Saturday 19 October is World Photo Day, and this year Nikon New Zealand organised three events around the country each hosted by one of their ambassadors. Fortunately  one of them is Esther Bunning who lives just over the hill in Greytown. She is a grand master photographer who runs a studio along with her husband Terry.

She is known for a very etherial style of shooting using natural light, double exposures and textures mainly captured in camera rather than in post. At the 2017 NZIPP Iris awards she took away the highest print score for one of her images.

Esther has organised three models for the day. Justine is a choreographer dancer who has been Esther’s muse for a number a shoots. With her were Keziah and Aislin.

She is mainly a natural light photographer so when the weather delivered a much better result than was forecast we all headed outside into a car park where some large blue containers provided an interesting background.

The idea was simply to play with different settings such a multiple exposures, and also putting stuff in front of the lens to see what would happen. This is really experimental shooting as you are never really sure what the result will look like before you shoot it. It is also stuff where you will be fooling the cameras metering and focusing so it all done in manual modes.

We then headed back into the studio where they had set up two full backdrops. One was right by a large window and so used natural light, while the other was using continuous light.

The shots in the studio were more controlled  with the more constant light. I started out with more classical looks.

Creating double exposures using the lensbaby creates some interesting effects.

It was a great day and I hope that they do something like this again.