In my adult life, each Easter passes with the usual commercial fanfare of chocolate and crossed spicy buns, but this year I started to wonder what its actually all about? How did it all fit in since rabbits don’t lay eggs, and if it was about Jesus on a cross why aren’t we all rocking chocolate crucifixes? Read on for a fascinating peek into the real history of our Easter traditions.

The surprising origins of Easter… in an egg-shell!

While Christianity will tell you that Easter celebrates the death and resurrection of Jesus, there are tales that well-predate this. Its known that Christianity absorbed many of the existing Pagan traditions and festivals and tweaked them to fit their dogmas. When you scratch the surface, history is criss-crossed with surprisingly similar stories from every culture.

In pre-Christian times the vernal equinox (Easter) was a celebration of the arrival of spring—the end of the dark and barren winter—the planting of seeds, new life and the activation of the fertility cycle. Every corner of the world has their own ancient story to illustrate the movements of nature.

Even the name Easter is a variant of the name of many fertility Goddesses—Ishtar, Ostara, Eostre and Eostra.

God’s son

What interesting to discover is that in many cultures there are Christ like figures which predate the time of Jesus. Also, son is literally associated with the sun—to name a few, Baal in Sumeria, Horas in Egypt, and Mithras in Persian culture. Interestingly, these characters all are born on 24 December (winter solstice), die into the darkness of winter and rise again at the spring equinox.

The hot-cross buns

Bread and cakes have long played an important role in cultural ceremonies and can be traced back as Pagan fertility symbols. Often marked symbolically, cross buns have superstitious value and were kept as offerings to protect crops, homes and sailors. The english custom of spiced buns on Good Friday derived from a London bylaw forbidding the sale of such buns except on Good Friday, Christmas and at burials. Its likely this Good Friday allowance, and association with Jesus’ cross, prompted them to be scored with a knife, which through time has evolved to a cross being piped on top.

The bunny

This furry Easter symbol is derived from the Goddesses of spring and fertility. Guess when feasts were held in their honour? Yep, the vernal equinox. Their symbol was the rabbit because of its prolific, shagging-success rate. Technically its the hare that has associations with these female deities including the Virgin Mary. This was because at one point it was believed the hare could reproduce without loss of virginity. The first documented Easter bunny laying eggs was in the 1500′s. Making nests for rabbits soon followed, which eventually became decorated baskets. Likewise, eggs were swapped for candy and other small gifts.

The eggs

Eggs have always symbolised fertility and new life and have long been given as tokens of good wishes, protection and good harvests. Pagan farmers used to bury the brightly painted eggs in their fields to encourage the Gods to favour their crops. On a more practical level, there was a time when eggs were forbidden during the fasting period of Lent, which resulted in an growing abundance. To avoid wastage, the eggs were preserved and decorated and the bounty was eagerly exchanged on Easter Sunday. The most elaborate versions are the Russian Faberge and Ukranian Pysanky eggs.

The hunt

While the egg-hunt has innocent connections to childhood for most of us, its origins may have come from a darker past. Its said that the hunt came in later times when Christians sought to flush out Pagans. The priests rewarded children to hunt and dig the fields to find the coloured eggs as a means of identifying and exterminating Pagans.

We are the only species on Earth to record our past through story telling and documenting traditions handed down—in the case of Easter, for thousands of years. Although most of us may be unaware of the the simple origins—its interesting how we continue to evolve our traditions.

It’s always a fun day shooting the Broncos and particularly this year as we had a celebratory theme. Previously the mood has been serious, as the boys delivered their steely personas for past poster looks. Not so this year. We had military drums, bongos, tamborines, all playing in unison to Alex and Sam’s singing while they waited their turn to be photographed, and it shows in the final result. Truly a party atmosphere.  Congratulations Broncos on 25 years!

The ‘Theatre of Food’ campaign with cheesy pizza pull.

Nowadays, the things I dream up I want to be able to make a reality.  Not of course the crocodile in my swimming pool but the stuff my imagination is now inspired by.
One of my favorite things to do is try different tea’s while diving down that rabbit hole, so while musing over a peach tea I had just acquired,  I dreamed up my version of the Mad Hatters tea party.

With the help of my amazing food stylist, Jaime Reyes, and after a very long pre-production phase, which involved countless phone calls, borrowing props, rummaging through second hand stores and antique stores and what seemed like endless shopping, the day had finally arrived to put it all together.

