Moeraki Madness

It was a 4 am start for my voice-activated-lightstand Mike and me the other day.  I had a shoot for Tourism Waitaki that Mike was helping me with; We were due to kick off with some models at 0900, but we thought we might as well get there at dawn, to get some of our own pictures of the famous boulders. They're a bunch of beautiful spherical stones, said to be the remains of eel baskets, kumara and calabashes washed ashore from the wreck of the ancestral canoe Arai-te-uru. The less romantic explanation is that they're septarian concretions that have been freed from surrounding mudstone by coastal erosion. I know which I prefer.

The weather had been mixed all week and as we got there, we knew we weren't going to be in for a spectacular sunrise, as the coast had clagged in.  Never mind, we thought, moody and misty works just as well.

Our mood wasn't helped by another bunch of photogs though. Not long after we'd started, along the beach comes four guys with the same idea. Without a word of acknowledgement, they just muscled in and started shooting over our shoulders. It tended to make us a little bloody minded about letting them in. Mike merely played dog-in-the-manger with a guy toting a medium format camera, while I dropped the C-bomb at them. In hindsight I'm just a little disappointed at myself for not being more welcoming to obvious tourists. They were clearly semi-pro or pro going by their gear, but their attitude was seriously amateur.

I reminded myself that they're just rocks, and this was only ever going to be a recce for me anyway, so it didn't come to a fist-fight. Once they left, calm was restored, and it was beautiful down there on the beach, especially with some small Hectors dolphins surfacing just a few score metres offshore. I took some long exposures, trying to work with soft waves and hard rock, while Mike took a bunch of bracketed exposures to combine later. I'm looking forward to seeing what he gets, we've both got quite different styles.

Leisure out of the way, we grabbed a quick breakfast once the visitor centre opened and got on with the assignment once our models arrived from the local Polytechnic. The light came and went, and it was hardly tourist brochure weather, but we got some interesting stuff that my client was really happy with. My favourite is the one above, partly inspired by the movie Alien. It was a quickie we pulled off on the way to the next location. The girls were lit by Mike with a Canon flash on the left, while I had another low right, aimed at the boulder. With just a little more time, we'd have got some flashes inside the rock working to light the girls up, and a much softer key on them, but we were on a hectic schedule.

It turned into a long day, several different locations, run and gun, with Mike trying his best to give me good light in a few minutes.

So many different conditions and setups, we just about threw everything we could set up quickly at it - bare strobe, softbox, strobe through translucent reflector, silver reflector... nothing but fun.

And now, batteries recharged, Miss C(7) handed off to a friend for the afternoon, I'm out the door for a magazine shoot. Yeah.
But this boulders thing. I've never encountered it in New Zealand before. I guess I should expect it at an iconic scene in the goldern hours, but don't some basic manners apply, like, say hello to other photogs at a scene? What's your take on photog etiquette?