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Blog Archive

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

Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: The Earth From Above (2006), Te Karakia (2008), & Michael James Manaia (2012)

A few different events today - a glimpse of the huge outdoor exhibition that opened Waitangi Park in 2006, Yann-Arthus Bertrand's photo series The Earth From Above, which I'd guess might be the Festival's biggest free event ever?  Certainly the biggest I saw, in my time!  It always seemed to be packed, and it was quite a large area - almost a shame it didn't become a permanent exhibition there.

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: The Wild Bride (2012)

As I mentioned yesterday, Kneehigh Theatre are one of my Festival favourites - and a company I'm always happy to see when I get a chance in other cities, too.  From Tristan & Yseault to Brief Encounter and The Wild Bride, every show I've seen has a wonderful warmth to it - so it was great to have them back in Wellington in 2012, their second visit from their home in Cornwall.

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: The Rehearsal / Playing The Dane (2012) and Festival Setup (2010)

I should probably point out that, in doing these 'history' blogs, I'm obviously skipping over huge swaths of material.  Given that each of the five Festivals I photographed represents some 30,000 images (yes, EACH) it's hard to go back through and pick, say, 20 to represent a day in the life.  So, sometimes I'm picking a show I liked, or one that photographed particularly well; or just one where I think the images weren't seen by many people at the time, for whatever reason.

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: Tea, A Mirror Of Soul (2006), Seven Deadly Sins (2008) and Festival Setup (2012)

Well, now that the Festival is rolling, it would usually be a tightly scheduled 24-day marathon for me, jumping from rehearsal to rehearsal to opening night function to post-show function, with the possibility of seeing something in between those two - and from looking back over the years, there were certainly a number of days like that!

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: Festival Setup (2008 & 2012)

Even after the Dawn Ceremony is over, the preparations continue!  The pressure is certainly on in the final week leading up to the shows starting, but sometimes the opening nights are staggered so as not to conflict with each other too much - so today, we have a few more preparation images before the shows kick off in full.  Enjoy!

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: Dawn Ceremonies! (2004 - 2012)

I'm cheating slightly on this post - these didn't all happen on Feb 21 each year (which is tomorrow anyway, of course!), but the Dawn Ceremony / Powhiri to welcome the visiting artists is such an integral part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival that it only makes sense to see images from them together in one place, really.

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: The Lindbergh Flight rehearsals (2008)

Continuing on from my previous post - here you can see the progress over a week of rehearsals for The Lindbergh Flight / The Flight Over The Ocean, the opera at the New Zealand Festival in 2008.  As I mentioned then, the first image image here is a surprising match for one I took a week before, when we were in the rehearsal hall!

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: The Trial of the Cannibal Dog rehearsals (2008)

Sometimes, images are needed for an upcoming Festival production before it actually happens - so I'm off to the rehearsal hall to capture the stage it's at currently, in this case for the programme people will get on the night of the show.

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: Festival Setup (2008)

I always have one big folder of images on my hard drive during the Festival that's just labelled "Festival Setup"; it's the catch-all for photos of people building stuff, wiring things, whipping the whole thing into shape.  And it's important, because years later when there's a new crew working on the Festival, it can be that the images are the only record we have of how a certain temporary venue was situated on the site, where the power came from, or how a stage went into Shed 6, and so on. It's also often part of the early publicity for the Festival - giving people the sense that something is happening, in the weeks before shows actually start to happen on stages, building the anticipation.  At least, I like to think so!

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Today in New Zealand International Arts Festival history: The Lindbergh Flight rehearsal (2008)

With the New Zealand International Arts Festival coming up soon (from Feb 21 - Mar 16 this year), and as this is the first one I'll miss since I started working with them in 1998, I thought I'd have my own festival of photos, from the time I spent as their sole photographer from 2004 to 2012.  I'm going to have a look through my archives, and pull out a few - but not TOO many - images that might not have been seen at the time, but that I like looking back at now.

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A Field Guide To The Birders of Southern Ontario (new Kage Collective post, with the Fuji X-Pro 1)

Just in time for Australia Day this weekend, here's an essay of images of...Canada, last summer.  New today on the Kage Collective site, it's the first essay for 2014, and it's one of mine!  Stop on over and have a look...

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Lorde at Goodgod Club, Sydney May 2013 (with Fuji X-Pro 1 & 60mm f/2.4 lens)

With the Grammys coming up, and New Zealand singer/songwriter Lorde nominated and  performing at the ceremony, it reminded me to take another look in my archive & find a few photos I took at her showcase gig in Sydney, back in May of this year - before anyone really knew just how big her fame would get!

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