Always put the sun behind your subject. For one thing, it means they won’t be squinting in the picture. But another reason is to get cool backlight effects. Usually you can get a nice bit of rim lighting or some nice highlights on the hair, but when the sun is very low and you stick [...]

Last night Brence and I spent some time tidying up the home studio and putting up a new dark background I made of navy blue fabric. I fired off some test shots of Brence to see what it looked like – and it looks pretty good and works well in colour or b&w. We started [...]

Frederique and Oakley recently got engaged, and they took advantage of my ‘Summer Nights’ portraiture special to have some engagement portraits done. Fred told me that as well as being engagement portraits, she wanted the pictures to be a snapshot of their lives in Christchurch right now. Fred is originally from Montreal, Oakley is from [...]

I recently did a lifestyle family portrait photoshoot at the beautiful Riccarton House grounds in Christchurch. Kat and her mum Mandy were over from the UK visiting Kat’s sister Emma, who lives in New Zealand. It’s rare that these three lovely ladies are together, and Kat and Emma bought the photo session package for their mum [...]

I went to visit my friend Jos and her wee boy Seb at Hagley Park today. I had my 5D with 70-200mm lens with me and grabbed a few shots of them feeding the ducks. Seb is quite entranced by the ducks and would have liked to have petted one I’m sure!

Brence and I spent a month visiting my folks in Canada over the recent Christmas and New Year’s holidays. We took a ba-zillion photos which I have yet to sort through properly, but I wanted to post a quick pick. I took this of Brence riding the bus in Vancouver one cold rainy night. It [...]

My previous post was a selection of photos of my brother’s beautiful Cane Corso dog, Buddha. Here’s a selection of photos of his other dog, Bella (also a Cane Corso). My brother lives in Chilliwack, B.C. Canada, and is going to breed his two dogs – anyone in the greater Vancouver area who would like [...]

My brother Mike lives in Chilliwack B.C. Canada and has two utterly gorgeous dogs. I was visiting for the holidays and Mike requested some professional portraits of his dogs for his website – www.canadiancanecorso.com – where he intends to promote the breed and his upcoming litters of purebred puppies for sale. His dogs Buddha and [...]

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you’ll have seen quite a few photos of my partner Brence. Being the partner of a photographer means you wind up getting your photo taken A LOT, but this time it was by request! Brence’s brother was visiting and they asked me to take an informal [...]

I’ve been overseas in Canada for a month with my partner visiting my family over the Christmas/New Years holidays, and a couple of days ago we made the lonnnnnnnnng trip back to New Zealand (via an 8-hour layover in Sydney – yikes!). We had a new Canon 50mm 1.4 lens with us that so far [...]