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Tag: Behind the Shot

How a photograph actually happened — the story, conditions, and craft behind a single image.

  • Our Plane Tried to Land in Queenstown Twice, Then Gave Up

    Our Plane Tried to Land in Queenstown Twice, Then Gave Up

    Queenstown’s airport is tucked between mountains, which is lovely in a photograph and slightly less lovely when you are trying to physically land an airplane in it.

    We came in the first time and got close — close enough to see individual blades of grass, close enough that everyone had already done the quiet thing where you decide the flight went fine and you’re basically home. Then the engines spooled back up and we climbed. Wind. The pilot came around and tried again from the other runway direction, got down to what felt like fifty feet, and pulled up a second time. Two runs at the ground, two polite retreats, and then the announcement nobody wants on the leg they’ve been looking forward to for two years: we were diverting to Christchurch for the night.

    Now, here’s the thing about traveling with Matt. Matt is a master planner. The kind of person who has a backup dinner reservation for a city he was not supposed to be in. We hadn’t been on the ground in Christchurch for an hour before he’d produced a plan: Kaiser Brew Garden, in the Riverside Market — a whole building of restaurants that used to be shipping-container eateries, now a proper food hall. We ate well, slept, and flew back the next morning, and this time the mountains let us in.

    I want to be honest about why I’m telling you this instead of just showing you the pretty version. The pretty version is real too — Queenstown turned out to be a genuine dream, and I’ll get to that. But the brand here has always been I was actually there, and “actually there” includes the part where the plane wouldn’t land and we ate schnitzel in a city we hadn’t booked. The trip is the trip. The mishaps are half of why it’s worth writing down.

    What we got once we finally landed

    Everything, basically. Go-karts and dinner at the top of Skyline Queenstown, looking down over the whole valley. A perfect crisp fall day in Arrowtown, renting bikes and riding out through the countryside to wineries. And a bus-and-boat run out to Milford Sound — we were supposed to fly, but it rained the entire time, so we bused it. Which sounds like a downgrade until the rain turned every cliff face into a waterfall that only exists when it’s pouring. Cold, soaked, worth it. That’s a sentence I could put under half the photographs I’ve ever taken.

    The part that pays for the story

    A lot of what I shot on the South Island is heading into the print store — Queenstown, the Southern Alps, the road out to Milford. If you want the practical version of this trip, the full South Island photographer’s guide walks the whole route and tells you where to actually point the camera. And if you just want a small piece of New Zealand on your desk before the wall-sized version exists, start with the postcard. Nobody starts with the wall-sized version.

    — Preston

  • What an Editorial Intimate Session Actually Looks Like

    What an Editorial Intimate Session Actually Looks Like

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  • The Church of the Good Shepherd: New Zealand at the End of the Earth

    The Church of the Good Shepherd: New Zealand at the End of the Earth

    I didn’t plan this one. Which, if you ask me, is usually when the good ones happen.

    We’d been photographing our way toward Christchurch — the lone Wanaka Tree standing out in the lake like it knows it’s being watched, the impossible glacial blue of Lake Pukaki, a last-minute detour up to the Mt John observatory because someone (me) couldn’t help himself. We stopped for lunch by Lake Tekapo. And there, right on the shore, was this little stone church.

    The Postcards Collection – New Zealand Lake Tekapo Fig 1 – Framed Print

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    The Church of the Good Shepherd has stood on that spot since 1935 — which is to say, longer than anyone I thought to ask. It’s small. It’s plain. And on the day we were there it was flatly, gloriously overcast: the kind of grey light photographers pretend to be annoyed by and secretly adore, because it turns the entire sky into one enormous softbox.

    I set the lake in front of it, the mountains behind it, and the little church in the middle of all that openness — and I knew before I’d taken the frame that it was the one. It’s the whole New Zealand experience in a single picture: just enough man-made to feel like home, sitting right on the doorstep of the wild.

    What New Zealand actually feels like

    Raw, untouched beauty is the closest I can get. It feels like the end of the earth — hostile enough to keep you honest, cold enough to remind you you’re a guest, and beautiful in a way that, somehow, no one has managed to wreck yet.

    (I also came home with an indefensible number of photos of highland cows. New Zealand has the best-dressed livestock on the planet, and I will not be taking questions.)

    A shaggy highland cow with a long fringe over its eyes, standing in a green New Zealand pasture.
    Exhibit A. I rest my case.

    The postcard

    The church became part of the Postcards Collection — with a print for the wall, if a small church at the end of the earth earns a bigger spot in your house than a postcard rack. Start with the postcard. That’s how every collection starts.

    — Preston

    More from New Zealand

  • Greetings From Sydney: The Opera House Detail You Never See

    Greetings From Sydney: The Opera House Detail You Never See

    We got up before the sun to photograph a building that is, by most counts, one of the most photographed on earth. Which, when I say it out loud, sounds like a bad plan.

    Matt and I walked over to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair in the dark — a little cold, mostly quiet. There was a pair of seagulls having what I can only describe as a strong disagreement, and one other couple further out toward the point who had very clearly not come for the architecture. And then there was the Opera House, waiting to catch the first light.

    Here’s the thing about the Opera House: we’ve all seen it. The whole white sweep of it, sails and all — from the ferry, from the bridge, from every postcard rack in New South Wales. And because we’ve seen the whole thing so many times, we’ve quietly stopped seeing the parts. Up close, those sails aren’t smooth at all. They’re clad in more than a million tiles in this restrained little chevron pattern, and almost every photo flattens the whole thing into one white blur.

    So that’s what I went for. Not the building — the skin of it. The tile detail up top, catching the very first light, set against the kind of deep blue you only get for about twenty minutes before the day turns ordinary.

    The Postcards Collection – Sydney Opera House – Framed Print

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    (I also spent a few frames doing something stranger — dragging the camera through a long exposure to smear the whole thing into motion. That one’s not in the shop yet. But since you’re here:)

    Intentional-camera-movement long exposure of the Sydney Opera House at dawn, the white sails smeared into vertical streaks of motion against a deep blue sky.
    The “drag” frame — same building, same morning, held the shutter open and let it move.

    A quick, honest tangent

    We’d just come through a couple of trips in Asia, and Sydney hit different. It felt so Western — so familiar — that it shrank the world for a minute. A massive, buzzing city on the far side of the planet that somehow felt like it could be home. I’ll also admit that by the time we made it to New Zealand and there was finally some open space and nobody around, I was relieved. You can love a city and still be glad to leave it.

    The postcard

    Greetings from Sydney — Vintage Travel Postcard (Pack of 10)

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    The detail shot became Greetings From Sydney in the Postcards Collection — in case you want to drop a cheeky note to a friend or you’re leaning more into creating a collage by framing it.

    — Preston