Jaime appeared early in the morning arms ladened with masses of amounts of food, props and cooking equipment,  just short of the kitchen sink.  The weather however decided to conspire against us.  So what was going to be a shoot in the tree lined green belt near my home, ended up being on my back deck, much to Jaime’s relief, as I think the logistics of him prepping and setting the table so far from the kitchen would make things quite challenging.   After my two trips to the antique store on the opposite side of Brisbane and signing my life away on very large deposits for very expensive antiques, all the furniture and props were in the 4wd and on their way to my back deck in the pouring rain.

The preparation lasted all day, and by night fall we were almost ready to shoot.  The table now set, the lighting in place and the rain easing to a quieter patter, I started the long exposures.  With the combination of flash, tungsten lighting, including hundreds of tiny fairy lights and my light brush, each exposure took up to 5 minutes,  where I very carefully and in total darkness made my way around the table and brushed light into every object I wanted, and created the glows that the firefly’s would leave on the objects around them,  like painting but with light.

I brought the forest to the deck with a little help from photoshop and the journey from my imagination to a reality was now complete.

Bon appé -tea!

Thank you Jaime

With every episode of Master Chef, my level of experimentation increases and so do the ‘helpful’ gadgets in the kitchen.  So currently I have no bench-space left and blenders, grinders, pasta makers, ice-cream churns and food processors falling out of overly stuffed cupboards.

I admit to having a love affair with eating food, but, If there is one thing I enjoy more than eating it or trying to conjure up something delightful in the kitchen, it’s shooting food.  I also have a rather unhealthy obsession with purchasing cookbooks, not always for the recipes, but largely for the images and on my bucket list, is shooting my own cookbook.  So I was absolutely delighted to be invited to shoot 2 Small Rooms Canapés cookbook.

My top tip when shooting beautiful recipes for a cookbook?

Is it is important to sample the product after every shot… ;

It’s a massive production that comes round once a year where the whole years worth of sponsor material and Broncos promotional photography including the season poster, is all shot in one day. Being just one human, I enlist a team of good souls, who help me make it happen, including stylists, extra photographers, a producer, set construction, assistants and the list truly does goes on.

It definitely gets my brain firing on all cylinders to co-ordinate and bring the whole thing together, where thousands of images are being captured in a short space of time.

But my favorite part of the job is the team poster. After the concept is approved by the client, it takes me months of pre-planning and pre-shooting to map out its structure—yet the team players all have to be shot in mere minutes! There’s no room for mistakes.

This year I was able to achieve a few fun concepts at the end of the crazy day.

“The Incredible Hulk” starring Ben Hannant. Ben is an absolute trooper, holding onto very uncomfortable poses for long periods, after an already long day, and

“Family Portrait” starring, Corey Parker, Ben Hannant again and Jack Reed, donning fabulously retro winter clothing in no less than 35º heat!

Yes, there is nothing like suffering for your art.

A recent survey highlighted that today’s Australian children believed yoghurt came from trees. This serves to highlight the growing gap between farm and plate and brought me upon the notion that when you don’t know your food’s history, its easy to not think twice about it—but when you do see what’s really going on, its impossible not to be affected. Not only has the world become mentally removed from knowing their food source, but sadly they’ve become disconnected from the responsibility of how the food is reared, caught and killed.

I’ve used this subject as the challenge for my latest work in collaboration with food stylist Jaime Reyes. I wanted to achieve two things, firstly, convey how this lack of awareness allows poor farming and animal abuses to continue on in the dark…and hope that by bringing some attention to it, some will start to see the light.

This interplay of light and dark is reflected by the chiaroscuro lighting used—a Renaissance technique literally meaning light – dark, employed by the great  master painters, such as Willem Kalf and Vermeer in the 17th Century.  It is a dramatic use of lighting, hyper-focusing the viewer on the subject at the exclusion of all else.  My renewed use of the old technique here, hopefully encourages us all to focus and think about how all creatures deserve a quality of life and a respectful, humane end—and that the power to make it so belongs with each individual.

And secondly, from a technical perspective, it was also an opportunity for me to slow down, remember and be deliberate.  In the digital age, the shooting process has sped up to match the technology as digital is immediate and in ways more forgiving, requiring less attention to detail.  “Fix it in Photoshop” is a term I hear daily.  The expectation is to pack in more images in less time.  Not so long ago, this was not possible, the limitations of our equipment, film and printing required us to have an extensive knowledge of the machinations of our hardware, a precise understanding of lighting, photographic techniques, problem solving and translating that all to emulsion.  Each exposure was critical and there was a deliberate, considered pause to re-examine every aspect before pressing the shutter.  For me this series is a chance to do just that, pause, consider and remember techniques handed down to me by my mentors and enjoy the process of creating something new the old way.

