This is the first week where everything has felt like it’s getting back on track. I’m not sure what it is, but something positive is happening, the trip out of the valley has started.

If you haven’t heard the song that’s the title of this photo, you need to. Go here.

In February, I made the BEST decision I’ve ever made in my life; I adopted a kitten.

Meow, short for Lady Meow of Brisbane, is the most special little ball of fur. She makes my house seem like the best place in the world when I come home each afternoon. Her love helps me get through the bad days and makes the good days even better.

Strobist: 430EX @ 1/16 high above and to the right of me, 580EX @ 1/16 into stofen omni-bounce at camera height to my right.

I think this comic is a fair summary of my life:

Sometimes life makes you feel pretty awful. But thankfully, it passes and life, as always, goes on.

The breakdown of a relationship is a pretty brutal thing. It floors you. It makes you question your self worth, your value to the world. It makes you sad and it makes you ever so lonely. My last 52 week project didn’t ever get finished because of what happened in my relationship with Soph. It’s been nearly 8 months now but life is still not back to normal. We parted still loving each other, but there had been so much damage along the way that it was impossible to reconcile that and we both accepted it (eventually). We still talk every now and then and in time, we will become friends; It’s not possible to spend so much of your life together and not have a friend for life. But for now, we’re both getting on with our lives and trying to sort ourselves out.

My motivation to take photographs, especially self portraits has waned but this is something that I need to start again. It gives me something to think about during the week, something to fill my ever-thinking mind. It’s catharsis and it needs to be done. I think the first few weeks of the project might be a little ‘emo’, but I think with time, I’ll get my humour back again. I’ll be back from the dead and I’ll hopefully make you smile or giggle. And hopefully, I’ll smear myself in high fructose corn syrup at some point again.

But for now, bear with me and we’ll get this train on the tracks again.

Over the new year, my friend Iwan and I made a comedy series. The Awkward Man follows the many encounters that the protagonist Jesse has with a number of potential girlfriends. Recently separated from his childhood sweetheart, he’s learning how (and how not) to interact with women. He learns from his mistakes and makes one every episode, resulting in an amusingly awkward moment! Check it out at http://www.theawkwardman.com!

Shot in 1080p HD entirely on a Canon 5D Mk2 with ghetto lighting purchased from the hardware store Bunnings, the series had a budget dominated by catering for actors, crew and extras. We did get pretty good at making sandwiches in the end so all isn’t lost. It’s taken us nearly 5 months to edit, colour grade and do the sound but FINALLY the bloody thing is ready. We hope you enjoy it!

A friend and I entered a competition where we were randomly paired up with a band and asked to create a video clip within 72 hours. We heard the song for the first time on Friday night and after having a chat to the band and finding out the kind of clip they wanted, we went about brainstorming the clip well into the night and completing some of the pre-production. Around 65 hours later, we produced, shot, edited and colour graded a 4 minute 20 second video clip having had about 8 hours of sleep in entire time. In the end we didn’t win any of the prizes on offer but I thought it was a pretty damn awesome effort for just the two of us (considering some other teams had 8 or 9 members). Additionally, being called Team MacGyver wasn’t a coincidence, we didn’t have any of the fancy gear that most film crew own, just a nice camera (the Canon 5D MkII), lenses and a bit of ingenuity. For example, we wanted to shoot 2.35:1 but since the camera shot 16:9, we ended up having to put a piece of plastic with boundaries drawn onto it to be able to frame the video properly. MacGyver would have been proud of us.

Here’s the final product! The band loved the clip and while there are a couple of small technical things that we still notice, it was a pretty amazing learning curve for two guys who’d never shot a video clip before and we’re pretty happy with our efforts.

The last few months have been a pretty tough time for me creatively. I’m in what’s known as a bit of a funk and photography isn’t something where my heart is at the moment. I know it’s just a matter of time for me to get my interest back. But in saying that, I’ve still been doing plenty of work for other people covering weddings, band promos and portraits. I’ve also been involved in the production, filming and editing of a TV comedy series a friend and I created as well as some video clip work. I’ll get to those in a few days…

This is a promo photo I took for BugGiRL a few months ago down in Wollongong. The band were flying out for the USA as part of a massive tour a few days after this shoot and are still there at the moment. Check them out if you get a chance and you’re in any of these places in the next month or so.

I also took some photos for a young Brisbane band called Wheeler. These guys, with an average age of 13, just won a local competition against much older competition and are working hard towards developing a bigger fanbase and getting their music out. I have to say, the conversation with the two younger members Flaxton and Xane about nerf machine guns was probably one of the best I’ve ever had with a band during a photoshoot!

The Mercy Beat are an “electrifying” rock band from the inner suburbs of Brisbane (ha! I’m really funny). They play an uncompromising genre blending mix of fast rocky punk. They’ve been described as something similar to The Bronx, but they (and I) kinda disagree with that. Check them out for yourself and decide, I think it’s just downright awesome music, who cares about labels and descriptions?

For the first time, I went into a photoshoot planning only 2 photos. Normally I try and get as many good ones as I can, but this different approach let me really think about what I needed to do well before the actual event. I knew it was going to be a bunch of composites which generally require the greatest amount of planning. The next photo here was something the band had thought of and told me on the evening, thankfully there was enough room in my brain to be able to work that one out as well.

