APPA Awards Entries

No wedding today so I thought I’d post my entries in the Australian Professional Photography Awards – the APPA’s. The awards are being held next weekend in Brisbane.

This year I’ve entered some unusual images. Everyone who has seen them have been very impressed and common agreement is that I am either going to do extremely well, or bomb out completely. One other photographer said he wouldn’t be surprised if I got named Australian Photographer of the Year. It all depends on who sits on the judging panel when my prints come up to be scored.

In addition to the prints being carefull selected and Photoshopped, this year I also paid special attention to the papers I used. I printed them all myself and my studio is littered with versions that didn’t make the cut.

The first image has a real painterly feel and was printed on a specialist rough, heavyweight, watercolour like paper from Innova called Roughtex.

I love this image of the shoes. The final version is slightly different to this one with things like the writing removed from the shoes but I think it’s perfect. It reminds me of a a ManRay style image. The paper was an everyday commerically available Kodak Heavy Weight Matte Paper.

This image is definitely something different although printed on the same Kodak paper as the above image. I initially produced the image in response to two things. I had noticed a trend in wedding photography and wedding albums to be very much in a fashion shoot style. This was being carried through to people winning awards for wedding albums that had very few or no images included of the wedding ceremony. I thought it was crazy.

Then I shot a wedding that was one of the most emotionally charged weddings I had ever been to. The bride and groom had postponed their wedding after the bride’s mother had a severe stroke. When she had recovered sufficiently the new wedding date was announced and the mother declared she would walk her daughter down the aisle. And she did. One agonising and exhausting step after another.

From the celebrant to the drinks waiters standing by and of course the congregation of guests, it seemed that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

How could I capture the spirit of the wedding, the couple and their families and wrap it up in a single image. Obviously this is a
montage or collage of a number of images from that ceremony. The result is a bright, and bold abstract that, to me, sums up the emotion, confrontation, love, hope and happiness of that wedding.

I have wanted to take this last image for years. I’ve had it in my head just waiting for the right bride and groom to come along. I don’t normally take set up shots like this and capture brides and grooms largely as they are. But this couple were fun and totally up for it. So how did I get the groom flying? Not telling just yet. The paper used was Innova Bookart Smooth Cotton.

Fingers crossed untill next weekend