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All aboard please, photographs by Grant Maiden, Wellington, New Zealand.

Generally as a photographer blur is not your friend, but there are cases where it can be helpful, for instance in this shoot I did with Victoria University, Insight Creative and their refreshed ‘Know Your Mind’ campaign.

The large image is of the ‘Guide to Undergraduate Study”, and the idea was to capture friendly students enjoying all the energy and buzziness (is that a word?!) that Wellington has to offer. To achieve this warm and inviting mood we chose to shoot at twilight to get those buses blurring and capture the golden streetlights and electric blue sky above.

The other images we shot in studio and were of a range of individual students for use on billboards, buses, bus stops and web use.

 

 

We partnered with Apollo Campervans in the July school holidays and travelled around the South Island in one of their campervans mixing some freedom camping with campground stays.

It was the middle of winter but the weather came to the party and we were rewarded with crispy blue skies and vast horizons (and not too many other tourists!)

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+ high-res version

This was a five day motorcycle safety shoot for Acc for their excellent website called Ride Forever .  Its all about, well, riding forever. I pulled in my photographer friend (and motorcycle geek)  David Hamilton and we tagged alongside the film and production company Sauce.  We had five different riders on different bikes, as well as several cars (and a truck), recreating various scenarios that motorcyclists need to think about- overtaking, following distance, cornering, all that stuff. Heres a very small handful of the thousands of images we shot.

 

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We were lucky enough to stumble across this week long gathering just outside of Luang Prabang in Laos in December. Celebrating the abundant harvest, it is an absolute riot of colour, pagaentry and ritual (and fun too of course!).  There’s dancing, a beauty pageant, rides, food, singing and an interesting ball tossing ritual which is apparently a way for potential suitors to show interest in each other.

The Hmong are an ethnic group of people from the mountainous regions of Laos, Thailand, China, Myanmar and Vietnam and there are several tribes that live in Laos, each with their own unique customs and amazing costumes.

It made our kiwi barbecues and New Years parties back home pale somewhat in comparison!

 

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A commercial job for a German power engineering company called Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen.

This is father and son Alan and Grant Brown from Sydney over in Wellington servicing the transformers at the Brooklyn substation.

 

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