In the press: November 2023
November is the month for Christmas issues in the magazine world and I am grateful to have shot a cover and two stories for Country Style and another story for Home Beautiful.
There is so much work that goes into a magazine cover that goes unseen. It is such an interesting process and one I am grateful to have been a part of several times now.
A cover shoot generally spans across the best part of half a day. This particular one we spent about 5 hours setting up and shooting. But that is just the time on location! This is not counting the hours spent by Cheryl Carr, the stylist, agonising over props & colourways - sourcing decorations and wrapping boxes in this instance. And then there is the post-production time, sorting through hundreds of images of animals in various positions picking out the best ones to share with the publishing team.
On this particular shoot we arrived on location just after lunch, and our first task was to find the perfect spot with the right backdrop on the property. After some back and forth with Sarah the magazine designer, we chose this heavily sloped part of the paddock due to the dam and treelin in the background.
From there we set up the tree and sent many texts back to the team at Country Style for feedback on decorations and present placement.
Melissah and Ben, the property owners, were an enormous amount of help across the afternoon. Ben drove all the props and the tree down the paddock in his ute, put a star picket into the ground for us to tie the tree to, got the whipper-snipper out to cut back the grass and when it came time, helped Melissah coax the right animals into position!
While we waited for the light and the animals to all be in the right position the tree was almost knocked over by a cow and the goat urinated very close to the gifts and began to eat the tree itself!
At the end of the day, we had the shots we needed and the sun had set and so we packed it all away…just to set it all up in Melissah’s house the nest day for her house shoot featured within the mag!
