Jody and Kazz

March 30, 2014 in Equestrian, Portrait

A few weeks ago I photographed Jody and her horse Kazz, friends with Hayley - the subject of my previous attempt! I'm quickly learning that all horses are unique, and each present interesting challenges to creating nice poses... which includes standing roughly in one spot long enough for a photo, looking anywhere near the camera or their owner when required, and not just ignoring me and eating the grass instead! Jody was great though, and was able to get Kazz to listen to her with relative ease - hopefully the connection between horse and owner comes through in the photos.

It's often a challenge to get the horse to prick up it's ears and look interested, rather than just angry or sleepy! My only 'trick' so far has been to have an assistant (thanks Abby!) hold my shiny gold reflector where I want the horse to look, and scratch on the metallic covering... maybe I should try carrots next time instead..

We shot at the Coatesville pony club, which has nice areas out back by a stream, with overhanging trees and fences and logs to play around with. Jody and Kazz were very patient, and happy to try out a lot of different spots and sit on a variety of things for me. Of course it was also the day of the Coatesville markets next door, so I also had to work to keep road traffic and marketgoers from walking through my backgrounds.

After taking many hundreds of photos, it was a real challenge to reduce them down to a sensible number of selects. I relied on Jody (plus Hayley and Jody's mum!) to help choose the the best horse poses and expressions. I learnt a lot from their comments and am slowly picking up some nuances of horse body language... and it is certainly more complicated than my first lesson of just 'ears forward'! Some interesting comments were about the angle of the body and neck, and not making the horse look small or funny-shaped. For instance, the second photo in this set makes Kazz look quite small, however I really liked the arrangement with Jody on the fence, so in this case the photo stays!

Thanks very much to everyone that helped out with this photo shoot, and the image selection afterwards! Jody and Kazz were great fun to shoot, and I'm happy with what we achieved this time. Of course it's still a learning process and I hope to improve each time :)

Hayley and Maddie - Equestrian Photography

February 12, 2014 in Equestrian, Portrait

First things first, in case nobody reads below the first paragraph, I'm starting a new Equestrian Photography website at www.ndequestrian.com so please check it out for all of your horse photography needs. I'm focussing both on equestrian events (dressage, show jumping and cross country) and portraits of people and their horses - either alone, together, riding, playing, competing or any combination thereof. Or you know, if you don't even have a horse, I'm still into 'person' portrait photography as well! For now I'm building my portfolio, leaning on friends and friends-of-friends to organise photo shoots and attending local events. This set is of my friend Hayley and her horse Maddie, shot at Muriwai Beach on the west coast of Auckland.

I've previously made most of my 'good' photos while travelling, and then had trouble later finding things to shoot or entertain myself at home. My business travel has slowed down a lot lately, so I've been trying to get proactive in finding Auckland subjects instead. Since Abby has started riding and competing again this season I'm likely to attend a lot of equestrian events as a spectator anyway - which seems like a good opportunity to keep myself busy and find a new and interesting subject to shoot. Of course I'm hoping to bring some of my personal style and aesthetics to this subject, but also give people what they want or expect from equestrian photos.

I'm enjoying getting into Equestrian photography, but it has the side effect that I must also learn more about horses, which is not as easy as you might expect. I can walk around a horse and photograph it in a nice light and angle like any other subject, but their behaviour and posing is new to me, and not entirely logical! Luckily I have plenty of people to educate me in this, and help with manoeuvring and posing the horses as we walk around. Mostly I concentrate on the view through the camera and try and avoid getting kicked in the head. The main problem so far has been that horses tend to do their own thing and look at whatever interests them - it was quite hard to get Maddie to point her head in any particular direction, or even stand still in one spot, let alone look at the camera on command! Next time I might have to bring some carrots.

Hayley and Maddie were great to photograph, and both of them were very patient while I tried out different angles, locations and poses. The thing I found most challenging actually was choosing afterwards in which photos Maddie looked prettiest! I hope I can make a competent portrait of a person already, but I can't yet interpret what different horse expressions mean, or which poses people will like better than others. So far, I can tell that 'ears forward' is good and that's about it it. Certainly not all of the shots I took were keepers, but overall I think it turned out pretty well and I had a good selection to give to Hayley. Definitely looking forward to trying again soon and improving my craft.

Cork Tree plantation at the Canberra Arboretum

Canberra and the Wide Brown Land

January 31, 2014 in Travel, Landscape, Museum

We spent Christmas 2013 in Canberra visiting my family, which we've done several times since they moved there from NZ. Canberra isn't really a big tourist destination, and after visiting half a dozen times I'm not really sure what to visit anymore. The National Museums are very good however and worth repeat trips.

