I have recently returned to Melbourne, after being disrupted somewhat by the Covid sitch ;-)
Accordingly, I am available in Australia once more for photography of art and objects. I’ve been doing this work at the highest level for many years, for private collectors, galleries, and cultural institutions.
I can be contacted through this site if you are seeking photography and digitisation.
The latest issue of Ceramics NZ features my photo of a work by Maia McDonald from her ‘100 Ceramics’ series. McDonald included the image with her article in the magazine.
Ceramics NZ
Maia McDonald article
I was fortunate to photograph some very important Impressionist paintings for an Australian collector some months ago in Sydney. The works included Pissarro, Sisley, Signac, Monet, Rupert Bunny and John Russell.
It was essential to capture the texture of the canvases as the works were reproduced as fine art canvas prints, 1:1 ratio.
In recent months i have moved to Oakura, near New Plymouth in New Zealand, and am now based here after 20 years in Australia.
I grew up in NP, and have moved back to help out my family. Part of this involves managing the family art collection and rebooting Kreisler Gallery.
I am of course available for photography assignments, and am putting the feelers out for work across NZ. Hit me up with any enquiries.
Oakura Beach at dawn, June 2019.
So it's Sunday morning, I go for a walk around the block in a misty rain all is drenched on the streets of Bondi, and I take shots as i go with my phone enjoying the diffused light for a change from the usual hard contrast. I get home and upload the pics to Instagram.
I get home feeling inspired and make a piece of toast with smashed beetroot, sautéed carrots, and a sprinkling of parmesan and parley. It tastes really good and I decide to make another and shoot it. I need natural light and a white plate, and i style it up carefully, shooting with my Zeiss lens and old Canon. The shot kind of reminds me of Irving Penn's aesthetic - it could be the clean whites and the rough and ready food combo. I post it to the 'Gram and one friend says it resembles Groucho Marx.
Smashed beetroot and carrots on toast.
I move on to shooting some sea shells. I had been wanting to do this for a while since doing copy work of a print of some in black and white by Max Dupain, which I had shot for an auction catalogue. The pic in on my Art & Object page...
I couldn't do it exactly like Max since I had no black velvet kicking around the house, so I decide to use a circular piece of black slate I had been given as a cheese platter by Felicity Jenkins as a gift. I had to progress with daylight as I had done with the toast shot - keep the light natural. Also, I was liking circlular composition and a square crop from the morning walk, so I kept with this look.
Interestingly, if you look at the food shot and the shell study closely you can see from the 'plates' and their shadows that the lighting is the same.
Shell Study, after Max Dupain.
After the shots I got a phone call from a friend asking me to do some portraits of her son this afternoon for an acting agency. I agreed, and after the call got to thinking about how to do it, with my Fuji camera gear at my office across town. What the hell, I can use the same set up as for the still life shots - the Canon and the Zeiss 50mm, my only Canon mount lens. It should be ok, though I prefer a longer focal length.
Then I thought approach. I like Martin Schoeller's portraits of celebrities so I had a look online and found a discussion about his technique...kino flo lighting, damn, I only have Profoto strobes...I decided to look at the book i bought in Bangkok, Lighting People by Rossella Vanon. It's one of two great books on technique that I have, the other being Light Science Magic. I settled on a lighting approach, and then considered a mid length portrait. I have a postcard of a photo by Nicholas Muray of Frida Kahlo, an iconic image. I decided I would use that for inspiration.
Frida
by Nickolas Murray, wow!
Problem is, to replicate the shot above i need a grey wall, and the lighting is more complex than you think. The Muray shot is a masterpiece, taken in 1939, when colour film was in its absolute infancy (Kodachrome came out in '37).
In the time of writing I shot some portraits of Xavier. As so often happens I used the Frida pose from above but to no great success. Irregardless, here is a separate photo from the shoot that I am happy with:
Xavier Lenehan, 2017.
Here's another pic of the day, this time from the Art Gallery of NSW. I shot this last December during the Nude show, and it features Wild Man by Ron Mueck.
It was a hard work to shoot as the face almost had a 'sweet spot', a perfect angle to shoot it from, and I also wanted to to give a sense of the scale. I shot it from several angles, including from above with a ladder, and decided it worked well with a fairly wide angle lens.
Since the beginning of this year I had been considering rebooting a digitisation business, and this has eventuated with Digitisation Service Australia, here in central Sydney.
I had had a similar business ten years ago 'Viewfinder'.
Increasingly I have noticed a demand for a specialised and independent digitisation business since I returned to Sydney 18 months ago to work at the Art Gallery of NSW, and subsequently on the mass digitisation project at the State Library of NSW.
I will run Digitisation Service Australia alongside Kreisler Photography.
Introducing...
Digitisation Service Australia
I am busy doing editing and post production on a private collection of over 200 boomerangs at Carriageworks. It is a significant group of objects with some going back well over a hundred years.
I decided to feature them on a white background, which is the convention within museums. They were done using a copy stand set up with Elinchrom lighting and a Canon 5d, with a Zeiss ZE 50mm makro planar.
Screenshot of Adobe Camera Raw edit window.
