The Importance of Personal Projects

I've always wanted to photograph our vets around ANZAC day, but generally I leave it too late to organise.

This year I approached several RSAs around January but heard nothing back. I gently persisted in my requests, and received a reply at the last minute stating that if I was prepared to shoot immediately after the dawn ceremony, I could set up my portable studio in a nearby hall.

Why was I so keen to photograph our vets this year? Because many are at an age where there would be few additional opportunities. They also make great subjects. I gave no direction on how to pose, but they all projected a dignified charisma that the camera loved. Despite my father and brother serving in the US and NZ Navies respectively, I'm as far as you can get from a military person as possible. 

Technically, these photos were very simple - I placed large octobox to my left angled down 45 degrees. I erected my collapsible backdrop in a corner and provided a stool for the subjects. So I wasn't after a technical challenge. But I wanted to mix up my portfolio. I wanted to the opportunity to meet people who had lived rich and fulfilling lives and who had interesting stories to tell. These guys are characters

Personal projects keep me fresh and engaged. I loved this experience. I'm looking for another project to sink my teeth into. If you have any ideas, get in touch

One for You, One for Me

It's easy to repeat the same kind of photos over and over again, and sometimes it's necessary to do so. If someone needs a headshot for her website, she doesn't want to be the guinea pig for fish-eye experiments.  But how do you push yourself to be more creative?

It all depends on where you are in your photographic journey. For some photographers, using a speedlight for the first time is their way of building their creative muscles. I'm sure that for a jaded a commercial photographer, doing any personal work that isn't bound by a client's requirements could get the juices flowing.

Some need to improve their technique. Look for mistakes in the frame and fixing them in subsequent images. For others it's improving their directing skills or patter with their subject. But the difficulty is finding talent long-suffering enough to allow you to indulge your experiments. As my son gets older, he's less patient with my demands to use him as my muse.

I wanted to further explore the stroboscopic capabilities of my Godox lights. I had taken stroboscopic images of Evie on her pole, and now I wanted to see how much further I could take things without the talent being anchored to a piece of equipment. And I wanted to do so with coloured gels.

While people like Evie get excited by the opportunity of unique pictures for her portfolio, others just want shots that make them look pretty on Instagram. How could I find people willing to help me out? Every time, I thought I'd found someone keen, they'd vanish once they learnt what I wanted to do. 

In the end I reached out to an agency. I asked if they had a model that needed photos for her portfolio, and explained that I would take them, but that I'd also like to take more experimental work for my own collection. They would get what they needed and I would in turn get what I wanted.

And did it work? Yes, but I would have loved more time. I think I'm still figuring out the opportunities this technique offers. I could explore it for years before I felt it had exhausted it. Some shots I was really happy with:

Others I felt had potential:

And some didn't work at all:

I wish I'd had more time. I'd like to have tried difference the strobe speeds and durations and different colour combinations. But I guess I don't need to do this in one session. These things take time

Thanks to Vicki and Voda Model Management for helping me out.

Portable Studio

In my dream world, I'd have a large studio with 10 Profoto studio strobes, an infinity wall, two assistants, a digital tech, an in-house MUA and a couple of Hasselblads. And people would come to me to be photographed.

In the real world, I often need to travel to where my subject is. It's important that I can be flexible.

When Rhara told me that she wanted to be photographed with glitter I knew everything I needed was in my kit. We were taking photos in the old Ladies Powder Room at the Trentham Racecourse. There was no white wall, or any uncluttered background space. So I hung a grey backdrop and got to work. Here's a shot of the environment from Rhara's phone:

Two speedlights with gridded Flashbenders and different coloured gels lit Rhara while behind her was a bare concealed flash aimed at the backdrop. 

We experimented with different colour combinations. This one used Pink from the right with red on the background:

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Blue on the background, a different blue from the right and a red from the left:

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Even with such a simple setup, we got a variety photos with different colours and moods, and both of us were delighted with the end results.

Cindy Sherman's Last Day: Photography and the Art of Self-Doubt

I always took Thoreau's "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" literally - he meant people with penises as far as I was concerned. He was talking about men trapped in society's expectations, unable to express their own creative and authentic selves - slaves to the role of husband and provider. It seemed to me that somehow he managed to predict the modern white collar world ... the cubicles, the office politics, the slow, soul-destroying tediousness of ambition for middle-management and beyond. Or a blue-collar world, on the factory assembly line or down a mine with no way out except the grave.

But feminism has taught us that women have traditionally had their own kind of desperation, which was born from a powerlessness solely defined by marriage and motherhood, whether it was wanted or not. But in the contemporary world, women have joined the rat-race and can participate in both its rewards and its punishments. Ironically, the pressures of modern-day economics mean that a dream of being a mother at home with her children is unattainable for many women who long for that life.

This afternoon I visited the Cindy Sherman exhibition's last day at City Gallery, and what struck me most yet again - and what has always drawn me to her - was the work that explored the sheer desperation of the suburban housewife in middle age, her looks fading in a world that only cares about youth. Sherman's self-portraits have an incredible range, and I'm simply astounded that beyond the irony and the layers of artifice, the emotional core is so strong. For every haughty socialite secure in her place in the hierarchy, there's another one who is no longer certain in a world that no longer reveres her. Any self-confidence the subject subject once had is fading.

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But self-doubt isn't only about the loss of power by the privileged. For the suburban housewife, it can simply be a diminishing of her youth, and this I think is probably close to home for Sherman herself. Her interview with the Domion-Post last year was revealing:

"I think about maybe doing some plastic surgery, like a neck lift. I mean I toy with these things in my head and I'm, like, reticent to do any of it. I mean I've done Botox, things that are temporary. Well, I don't do it when I'm working, I need my expressions when I'm working."

She trails off momentarily, then says: "It's rough being a woman and ageing in this day and age."

Sherman's work grapples with the complexity of feminism, as can be seen in the wide variety of women that she plays. It's all very well to take a doctrinaire stand for a set of beliefs and say that looks don't matter, but the nuances of being human remind us that what we feel on an emotional level can be at odds with our professed values. Insecurity and anxiety aren't suddenly erased by ideology.

That every Sherman photograph is a self-portrait - or at least a portrait of Sherman in character - is a testament to her powers of empathy, even when a portrait is not designed to be sympathetic in itself. She is a chameleon who is the subject for as long as she poses for her camera. In the pieces that I love most, she shows us that the mid-life crisis isn't the exclusive domain of the male. We've seen that in exhibitions of local photographer Jenny O'Connor. Her "Visible: 60 Women at 60" takes this idea even further down one path, but it's a celebration of the women who have embraced their age. In Sherman's uneasy characters, you see their inner world powerfully externalised.

So often I see or read about photographers who call their work fine art, but it doesn't say anything about the world we live in or the artist's relation to it. My personal definition of true art means that it has to boldly engage what it means to be human ... even when the genre is landscape.