The only really new activity we did this time was a couple of visits to the Canberra Arboretum, which is a giant tree plantation on 250-hectares of land that was completely burnt out in the 2001 and 2003 bushfires. I've seen the site driving past on previous trips while it was being planted, but it only opened in February 2013 and is proving to be a new drawcard for tourists and locals. The very large site includes plantations of 100 different blocks of different trees and 100 gardens, as well as long walking, biking and horse riding tracks.

The Arboretum was actually quite nice to walk around, despite the lack of shade provided by mostly baby trees from the hot Canberra sun. There are also two plantations of older trees spared by the fires, including these Himalayan Cedars and Cork Oaks planted under direction from Walter Burleigh Griffin, the original city planner of Canberra, and namesake of the big lake surrounding the centre of town. The Cork Oaks were particularly interesting as they are still regularly harvested for their bark (which makes cork, duh), giving dark lower and pale upper trunks.

One thing that I do most times I go to Canberra is to visit the Australian War Memorial Museum, which is an impressive monumental building with a very good collection of military hardware and stories from both World Wars, as well as Australia's other engagements. The WWII aircraft are my favourites, including some of my favourite planes like the P40 Warhawk, and a massive Lancaster bomber named 'G for George' with associated sound and light show every hour! We were at the museum for closing time, where they perform the Last Post ceremony every day including a story about one of the 102,000 names inscribed on the roll of honour.

Wide Brown Land and the Black Mountain Tower in the background

Melbourne Beaches and Buildings

January 22, 2014 in Travel, City

Following on from the previous post... we had another couple of days in Melbourne after NYE and my birthday, and plenty of activities to occupy our time. One day trip we made which was particularly interesting was out to Brighton (Dendy St.) Beach in the south of the city suburbs to check out the famous colourfully painted beach huts. We actually went to St. Kilda first, thinking the huts were there, as images of the huts seem to always crop up in the tourist literature about St. Kilda! After some quick research figuring out our mistake during a cafe breakfast, and picking up some giant baked goods from one of the famous St. Kilda cake shops, we braved a local bus to get us a few more beaches down the road.

Arriving at the beach, we first sat down to test our bakery treats... unfortunately it seems they were baked for their impressive size rather than flavour, something only tempt the tourists perhaps. Or at least that was the case at the shop we visited. Not recommended, and in fact we finished neither our giant custard square nor our giant éclair. The cakes were disappointing, but at least the beach was not! It has one long row of 82 huts down a quite skinny beach, all painted in bright colours and some with interesting patterns or paintings of wildlife, kangaroos, space invaders, or Australian flags. The huts are now a valuable icon of Melbourne, and sell for up to AU$200k each, despite having no amenities or running water... literally a shed on the beach! The council even proposed to build 6 new ones in 2009 to raise $1 Million in council funds. To keep them locally owned, you may be a rate paying citizen of Brighton to buy a hut.

Other than our beach trip, we spent quite a lot of time just walking or tramming around the city looking at things. Of course I had to visit the main Melbourne Cathedral, in order to add to my collection of pipe organ photographs. This wasn't the biggest or most impressive compared to old European ones, but it was still nice, and makes for quite a cool photo with the horns poking out at the bottom I think.

I really enjoyed seeing the old Melbourne architecture spread around the CBD. We stumbled across some interesting buildings, such as the ANZ bank branch still in an original colonial building, with it's grand foyer and central teller island. If I lived in Melbourne, I would be sure to use that branch... almost makes it worth a special trip instead of doing it online! There were lots of other buildings like this we didn't get to go inside, including many old grand theatres. Auckland City has the Civic theatre I guess, and maybe the ferry building, but that's about it as far as interesting old architecture in town! Melbourne is certainly more interesting in that respect, and had the best collection of old architecture I've seen outside of Europe.

Some of the new architecture however left a bit to be desired. The many skyscrapers in the CBD were par for the course in any large city, but one thing I didn't appreciate was one of the 'shard' buildings on Federation Square, which was a direct ripoff of the Judisches Museum in Berlin, one of my favourite buildings! I had to stop and check on the internet to make sure it wasn't designed by the same person (Daniel Liebeskind) but it was not - my outrage was justified, they just made a poor copy rather than design their own building. Federation square as a whole I didn't find too bad, but supposedly the architects who designed it didn't get any more work for some years afterwards! That was hearsay, but fun to assume it is true so I'm not going to fact check.

