Andrew Spencer Photography

The Hairy Mussel Co – live tank shoot

The Hairy Mussel Co is an innovative company of cool Guys who have worked out how to distribute fresh, live green-lip mussels to folk who enjoy fine food. I’ve done a bit of work for them and I love them! They are go-getters with the good old kiwi can do, never say die attitude, an inspiration to the rest of us.

Thing is, they’ve developed this mussel tank that will fit in retailers shops and it needs no power to run, has a small footprint. You just put the mussels in, fill up an ice box and you’re good to go. Too easy. Yeah…as long as you’re not a photographer! The Hairy Mussel Co need some promo images, this tank is as shiny as your retired father in law’s car and I was having nightmares about capturing images of it.
I thought of putting one of these tanks on the beach somewhere and using a 200mm lens to  keep myself from being reflected off every sparkling piece of it. Turns out that wasn’t an option and we had to make photos at Cuddon Engineering in Blenheim, they are the clever people who turn dreams into tangible assets.

So, rethink on the photo shoot. Solution – huge light source by shooting a strobe through a diffuser panel, a little bit of fill with an umbrella and try to eliminate any bright ambient light  with another diffuser. And used a blue background in case we decided to cut out the tank.

Result – beautiful! What a work of art this mussel tank is, almost as delectable as the product that’s going to be in it. I adore mussels!

The Hairy Mussel Co

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Remember the Concorde?

Concorde – the great gas guzzling aeronautical icon that could cruise at 1300 mph, the body stretched up to 25cm in flight as it flew at an altitude of up to 18,000m. Pretty impressive for a piece of gear first made in the late 60s.

The French-Brit (Aérospatiale-BAC) partnership only made 20 and after its one crash in July 2000, world economic climate and other determining factors Concorde flew for the last time in Oct 2003.

I worked in Gloucestershire on a huge potato farm in the 80s and we were under the London to New York flight path of Concorde. The noise of the mighty aircraft climbing into space over the UK was sensational, only outdone in impressiveness by low flying jet fighters when I was working in Scotland.

So the point of this writing? I recently found some images I shot of the Concorde on one of it’s visits to Christchurch in the late 80s. Still in it’s heyday then, it was exciting times. I would have loved a ride but normal fare London to New York was $9,906 US. – Gulp!

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Kaikoura New Wharf – no more.

Call me old fashioned but progress doesn’t always seem like a step for the better. I’m thinking about the New Wharf, it ‘s been part of the Kaikoura landscape since around 1909 (The Old Wharf is around the corner and wasn’t up to the job of a busy town so the New Wharf was built). For all these years it has jutted out into the ocean amongst the lime rocks braving the forces of nature.

The fishing careers of countless kids have started here, some of them using the wharf to land their catches when they grew up and became fishermen. It has been used for work and play for 90 years.

I spent hours at the wharf and made 100s of images of it and from it. It was a place where you could almost feel the history. The creaking, gnarly planks had weathered a thousand storms, strained under 1000s of tons of cargo.

The Wharf is the first place to see the sun in the morning and the last to loose it at night and I would be there. I would go there in the middle of the day and I would go there in the middle of the night. I would go and watch the angry ocean pummel the poor old Wharf, I would paddle under it on my kayak.

It was one of the most favourite places for wedding images with wedding couples loving it almost as much as me. Standing on the Wharf on a clear day you are surrounded by an ocean of blue sea and sky. On a rough day there was the rustic timber of the decking contrasting with the beautiful people.

But the New Wharf was getting old, the osteoporosis in it’s piles meant it was no longer safe and something had to be done. For months now there have been cranes swooping over the Wharf, picking pieces off it like a shag dismembers a fish. There was just a carcass. There are noises of pile drivers putting in new pieces, the foundations of some concrete pier that Kaikoura is soon to inherit.

I’m sad, I can’t even look now, I don’t want to know what is going on down there and when I drive past I look straight ahead so I can’t see what is happening.

And I can’t help thinking that surely the New Wharf could have got some new legs, a hip replacement or whatever it took to make it strong again. I’ve lost a good old friend.

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