Over the weekend I attended the Central Regional Conference of the Photographic Society of New Zealand (PSNZ). While there were a number of speakers on offer, the one that I most wanted to hear from was Esther Bunning, who is an extremely talented photographer based in Greytown in the Wairarapa. Esther is a portrait specialist, and Nikon Ambassador, known for her dreamy style of shooting.

In addition to speaking Esther also ran a workshop where she showed various techniques to achieve amazing looks in camera, rather than relying on photoshop. These included the use of multiple exposures, slow shutter speeds as well as placing objects between the camera and subject.

We were lucky to have four dancers from a local ballet school as our models and I got to try several of the approaches as well as having play with her Lenbaby Composer. That was quite fun although manual focus and a moving subject can be tricky. Esther stated that this sort of shooting was very free form as you really didn’t know what the end result would be like until you had the shots. I found that it was quite liberating to simply go with the flow and not have to worry what was being shot.