on Wednesday, May 9, 2012

It comes up pretty regularly in my profession. It's an accountant sitting there going, "Excuse me. Why in the world do you need to spend so much money to go to Fiji or Tahiti or the Dominican Republic to do these shoots?

I've looked at the images and these shoots could just as easily have been done in your backyard in Auckland." And you know at some level they're right. I could do these images in my backyard in Auckland or somewhere in New Zealand where it's much, much less expensive, at least as far as the location itself - the look and feel of it.

But what they don't understand, and what I think is really important, is attitude. If I'm just shooting in a location, no matter who I am as a photographer or who you are as a photographer, if the model works everyday and they're just going to another location, it's just another day's work. There's nothing particularly special about it or at least inherently special about it. It's just another modeling job.

Take the same girl, the same shoot, the same wardrobe, fly her to Tahiti, drag her out for an hour walk through the rainforest getting to a waterfall in the back woods of Tahiti and shoot it there. Yes, it could've been a waterfall in Auckland at somebody's house in their backyard, but it will be a completely different shoot because I have different mental attitude, she has a different mental attitude, and the entire crew's excited. It's something new, different, fresh - it's not just another day's work.

I mean after all, let's be honest...it's another nude woman. How many differences are there inherently in nude women? Well I guess we can say infinite amount.

But that's the key - is that we have to try to make it become something special. So going to some place special, going to some place interesting, gets everybody's blood flowing and everybody excited about the shoot. It makes attitudes and expressions and so many other things so, so different. It's intangible.