Work in Progress: Maeve Woodhouse

Over the past few months I've been trying valiantly to work my way through a huge backlog of retouching. I would estimate that for every hour of shooting there is about 3-4 hours of editing, file processing and retouching that follows. To be honest it's quite demoralising because I find it almost impossible to keep up, and as a result some personal shoots just fall by the wayside. With fashion shoots in particular you have to have a quick turnaround - it's fairly pointless producing imagery that's already out-of-date by the time people see it. One of my goals for 2010 is to sort out this post-production overload... somehow.

The image above is from an editorial fashion submission I shot way back in July.

Stylist: Darya Bing
Make-up Artist: Aimee Graham
Model: Maeve Woodhouse @ Clyne

Monocle: Prix Pictet 2009

Congratulations to Nadav Kander for winning Prix Pictet 2009.

I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Nadav at Fotofest in Wellington back in 1998. His attention to detail and passion for the photographic medium is truly awe inspiring.

Ben Watts

Paolo Roversi

Legendary fashion photographer Paolo Roversi talks about creativity.

Backstage at NZFW

Over the next few days I'll be processing and uploading heaps of backstage photos I shot during New Zealand Fashion Week. You can find them at www.bulletmag.net.

The photo above was taken just before the Kate Sylvester show and features Tia Woods from Clyne.

BTW: If you like this blog you can join the Aaron K Photography Facebook fan page (www.facebook.com/aaronkphotography.info) and receive post updates in your news feed.

Ricochet: Obsidian Dreams

The latest Ricochet campaign has just been released. It's called Obsidian Dreams and features the stunning Stella Maxwell.

As you can probably imagine the set required a fair amount of time and effort to construct. First we erected two walls to form a corner and attached 3 large sheets of aluminium to them. Then we built a shallow pool about 4 metres square using timber and 2 layers of black polythene. The pool was filled with about 5cm of water. Of course all of the electrical gear in the studio had to be elevated just in case the pool walls gave way at any point (they didn't).

Lighting this set was quite tricky because both the steel walls and the water were reflective. After a few lighting tests I found that I actually liked how the strip light was flaring off the metal walls - so from that point on it was just a matter of finding the right balance between the top light and the fill, and controlling the flare as much as possible.

Stella was an absolute trooper. It was a long day and she was standing or kneeling in freezing cold water for fairly long periods of time. She didn't complain once. In fact Stella had the kind of infectious energy that kept everyone buzzing. It also helped that we could see immediately that the photos were looking wicked.

I'm pretty stoked with the end result. These shots are definitely heading for my print portfolio.

Client: Ricochet
Photography: Aaron K
Styling: Rebecca Maguire
Make-up & Hair: Emma Peters
Model: Stella Maxwell @ Red 11

The Cove

I went and saw The Cove last night at the Academy Cinema. It's a powerful and heart wrenching documentary that reveals how Japanese fishermen from the town of Taiji capture and kill 23,000 dolphins every year. The main motivation for this horrifying atrocity is financial (no surprises there) as they can sell captured dolphins to marine theme parks around the world for up to US$150,000 each. Dolphins that aren't sold are herded into a small bay and brutally slaughtered for their meat. As you can imagine, watching this is on the big screen is absolutely horrifying. There is no way in hell I will ever visit a marine theme park now that I know what's actually going on behind the scenes.

This is the sort of movie that should really be compulsory viewing for every single man, woman and child - and especially for the Japanese people. Maybe then there would be enough of a public outcry to halt this annual dolphin slaughter.