I felt extremely honoured to have an old friend Lars Wannop ask me to photograph him at the studio earlier this year. As an art director with a genuine curiosity for all things creative and beyond, he was such a pleasure to collaborate with in creating a portrait that would represent him best. He had sent me a reference of an image from my “Echo Chamber” series (on Instagram) and wanted to incorporate a “light playfulness”, with the idea incorporate subtle details to further prompt a curiosity about who he is. We actually ended up including some of the same flowers and some smoke as a throwback to the original reference.

Earlier this year, I collaborated with AER design to create a set of hero images for Melbourne’s “Winter at Fed Square” campaign. We worked on producing 4 final artworks, that had the flexibility to fit different print formats, digital promotions, way finding, signage and an animation. I couldn’t have asked for a more iconic Melbourne location than Federation Square to have the work displayed. Special thanks to Stray Orbit for the excellent retouching work you put in to help me hit our deadline and 77 productions for the animation.

Here are a few images and final artwork from the shoot.

I recently made another visit to the United Stated to attend the Creative Mornings Summit in Austin, Texas.  We started our road trip with Creative Mornings crews from Oakland, Montevideo, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Tijuana and Melbourne.  Following the event, I joined Phoot Camp friends David Worthington and Kristina Yamamoto for another road trip from Portland back down to LA where we drove, hiked and photographed some of the most beautiful spots in between. We had almost made it to LA, with coastal fog obscuring most of our Big Sur drive. Despite the poor visibility, it actually made for some dramatic photos which I hope to share more of soon. This was the Bixby Creek Bridge which apparently rarely ever looks like this.

I recently converted one of my old backup cameras into a “Full Spectrum” DSLR.  The process allows me to use the camera to filter out specific ranges of light using filters.  I was specifically interested in photographing in the infrared spectrum of light and brought my camera along to a weekend away with a few talented photographers in Mt. Beauty, a few hours drive from Melbourne.  This is one of my favourites from the weekend. Im thrilled with the results! I’ll update the “Projects” section of my website soon with a few more, once I get around to sitting down in front of it all!

Sharing a studio with One Fine Print has its perks. We had some fun filling up our massive office walls with some huge new prints! You can read more about them here and check out the little timelapse we made below!

A video posted by Mark Lobo | Melbourne (@marklobo) on Apr 21, 2016 at 8:21pm PDT

After wrapping up a shoot early last week, I decided to dump literally everything I had in my bag out and arrange it into a tidy flat-lay.  I think this could be the start of yet another series…

I recently joined a few Instagrammers out on Phillip Island, just under two hours out of Melbourne, for a tour of the beautiful coastline out at Cape Woolamai. There wasn’t much of a sunset like we had hoped for, but it made for the most peaceful night, shooting long exposures of the waves and seeing the silhouettes of thousands of Short-tailed Shearwaters flying above. It was so refreshing to get excited about photography outside of my professional style of work and just have some fun.  This is what I saw:

Since 2010, I’ve ended each year by wrapping up with some of my favourite moments through the photographs I’ve taken. It’s been a great year for pushing myself to experiment in new areas and styles of photography, both commercially and personally. I found myself heading in a few new directions with the primary focus being on creating new personal work, selling my work as prints and to continue to grow my portfolio photography business, “Foliolio”. Looking back on my photography from the year, it’s interesting to see how well these three things seemed to fit together and helped one another grow. This is my top 15 from 2015.

Although I spent much of my childhood in Japan, and still head back over to Tokyo at least once a year, I’ve never really had a chance to play tourist and actually explore some of the most beautiful and interesting places that Japan has to offer. This year I made a conscious effort to do just that and as a result, saw some incredible things. One of them being the beautiful deer of Nara.

I teamed up with One Fine Print who helped me get my personal work onto people’s walls, something I’ve been striving to do well for years. Not only did they do an exceptional job at that, they also got one of my prints on the air and into the penthouse of Shay and Dean, the winners of “The Block” a reality TV show about renovations with a strong focus on interior design and styling. If you’re in Melbourne, be sure to check them out on the walls of the Pop Up shop before it closes!

I continued to work on my playful food photography series, “Graze“. It’s an experimental food photography series in which I give myself some studio time and some “ingredients” to see what kind of playful food creations I can come up with. This was the result, I call it “Frankenfruit”.

Foliolio, my side-photography business which focusses on working with designers who want their work photographed well, quickly gained momentum and I worked with some incredibly talented designers. This was one of my favourites from a colourful shoot with Wild Hen on the design work they did for Fonda Mexican.

With the growth of Foliolio, I found the perfect studio to work out of. This small decision resulted in the ability to create some great work and I’m so glad I decided to find a dedicated space to work out of. It even has a space for my hammock, what more can I say!

In between shoots, things got pretty messy in the studio thanks to a new photo series “spill”, but now everything smells great (ie. like coffee)!

…and I continued to play with my food.

My main photo series of the year was “Handy“, which features creative people and what they do with their hands. One of my favourites was this one with Magdalena Ksiezak who makes adorable paper crafted creations.

Abandoning the seriousness of photography and with this new fascination with hands, I adopted a more playful approach, with a light-hearted spin-off series called, “Stuff you can’t do with Novelty Sized Hands“.

The series fed other ideas, which led to some experiments, including the idea to create an “ice sculpture” using the novelty sized hands as the mould.

I worked with friend and graphic artist, Spencer Harrison AKA Spenceroni on some promotional imagery for Hello Play, his exhibition at No Vacancy Gallery in Melbourne’s CBD. We created a series of playful photographs, showcasing Spencer’s work, all the while “playing” and experimenting as we did.

I was featured on the front cover of PDN Magazine’s January issue. It was an issue on innovation, featuring the work I created with Nate Bolt and the long exposure of his drone over the Californian desert.

A 7 hour drive from Melbourne, Do Lectures Australia once again took place in the beautiful Victorian high country in Glen Valley atPayne’s Hut.  It’s a land without phone reception or internet access, and a sky with seemingly more stars than negative space.  I couldn’t have been happier being back in the thick it all to photograph for another 6 days of incredible people, great conversation and a good community.

A photo posted by Mark Lobo | Melbourne (@marklobo) on Dec 6, 2015 at 1:37pm PST

I started to get a bit more involved with Melbourne’s photography and Instagram community. I met some great folks and got to be a tourist on Phillip Island, shooting late into the night and witnessing thousands of Short-tailed Shearwaters flying overhead. I have to say, it feels like things are coming full circle and am feeling inspired by landscapes once again. I’m looking forward to where this all heads in the new year! Playful, experimental, handy landscapes for people’s walls?

And Lucky last, this ridiculous selfie I took with Phil Ferguson aka @ChiliPhilli when we did our Handy Series shoot.

Have a great holiday season everyone and all the best for 2016!!!

If you’re a fan of the TV show The Block, you may have seen one of my leaf prints on the walls of Dean and Shay’s apartment last night!  I had known that a photographic print of mine had been used to decorate the foyer of their penthouse apartment, but didn’t really know whether or not we’d get much love from the judges. But my jaw hit the floor when judges Neale Whitaker and Darren Palmer pointed out the work and commented on how beautiful it was, likening the space to an art gallery.  I couldn’t have asked for a better debut of one of my prints to the Blocktagon!

If you’ve been interested in the print for the walls of your own home, it can be found here on the One Fine Print Website:

http://www.onefineprint.com.au/shop/autumn-finds/

You can read a bit more on how it all went down and see the other One Fine Print artists on the walls of the space here.