Matamaka: To Spritz or not to Spritz?
As a photographer and retoucher, I love glass. The clarity, reflections, and refractions create amazing opportunities to capture something beautiful. Thus it’s always a pleasure to do a hero bottle shot, a shot that is specifically to make the product look as good as possible. A while back I was tasked with doing the Hero shot for Matamaka Beer, a brew made in New Zealand for the Kingdom of Tonga. They required two shots – one ‘straight’ shot, with no glorification or distractions, and one ‘spritzed’ shot, or in other words, looking like it had just come out of the chilly bin at the beach, ready to drink.
The first shot was no real hurdle, with a bit of back lighting, superimposing shots, and a fair amount of retouching it was looking pretty good.
The second shot was a bit more of a challenge. Prior to this, I have dodged spritzing a fair bit, using pre-shot droplets and overlaying them onto the subject. Due to the bottle shape, and the quality of end product needed, that process wasn’t going to hold up. After a fair amount of researching with water, I found it was just too light a liquid to hold any sort of desirable shape for any length of time. Gelatine was found to be a good mix, thickening up the water, making it ‘glob’ together and stay there. To cut a very long (and probably quite tedious for some readers) short, after quite a lot of fiddling, experimenting, and retouching, a final product was achieved that I think looks pretty damn good.
The best thing about it is that now my systems are in place for a repeat shot. Where this took me the best part of 2 days to achieve, now that I’ve found what works (and what doesn’t), it would now take drastically shorter time frames to do it again with another bottle. Onwards and upwards!
Biking: Back to the dirt.
Mid 2009 I joined up to an exciting, fast paced, and fresh community called CouchSurfing. It’s a great principle – you create a profile, state what type of person you are and what type of person you want staying on your couch, and hey presto, suddenly you’re inundated with about 5 requests per day from people around the world needing a place to crash for a night, two nights, or a fortnight in the case of a particular German. It’s an amazing way to make friends and contacts around the world, and I’m hoping when it’s my turn, they’ll return the favour.
In March I had the pleasure of hosting Robin and Jia, a couple from Singapore, who are in the process of living the dream – driving around New Zealand in a van with a dirtbike in the back. You can check out their blog at www.beyond-the-cubicle.com. Amazing people, they are rivals for the best couchsurfers I’ve ever hosted. They initially stayed for a week, after which they headed off to the Bay of Plenty. They left behind, amongst other things, a present of a pair of dirtbiking gloves, with the message ‘Stay Frosty’. I put them on my dressing table, thinking ‘I’ll never use those… I’m a sports biker now.’
A week later and I was sitting in bed, staring at them, recounting all the adventures I’d had back in the day with my KLX 250S dirtbike (see ‘A Wet Weekend‘, and ‘New Zealand on a (small) Motorbike).
‘I could do it’ I mused. ‘I could do it… buy a cheap road legal dirtbike, and get back into it’. I disregarded the thoughts as mid sleep nonsense.
Two weeks later, I was in Putaruru, test riding a KLR250. ‘This feels good’ was about all my head could process, as I revelled once again at the glorious fun that is a single cylinder.
No idea what I’m talking about with all the bike terms? This is the latest addition to the garage – a 1996 KLR250.
My aim is to get onto the dirt at least once a month, as last time I was in possession of an off road bike, I didn’t use it anywhere near it’s full potential. To record and preserve my progress at getting back to the dirt, I’m taking my helmet cam with me on every ride.
First up was the 42nd Traverse, in the Tongariro National Park. This is a 40+ km track with several river crossings, and some amazing terrain to ride over. It also has plenty of clay at the start, not a good thing for a returning noobie like me. Here’s what happens when you hit clay at a bad speed, bad stance, bad attitude, and bad tyres.
With night quickly closing in, we sped through the whole ride, which was fun in it’s own way, but I’m going to have to get back there at some stage for a more leisurely take on it! Here’s a few snaps of the day!
Scratchings: Back to the drypoint
Wow. It’s been just over 4 weeks since my last post! Shame on me… I guess it’s been a month of peculation, speculation, and meditation. Yeah right. I’ve just been maniacally running around living 4 lives at once, balancing army commitments with my design job commitments with my freelance commitments as well as attempting to keep things afloat on the home front too.
But any way, this post isn’t just excuses and apologies – it’s also an update on where I am with my personal art. All too often I’ve found over the last couple of years that I’ve had no time to develop myself in the direction I want to go, it’s been more of a water effect – the canyons of life steering me to where my attention should be. Keeping with that metaphor, this year thus far has felt like an eddy – a spinning whirlpool trapped behind a obstacle in the river, forcing the water to make several laps of the area before rejoining the current. Can’t exactly say what it’s waiting for right now, but be assured, it’s waiting. Only a couple more laps to go.
In the mean time, I’m getting back to what I love: Ink, Paper, and varying themes of them. This weekend I finally had a chance to sit down and dip my hand again in drypoint print – a favorite technique from my university days. The result wasn’t the best, clearest, or engaging I’ve ever had, but it’s a starting point, a stake in the gr0und, and here is my journal to record my progress. I’m fairly sure the blury, monoprint effect is due to having too much surface water on the paper before printing, not helped either by using water soluble ink (hey – it’s $10 a tube, opposed to $60 for the solvent based…). Stick around to see the developments!
