Anne Duffy and Meluxine in Sydney

Shoots can come together in the weirdest way.  Anne Duffy and I had been talking about shooting for a month or two, basically as soon as she found I was coming to Australia we started planning.  

She took the bus up to Sydney, and Lee Nutter was nice enough to drive me down to the train station to pick her up.  He and his wife also were a huge help in that he suggested this amazing location called Malabar Headland National Park, which, conveniently enough, is right by their all time favorite bakery for croissants.  Lee was pretty much my savior in every way in Sydney.  He made this shoot happen and pretty much every other one by giving me directions, locations, a ride, or even letting me borrow his car.  I can't think of anything I could have done without him, so yeah.  He's absolutely amazing.

But so Anne and I had done all of this planning for our shoot, and when she gets into the car she mentions that she is staying the Meluxine who I had thought was in South America still, so I jokingly say lets go get her and we can all shoot.  Ten seconds later Anne is on the Phone and Meluxine is getting out of bed, throwing on some clothing, and we are driving over to her place to pick her up before heading to the park.

What blew my mind about Australia is that when we would get to these really beautiful parks for shoots there was hardly ever anyone there, and there was basically no graffiti.  A lot of my favorite places in the U.S are almost impossible to shoot at.  Kids come and tag them with spray paint, or you have to dodges thousands of tourists on vacation.  Australia everywhere I went we could shoot pretty much endlessly without interruption.  It was amazing.

On our way into the park I saw this absolutely amazing Fig Tree and I sort of made a mental not that we were going to have to try and shoot at it if there was nobody around and either Anne or Meluxine were into the idea.  I was really into the idea because we just don't have trees like that here in the North East of North America.

We made our way down to this amazing section of beach and shot under a perfectly cloudy sky.  I love the rock formations in Australia.  They provide such an amazing back drop for models to work and and Anne and Meluxine are real pros at working with the scene.  I shot mostly with my 17-40mm to capture as much landscape as possible, but switched for a little bit when we found this really beautiful but sort of small spot to shoot in.  Playing around with the low depth of field made for some really beautiful spots.

On our way back to the car I mentioned the tree, and both of them were excited to pose on it, which was awesome.  I was a little worried that maybe they would both be sick of shooting on Fig Trees, since they are all over Sydney, and I assumed they get asked to pose on them all the time by excited foreigners like me, but that wasn't the case.  We shot pretty quickly as the tree was in a very public place, and I didn't want to attract any unwanted attention.

I love how these came out and I hope you all do too!