- Portrait of a Cormorant Fisherman 30m Underwater A couple months ago, Ballantine‘s approached me with the most amazing assignment ever: “We love what you do and want to support you as part of our Stay True campaign. Is there anything you’d like to do that you’ve never done before?” To receive such complete freedom from a client is almost unheard of – […]
- When nothing goes as planned: Do it anyways I like to do epic things, in exotic locations with amazing people – quite often on a zero budget, fuelled by nothing more than passion. As a result, things rarely… if ever, go 100% smoothly and according to plan. Over time, I have learnt that to be a good photographer you need to be an […]
- Hey Mom! I'm on Tee Vee! In 2009, I told a friend: “Mark my words! Before the age of 30, I’m going to be in a reality TV show!” At the time, I was only being half serious, but in September at 27 years old, I received an email from asian reality show Supermodel Me asking if I would be interested […]
- Hellgirl and Hurricane Von Wong – A first person POV You know that feeling when your stomach fills with concrete and the whole world slips a little left? That was my experience in September 2013 when I was unexpectedly laid off. Six months later, I would feel it fiftyfold—from the rooftop edge of a 40-story building. A habitual reader and career editor, I’m much more at […]
- How I Photographed Superheroes On The Edge Of A Skyscraper Every child has dreamed of being a superhero It’s a fantasy we’ve all had at some point. We imagine ourselves standing on the edge of a building, overlooking the city, hair blowing in the wind. As we get older, we stop dreaming. We stop believing that anything is possible because we’ve seen too much of what […]
- What It's Like To Shoot In A Real Life Disney Library Walking into Stift Admont was like entering Disney’s Beauty & the Beast library. Never before had a creative photoshoot been done in the Admont Abbey, the oldest monastic library in the world… yet here I was, standing at the entrance of what can only be described as the most magical mix of architecture and art […]
- A Stand Against Mediocrity To create great work, one must never settle for mediocrity. I like to plan my photoshoots around opportunity. Though I don’t have the luxury of having a studio or an in-house production crew at my disposal… I have managed to build, with time, a relatively large social following and numerous travel opportunities through my contracts […]
- 20$ Trick To Epic Portraiture SmugMug: “I’d like some black and white portraits of our employees doing something sporty” The first thing that comes to mind when one thinks black and white portraiture is old school, classical, traditional… but the Von Wong filter translated that into: edgy! impact! extreme! special effects! With only a couple days to pull something together, […]
- Transforming The Ordinary Into The Extraordinary Recently, I got picked up by Mamiya Leaf as one of their newest brand ambassadors and picked up Leaf Credo kit. Up until then, I had only used medium format very sparingly and mildly irresponsibly (some jumping may have occurred…), and never got the chance to really got familiar with the system. It took me a […]
- The lighting behind my shoot with Adobe Adobe’s Creative Voices: I have always loved the lighting that comes out of hollywood movies – It’s amazing to see how every character is always perfectly lit regardless of the circumstances in which they happen to be and that’s something I consistently strive for when lighting up my sets. Gear Selection: Vistek was kind enough […]
- Pyrotechnics & Capoeira in an abbey in Belgium Fire is best shot in the dark. It allows for many creative options such as painting with fire and quite simply looks better when shot against a dark background. I’ve had the chance to work with Andrey DAS to produce one epic photoshoot after another but we had never really attempted to do anything in […]
- Lighting an Octopus to tell a story ft. Pocketwizard Hypersync It’s not very often that someone comes up to you and asks you to slap some seafood on their face so when Jen Brook enlisted me to take part in her Dreamcatcher project I jumped on the opportunity. The shoot was an adventure start to finish – from sourcing our octopus, changing locations the day […]