Regal Salmon: Mobile Deliciousness
This one landed on my desk a little while ago now, but it’s only been recently that the client has been able to send through images of the finished product. Regal Salmon is a well known and respected brand in New Zealand, selling packaged Salmon in supermarkets with an emphasis on quality, freshness, and goodness. The king salmon they breed are raised in the pristine waters of Marlborough Sounds, giving superior taste, texture, colour, and a higher level of Omega 3 and other nutrients.
Their previous vehicle livery featured a large ‘wave’ of fish sweeping in from the rear – very closely aligned with their branding, but it didn’t do much for the tingling of taste buds – and let’s face it, that’s what we want food advertising to do.
A week of designing, adjusting, amending, and a liberal amount of retouching/fudging, and this was the result. You’ll see it rolling around town if you live in beautiful sunny Nelson (if this was a perfect world I’d be living there) – home of all good New Zealand Salmon.
Lenses: Back in the good ol’ days…
After owning a Canon EOS 450d for a week (see previous post for general excitement about it) I was already starting to find ways to work around the shortcomings of an average factory lens, a very small photography budget, and a overly-high expectation of lens performance.
Click here to read my quest.
Canon EOS 450d: Grand Promises
Four years ago, almost to the day, I purchased a Fujifilm s6500fd 6.3mp camera. It was my pride and joy through my last year of uni, a cut above the typical student point and shoot digital cameras, and most important of all – it made me look like a real photographer. This amazingly designed, well crafted camera saw me through many adventures, the occasional soaking, hundreds of photo shoots, and was my faithful companion for most hours of most days. Needless to say, I think of it in high regard.
But the world keeps turning, and I keep growing older, wiser, and more demanding. As the in-house photographer and retoucher at Curious Design, working with 6.3 mega pixels whilst trying to achieve a billboard size photo proves to be a tad difficult. So, finally I got my savings together, and splashed out.
Doing my dutiful research, it came down to a choice between the Canon EOS 450d, or the Nikon D60. The Nikon definitely had the edge over the Canon in the weight and size department, but I never actually got to use one. I think in the end this was the deciding point for me – the EOS range is quickly becoming the ‘iMac’ of the photography world, and thus can be found everywhere, with plenty of equipment for it, and a support network to boot. Not to mention there’s a big billboard I see from my office window everyday glorifying the EOS 450…
After looking around for the cheapest retailer I could find, and a bad experience involving a LONG wait in the shop, and no actual EOS appearing, I was recommended Pro Gear in Newmarket. As soon as I walked in, I felt like it was a real photography store. It had that clean, plasticy smell that photographers love, and a long row of camera shelves surrounded a long table covered with inspiring photography books. It took 30 minutes of discussion to work out that not only these guys knew their stuff, they didn’t charge the world for it. I walked out the door with a new camera, a basic lens, 4gb SD card, and a free camera bag feeling chuffed at the $200-less-than-retail price tag.
Due to having to wait for the battery to charge, I was only able to have a quick play with the camera in the evening. My initial impressions is of a comprehensive, yet slightly clunky interface – quick photo taking, but it seems to be a bit of a hassle to adjust and play with the settings, and not terribly intuitive. This is probably due to me coming from a comparatively simple digital camera, and an even more simple film camera – no doubt it will all become obvious with time, and reading the manual will probably help a bit too.
Ultimately, I can’t wait to use it. In fact, I might go on a bit of a twilight cruise tonight to have a play. Wish me luck.
Taupo Track Day Madness
Ever since I made the upgrade from my KLX250 (a street legal dirtbike) to the Ducati Monster 600, I’ve been itching to have a go at a track, to let it rip, get to the end of the throttle, and not have to worry about the blue and red lights appearing behind me. Red Baron, where I brought my first bike, decided to hold a track day at the Taupo track, coincidentally timed for my birthday! Click Here for more!
Distillerie Deinlein: Purity in a Bottle
One of my main jobs at Curious Design is to photograph, retouch, and illustrate products that don’t exist yet in real life for use as ‘Hero’ images – imagery of the product that summarises what it’s about, the theme, social placing, and all round ‘Aura’. They are designed to inspire, to ignite imagination, and to get a bit more viewer response than a plain, white background shot would normally achieve.
For a long while we’ve been doing work for Distillerie Deinlein, a boutique New Zealand distillery, that proudly hand make some of (if not THE) best liqueurs in New Zealand. One of their more recent projects to have been released is the Eau De Vie range, a range of beautiful fruit liqueurs that have even converted me, a staunch beer and whisky lover.
Here’s the Hero image I did for the project – with the intention for it being set in a modern bar, demonstrating it’s purity and clarity, appealing to 30-40 year old sophisicated professionals.
Kingsland Martial Arts: Kick Ass
One of my resolutions this year was to get back into martial arts. Everyone knows a club isn’t a club without a club logo, so I was quickly snapped up to design it. Here‘s the full story and the result!
New Years: Werewolf Hunt
Vague plans for my New Years didn’t come to fruition, leaving me strung high and dry for one of the most important events of the year. So, frustrated and annoyed at life, I packed my bag with a couple of bits and pieces, and hit the road on the Ducati. Having only brought it a month prior, this was her first open road trip, and boy was I looking forward to chewing up my frustration with many effortless miles.
Read the full story here
