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RE the injury, it was my own silly fault for not paying enough attention to where I was going. To cut a long story short on my first run of the first day on the snow I crashed into a ditch and did a good job of pulling a muscle in my side/back. I’m starting to feel better now though so hopefully I’ll be back on a board within a week or so.
The models in the following shots are good mate of mine and room mate for 3 months (9 years ago) Mike, and another fellow Aussie, Eddie - cheers guys! Without further ado, here is Coronet:
Mike on a rail:
The Coronet base building:
The view:
And a few of Mike & Eddie being part snowboarders, part fashion models!:
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The first thing that hit me on exiting the terminal was the COLD, and yes it does need to be capitalised, my appetite immediately turned into a fat Italian mumma, saying things to me such as “you need to eat” “you have to get fat” “insulation is gooood”. So after a breakfast of a cottage pie, blueberry muffin and 3 piece feed from KFC I was finally off.
The highlights on the way down being the very windy Mt John, home to the largest telescope in the country and also the fastest recorded wind speed (256kpm until the wind speed sensor broke) and the very very very BLUE Lake Pukaki.
Here are some shots:
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Anyways we got our lock fixed now so it’s all good. Found this sign, which made me laugh:
Seems that if you want to get up to mischief now is the time to do it.
Next up are a couple aerial snaps, first one of a road winding through trees, second one of a house we came across on fire and third is just a general pretty shot of some sugar cane farms:
When I haven’t been up in the air, scurrying across rooftops or laughing at funny signs I’ve been taking some advantage of the river outside our doorstep to snap off a few sunset shots:
First a word on the models, what a pair! Bart has been at me for quite some time now (he says about 2 years and I’m not arguing with him) for us to do a shoot together and I’d previously had a very successful shoot with Dee & we were both keen to work together again. So when the two decided to do a shoot together in Brisbane it worked out great for all of us.
Bart actually drove up from Armidale to fit in with the weekend I had off from Aerial shooting (which has since turned into 5 weeks off, but that’s another story) which was a mighty effort and about ties for the most effort a model has gone to to work with me for a tfp shoot! The other contender would be Jacinta who flew up from Melbourne, sure she had further to go but a flight is a lot less pain than an all day drive. Anyways, not only did Bart drive up from Armidale but he organised a collection of literally hundreds of inspiration shots. To Dee I gave the task of hunting down a gym for the second half of the shoot which she completed successfully. So all in all I had bugger all preparation (besides mental) to do for this shoot, the models did the lot!! Wish that happened more often I can tell you…
On the day I think it’s safe to say that the three of us worked our asses off. From waking at 2:00am to make it down to Byron for a sunrise we shot through to about 11am and then made our way leisurely back up to Brisbane, we ended up shooting at the gym until around 3am the next morning, so it was a 24+hr day. Mighty effort!!
These first shots are just from the beach section of the shoot, and just the handful I’ve managed to edit up so far, there are still many other winners in there. I started off with a very simple lighting setup of only my metz 60 ct4 on a tripod, using manual exposure settings to get that nice dark background. For those wanting a bit more info on this basically I put the flash in place, took a test shot with the models in their rough positions and then adjusted the aperture until I had the models exposed correctly, then adjusted shutter speed until I had the background exposed how I wanted it. These shots took only a fairly small amount of post processing because the contrast ratio was already about what I wanted by being able to balance the flash with the ambient light.
However my Metz soon failed, as I was to work out when I got it home the plug on the sync cord had become faulty so my camera wasn’t able to relay the order to the camera to flash. So we then had to settle for an even simpler lighting setup - that would be my old friend simple natural light. We were lucky in that it was a very cloudy morning so for the most part we had a huge softbox in the sky to work with. These shots typically took a little more post work as instead of flash I had to use photoshop techniques (mainly dodge & burn) to bring out what I wanted to be brought out.
Without any further ado let me introduce the models:
Bart - http://www.modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=184064
Dee - http://www.modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=385512
And on to the photos:
Ok, got back from Asia a week or so into Jan with the idea of chillin’ for a couple months and then heading back over to the land of plenty. Was here a couple weeks when my old aerial photography client rang me up and said he had some work for me. I initially knocked him back as I’d had enough living out of a suitcase just recently and just wanted to watch the cricket. But then the bastard rang back with an offer to pay me almost 2.5 times my previous salary.
Well I’m not much of a material kinda guy but this meant I’d be getting paid 4X my normal stock income for the period of work with them so I caved. A couple days later I found myself speeding the client’s ford Falcon down from Brisbane to Melbourne for some work in Ballarat. First a word on the car…did the clowns at Ford actually DRIVE the thing when they released that car? The Ford Falcon is supposed to be an Australia icon but as the guy who used to work on the suspension in my rx7 said “this thing was all over the road like dogshit!”. I used to be an idiot hoon, I’m now a…swift driver. But I’d be dammed if I’d take that thing any faster than about 130 - it just didn’t feel safe.
Sorry you true blue types but I’m going to stick to my Japanese cars who’s manufactures actually know what HANDLING is.
I’ll add that LP had already purchased the license for the image on one of my stock sites, this would have allowed them to quite legally use it in the manner in which they wished to but they chose to contact me and offer me a further generous payment as they felt the stock payment was too low. Makes me feel guilty now that I bought that locally ‘produced’ (photocopied) Lonely Planet Cambodia guide book!
So lookout for the 2009 Blue list which will have the following image on it’s cover:
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