Lighting was simple in my two planned set ups, but for the previous shot we had to do a bit of thinking as it’s a 4 image composite.

left guy: 430EX @ 1/4 through shoot through umbrella very close to head, 580EX with blue gel about 1.5m back and to the right of him @ 1/1
lightning guy: 580EX @ 1/4 + 0.3 into shoot through umbrella directly above with blue gel, 430EX @ 1/2 into reflective umbrella directly below camera
surprised guy: 580EX @ 1/4 with blue gel through shoot through umbrella
right guy: same as left guy but on opposite sides.

The final image is what happens after a lightning strike. Lighting for this shot was again quite simple, just a 580EX into reflective umbrella @ 1/2 directly above and between myself and subjects with a
430EX @ 1/4 directly behind.

If anyone wants me to write up a tutorial on creating lightning or smoke in Photoshop, hit me up.

Well it’s been a long time coming but finally, an update on this blog. It’s been nearly 7 weeks since I’ve had access to the Internet at home and this blog has been on a downward spiral! Not to worry, plenty of images coming our way in the next few weeks.

First up, this is the Dawn Collective, a band I’ve photographed before but have restructured dramatically to become a two-piece.

This last one is a revisit of an older photo which I took when they were a 5 piece.

And the original:

Many thanks to Lauren and and Joseph (the provider of the Alien Bees lights I used on the day) for assisting and helping carry the generator and all those light stands.

If you are particularly observant or stalker like, you might have noticed my flickr stream only contains about 25% of what it did last week. I’ve had a bit of an artistic crisis and feel like a lot of the photos I have on there aren’t as good as I wished they were and made them private. I didn’t have the heart to delete them and I hope that whatever I add onto there in the future fills that void.

But thanks to flickr’s ingenious system of changing filenames when you change them from public to private, all of these images have now disappeared off this blog as well and been replaced with “This photo is currently unavailable”. I’m trying to figure out what the best way to get around this is so your patience is appreciated. While you wait, check out http://youshouldhaveseenthis.com, best website on the internet.

I ventured out to the Hi-Fi Bar to check out UK darling Jamie T along with his band The Pacemakers.

I turned up early to check out Ernest Ellis the support act who had the crowd reasonably entertained with some pretty down the line indie rock.

Jamie T was always going to be a different story. The crowd was excited beyond what I would consider comfortable for a photographer standing squashed against a stage but then again, the kids paid to see Jamie T and not the back of my head.

Lighting, like always at the Hi-Fi was a bit hit and miss. There’s never much white light, mostly yellows and reds mixed in with some green and blue which generally means photos end up in black and white to retain any character of a passable photo.

Brutal.
Powerful.
Loud.

Typically, not three words used to describe a Mariachi band. But those three words describe The Bronx, the US hardcore/punk band, who also released an album of pure Mariachi tracks. The Bronx returned to Brisbane, playing two sets of music, vastly different and at vastly different volumes. Mariachi El Bronx played first and it was just what you’d expect from a Mariachi band. Beautiful, catchy melodic music it was.

The band returned later in the evening and the instant they were on stage, you knew things were going to be different. From the start of their first brutal track, The Bronx destroyed the crowd and their ears. The protection offered by a barrier at the front was useless for us photographers as wave after wave of crowd surfers landed on our heads, their arms and legs flaying.

Photography was tough, mostly red and blue washes but after having disappeared off the photography radar for a month, I had a great time getting back into it.

Life has gotten in the way of maintaining this blog in the last month or so but hopefully it’ll be back into the swing of things really soon. There will hopefully be more photos and more random words that make grammatical sense while concurrently having little intellectual effect on the reader.

Until the age of 12, all I ever wanted to be was an astronaut. I read every book I could get my hands on about space travel and the solar system, I was convinced I’d be an astronaut. Then, nature took hold and I grew to the ripe old height of 6’4" ruining my chances of travelling the universe. But I dealt with it and still have a great fascination for our universe including celebrating last week’s historic 40th anniversary of the Lunar landing. Now seriously, how AWESOME is that? Consider that the lunar module had about as much computer processing power as a modern digital watch and you’ll realise what a feat it was!

Hats off to you Messers Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins!

My last trip back to Wollongong was wholly dedicated to rock gods BugGiRL. I was there to shoot some behind the scenes stuff from their latest single’s video clip and more importantly, to take some promo shots for use inside their EP. We’d already taken some pretty rock’n'roll shots last time I saw them, and we threw around a few ideas until we decided we’d try to recreate the illustrated cover that the EP was having done.

This is the final photo that we came up with (click to go to a larger version) and it’s a 2 page spread on the inside cover.

Much thanks to my usual go-to-photo-assistant-man Rich, and for Soph for creation of the awesome tomato and lettuce bread rolls the band and I consumed as the clock rolled into the very late hours of the night.

Here’s the media release from the Bugger’s record label Impedance Records. Check out the Buggers as they travel around the country!

The raw and wild slab of an EP from BugGiRL is here, produced by Mark Opitz, and ready to sizzle and burn your stereo. You can now buy it by hitting our on-line store. It will be in shops in August(Australia/Europe/UK) and October(North America). The band are currently in California recording their new full length album with Sylvia Massy. Check out some photos from the sessions at www.myspace.com/thebuggers. Finally in news from the Buggirl camp, they have announced a run of Australian shows in August and have also announced some of their upcoming European shows starting in late August, hit our tours page for the dates.

I was sent an email from Rob of The Dawn Collective. It turns out his fiance had gotten some of the DC’s band promo shots I’d taken a while ago and printed them up into huge canvas prints. Awesome-o!