That's about it for Melbourne. I'm afraid I didn't actually get many good photos given the rich environment, but I still had fun exploring around. My usual slow process of wandering around and following my nose for photos isn't really practical with other people as they quickly get annoyed of alternately backtracking, going in circles, and standing still for extended periods! But Melbourne is definitely somewhere I'd like to visit again.

Melbourne New Year

January 17, 2014 in Travel

I'm still a couple of days of photos behind schedule from Berlin, but I've gotten bored of those temporarily, and thought it best to move straight on to our xmas holiday trip to Australia. We visited my family in Canberra for Christmas, but Canberra isn't a particularly pretty looking place and I hardly took out my camera save for some trips to the 'Arboretum' which may crop up later. On the way home we visited Melbourne, which was really interesting. I hadn't been there since I was about 12yrs old, so it was pretty much new to me. We have a friend living in Melbourne, who Abby visited last year, so she at least remembered where to go and navigated us around pretty well.

I really liked Melbourne as a city for walking around. It's all laid out in a convenient grid pattern, it's reasonably flat, there is really good public transport on the tram network, and best of all it is full of interesting old buildings and architecture mixed amongst the modern boring office towers. There is also a lot of street life and things going on in the city... maybe not everyone would appreciate the number of homeless people and buskers, and the odd pepper-spraying, but at least it isn't sterile and boring. I don't do a lot of classical 'street photography' of people, but I see Melbourne would be a pretty rich hunting ground for someone like my friend Sven...

The 2nd of January was my birthday, so we made a trip on the tram to the suburb of Fitzroy for breakfast, where the most interesting collection of shops, crumbly buildings, and most importantly, cafes, is to be found. One other thing Melbourne has going for it is a cafe culture similar to Auckland, where you can find pretty good coffee, even to my standards.. There are bad ones around as well, and in Auckland too, but at least the hit rate is miles higher than most places I travel to... looking at you, USA!

After breakfast, we wandered around Fitzroy looking at the buildings and attempting to visit the (closed) Centre for Contemporary Photography. Failing that, we went back into town to spend my birthday afternoon at the National Gallery of Victoria. There was an exhibition on of the photographer Edward Steichen which I particularly wanted to see, and also a large and quite good collection of European paintings and sculpture.

National Gallery of Victoria - bucket dome thing

The coolest thing I saw in the first couple of days was the Latrobe Reading Room in the public library, which took a little bit of exploring to find, but i'm glad we did. I spent quite a while walking around in there, and up and down the stairs to the different levels taking photographs. I'm not convinced it was a very efficient use of space as a reading room, but at least it looked cool! And a good example of the old and interesting buildings scattered all over Melbourne. Parts of it remind me of New York, both the public library and the city centre as a whole, just on a smaller scale with an Australian accent.

I always enjoy wandering around new cities looking at stuff, and Melbourne was really good for this! Lots of variety, interesting buildings and people, and great transport. Some more photos from Melbourne to come next time, but that is plenty for one day.

Berlin - Sanssouci Palace

January 06, 2014 in Travel

After finishing three weeks work in Essen, I visited Berlin for a few days before flying all the way home again to New Zealand. In my first half-day after arriving on the train, I walked around getting my bearings again, currywurst for lunch of course, and then met up with good friends from Finland/New Zealand who had timed their weekend visit to coincide with mine.

The following day I took the train out to Potsdam, which is a city just outside Berlin and capital of the German state of Brandenburg. It was the place of residence of the Prussian Kings until 1918, and so has a lot of monumental buildings including several palaces, including Sanssouci - Sans Souci meaning in French "Without Worries" - which was the summer palace of Frederick the Great.

The summer palace was meant to be a residence for the King to relax away from the formality and ceremony of the main German court in Berlin. Of course it is still huge, ornate and covered in gold leaf. It is supposedly a German rival to Versailles, but really is much much smaller, like a very fancy country villa rather than a huge palace. It is built on a very cool terraced vineyard though, which might have made for a nice picture if it wasn't the middle of winter and cold and grey.

The Sansoucci grounds are massive, containing both the Sansoucci Palace, and the New Palace, which is much larger and grander, and was built shortly after Sansoucci to celebrate the end of the 7-years war. This one is considered the last of the great German Baroque palaces. There is also another Orangerie palace, an oriental-styled pavilion called the 'Chinese Teahouse', roman-styled Baths, and another tiny 'Charlottenhof' Palace.

Jody and Kazz

Hayley and Maddie - Equestrian Photography

Canberra and the Wide Brown Land

Melbourne Beaches and Buildings

Melbourne New Year

Berlin - Sanssouci Palace

Wells Blog

Latest Posts

Tweets