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Blog Archive

Check out some of my recent work, and my essays on Photographing The Arts!

Lost & Found #48: Mt. Victoria Summit and Breaker Bay, Wellington 2007

Just a quick entry in the Lost & Found files today - this one was captured on film (yes, film!) a few years ago when I owned a wonderful camera, the Hasselblad X-Pan, which I've written a bit about before.

The great thing about those was that they were compact rangefinders, like a Leica - but also that they took double-frame panoramic images right in the camera. None of this digital sweep-panorama iPhone stuff, you actually saw the frame the way it was going to be!

But gradually, I was absorbed into the digital world, and when I found a digital rangefinder - at that time, the Epson R-D1s - I sold the X-Pan; and I haven't had a film camera since.

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Photographing the arts: how do I keep my images safe?

As a photographer, my images are important to me; not just when I take them, but for years afterwards, whether it seems that they have any future use or not. I can't count the number of times I've had a call, years after an image was taken, to see if I still have the file anywhere - often because one of the people in it has passed on, but mentioned that this was their favourite photo of themselves at some point.

Or, as has happened, when someone I photographed has won a major award - say, the Man Booker Prize - and suddenly, the world's media needs an image I took.  And, of course, sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to find something for historical purposes: that time someone performed here before everyone knew who they were, and so on...

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Lost & Found #47: Sydney Biennale at Cockatoo Island, 2012

This week's Lost & Found is a perfect example of why I started posting these - images I was very happy with, but that only I have seen. And even saying that, I saved them to my hard drive that week, and never looked at them again until now!

The 18th Sydney Biennale was held in July 2012, before I moved here from New Zealand; but while here on a visit I took a ferry to Cockatoo Island to see both the site and the installed works. It was a thoroughly impressive collection - and a beautiful sunny day, right in the middle of winter, which Sydney does very well I must say.

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Lost & Found #46: Drive-In, Port Douglas 2010

This week's Lost & Found is from a trip I won (on Twitter!) to Cairns quite by accident, when I was living in Wellington in 2010. If I recall correctly, Air New Zealand was adding direct flights to Cairns for the first time, and asked people to tweet something about how they'd get there. I sent a slightly snide reply (along the lines of 'in a plane, duh!') without actually intending to enter, and somehow or other wound up winning!

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Photographing the arts: how do I make everyone happy?

When I was photographing a theatre production recently, I had a quick conversation before the dress rehearsal, which went something like this: "Hi Robert, I'm the designer on this show - could you make sure you take some wide angle shots for my portfolio?"

Now, that's a perfectly normal, common and reasonable request - and one that raises an interesting question in terms of this sort of work: who exactly am I working for, or responsible to, when I photograph a show? And, how can I make them happy?

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Lost & Found #44: Trinity, Newfoundland 2010

Not long after visiting the Adirondacks in 2010 (as seen in last week's Lost & Found post), I went to Newfoundland for a few days, just to see what it was like.

[Actually, I wanted to go to Iceland that year, but something something volcano something something, so Newfoundland and Nova Scotia were the backup plan...]

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Photographing the arts: what makes a great production image?

The work I've been doing recently with Apocalypse Theatre and Pinchgut Opera got me thinking about what I try to achieve in production stills photography; so I thought I'd have a look at a show that epitomises my favourite kind of images from this sort of work - New Theatre of Riga's production, The Sound Of Silence, which I photographed for the New Zealand International Arts Festival in 2010...

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Lost & Found #43: Adirondack State Park, New York, 2010

'Whatever you do, don't go off the trail!'

That was the last thing the helpful lady at the information centre told me, before embarking on a walk for a couple of hours near Lake Placid, in upstate New York a few years ago. Don't go off the trail. Noted.

Oh, that - and it may get a bit marshy at one point...

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The Dapto Chaser - on now at Griffin Theatre!

I mentioned a while back that I'd been working on a show with the good folks at Apocalypse Theatre, The Dapto Chaser, which has opened now at Griffin Theatre here in Sydney - so I thought this would be a good chance to have a look at some of the images from our first shoot, the rehearsal space, and the final dress rehearsal before opening...

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Lost & Found #42: Pointe-au-Baril Lighthouse, Canada

As it's Canada Day (if you factor in the date line, of course), I thought I'd post something from one of my visits back to 'the old country' where I grew up for today's Lost & Found.

This is from an area about 3h north of Toronto on the Great Lakes - Georgian Bay, to be specific, which is part of Lake Huron but practically a lake unto itself by any normal standards of measurement...

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Lost & Found #41: Opononi, Northland New Zealand, 2006

Today's Lost & Found is going back to single images for a change - though in fact this is a stitched panorama of several frames, so in a way it's more than one!  I was on a driving holiday in the Northland region in 2006, when we passed through Opononi (former home of Opo, the Friendly Dolphin!).  

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Lost & Found #40: Nico Hulkenberg at the A1 Grand Prix, Taupo 2007

This week's Lost & Found is jumping back to a weekend in Taupo in 2007 - I was there to cover the launch of a (yet-to-be-completed) film about the life of Bruce McLaren, the great Kiwi grand prix driver, and founder of the McLaren Formula One team. 

But, it turned out that my accreditation was for the whole weekend of A1 Grand Prix action, so I stayed - and this weekend, the winner of that race won the 24h of Le Mans, along with a Kiwi driver (and another Kiwi came second), so I thought it was worth taking a look at those images again to see what I found...

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Lost & Found #39: Glenorchy near Queenstown, New Zealand 2014

Today's Lost & Found is a quick exercise in contrasting weather - the same scene in New Zealand's South Island just outside Queenstown, taken with the same camera & lens combination, just three days apart over the Christmas holidays last year.

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Lost & Found #38: Sonny Rollins at the Wellington Jazz Festival, 2011

This week's Lost & Found post is from my last Wellington Jazz Festival - who are kicking off again today, over in New Zealand! 

Our major draw card in 2011 was a one-off concert with Sonny Rollins and his band at the Michael Fowler Centre. He may have been 81 (REALLY!?) at the time, but he put on a heck of a show - and as you'd expect from someone of his calibre, the band were top notch as well...

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