I’ve recently been diving deeper into the captivating realm of wine and other bottle photography, focusing particularly on showcasing the incredible work of designers at Foliolio both in Melbourne and interstate. I wanted to share a few of my recent favourites from these designers, who worked on the branding and label design. Click through to delve deeper into the designer’s portfolio and show them some well-deserved support. More of my wine and bottle photography can also be seen here. Cheers! 🥂
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.
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!!!
This is something awesome that I hope you can all get behind. I photographed a new, hip hop inspired, hand lettered, letter pressed charity calendar, with contributions from a range of talented Australian designers. All proceeds go towards supporting Heaps Decent in their efforts to empower, inspire and educate disadvantaged Australian youth through music workshops. The calendar is a collaboration between Melbourne Designer, Sass Cocker (Ask Alice Stationery) and students of Old School New School, beautifully letter pressed by Amy Constable of Saint Gertrude Letterpress.
or if you’re in Melbourne on Saturday, you can head along to the launch party for a bit of Hip Hop and tacos, not to mention live letterpress and hand lettering:
Hip Hop Hooray – 2015 Charity Calendar Launch Party
All Day Donuts
29th November 2014
11am – 3pm
12 Edward Street, Brunswick
After hearing about the work I was doing with Foliolio, my Melbourne based portfolio photography business for designers, Jenica from Notely got in touch about working together on the photography for her new range of ‘Simple, Sustainable Stationery’. The idea for the Notely was something that I really wanted to get behind. Not only was the Australian made range environmentally sustainable but it also worked in collaboration with local artists for some of it’s cover artwork, with a solid focus on quality. We decided to go for a very clean and simple style of product photography, to suit the brand.  Here are a few of my favourite images from the shoot:
