion blur. !/125th sec was the best i could do wide open @f2.8...

It goes without saying that either I need a D3 or just forget about trying in such lighting conditions.
One other major thing I learned about the limitations of my equipment last night was the old Nikkor 80-200 2.8D series lens really lacks the auto focus performance required for such fast moving/erratic sports.
This was something I already kind of knew, but figured it might work out ok with the odd shot dropped due to the AF not being able to keep up with the frame rate on the camera. It's funny, because this lens has been my most used and abused lens for all my snow and other action sports work, I guess they don't require much focus tracking though!

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The Beginning

Queenstown, New Zealand 2007

I have had a bit of time on my hands lately and thought it might be a good idea to start a blog and share some of the things I've been doing with the camera of late.

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