With special thanks to Frank at Deshon’s Retreat in Kingaroy for his efforts to entice and procure the wild rabbits who enjoyed a life of beautiful, tranquil surrounds. And to those curious… the rabbits were brought to rest humanely and were subsequently used for my fabulous food stylist Jaime Reyes, latest recipe coming soon.

About a mile before entering the town, we stumbled upon an old  house.  At first glance it looked like someone lived there, until I focused on curtains that were gently caught in the breeze, out of a broken window pane. The front door was missing most of its middle panels, and the innards of the house appeared to have sadly prolapsed unable to hold up against the constant rain, no longer held back by the partly missing shingled roof.

As unsafe as the house obviously was, I couldn’t help venturing in to investigate. For me, it was a strange feeling, like time had both stood still and jumped ahead 10 years.  The tea pot  stood untouched on the kitchen table, the cans of food and the cooking pots, still sat neatly on the pantry shelfs, the toilet seat cover was still in place, and the clock in the rubble, frozen in time.

Later, I asked a man I met, about the houses story and he told me what little he knew, but promised to introduce me to another man down the pub, who may have known more than he.  It was the day after summer solstice with its longest daylight hours.   Being a workday, the pub goers all waited until dark, so around 11pm, when the sun had finally gone down, and the twilight grew thicker, we followed the sounds of Celtic music, to the warm glow of the pub.   Once the curiosity of  us being new strangers in town settled and the staring lessoned to friendly smiles, I was taken over and introduced to a man at the bar nursing a pint of Guinness.  I asked about the derelict house, I wanted to know who had lived there and what had happened for it to be frozen in time that way and then neglected.

He thought about the house for a moment, declared he never really knew the old man who lived there, but knew he was an old Shin Fein patriot, and they had met briefly one day.   Most days the old man would sit by the side of the road with a stick and chat to passers by.  This particular day, the old man pulled him up as he was wandering along preparing to thumb a lift and told him he wanted to show him something.  He was led to a spot near the side of the road, where a pile of stones where scattered around, they had formed three animals, one was a horse, one was a rat and the other a rabbit.

Then he remembered his name.   ‘Old  Donavan’ he called him,  he lived in that two story house down at the ‘Nord’ all his life and when the house was declared unsafe, and having no money to repair it, the old man was ordered to vacate it, so he slept in a caravan parked next to his house, and continued to visit the house daily, cooking his meals and sitting at his kitchen table drinking tea until the day he died.

They carted his body and the caravan away, and locked the door, leaving everything else untouched.

That was 12 years ago.

Nikon 105mm f /2.8 AF-S Macro lens vs Hasselblad HC 120mm Macro
I found this out whilst shooting a dandelion spore using a Hasselblad HC 120mm Macro lens on the H3D-39 Megapixel digital camera.

After setting up the shot, lighting the dandelion spore and composing my frame, I carefully focused and exposed the image, which, tethered to my laptop appeared shortly after on the screen.

I examined the shot, zoomed in very close and was surprised to find the image did not appear that sharp.  I went through all the checks to rectify the problem, clean lens, full depth of field at f/32, camera locked off solidly, focus 1/3 of the way into the spore and tried again. It still did not appear sharp.

By now I was getting a little perplexed, so I tried a gamut of different things, several focus plains, even opening up the lens right through to f/11, as I am aware that sometimes digital sensors can have troubles with the lenses stopped right down.

Much to my frustration, everything I tried did not seem to make any difference,  applying a load of sharpening in Phocus (Hasselblad’s editing software) didn’t even go all the way to the result I expected from a $6500.00 lens!

I decided to compare the same shot on the Nikon D3 with the Nikon 105mm f/ 2.8 AF-S Macro lens and was surprised to find that focusing on the subject was easier for a start and the first shot appeared sharp, not withstanding a slight halo effect on the highlighted edges. At a guess, the halo could be from the old softening filter that Kodak had once placed on their sensors to reduce the effect of noise, might it still be in use on the Nikon?   But if not, then its still a bit of a mystery to me.

But the reason for the Hasselblad problems with sharpness is more likely the Fuzzy disk phenomenon. And hopefully I can vaguely attempt to explain what that means. (Nick Rains is the expert on this) In film if you wanted and image to appear sharp front to back you would stop the lens right down to its maximum, hopefully f/32 or f/45 and if you focused a third of the way in on the unmoving subject, and your lens was clean you could pretty much be assured that you would not have too much trouble getting a focused image.

However on digital the rules change somewhat. The size of the photo diode in relation to the aperture, can actually cause it to go out of focus from a longer depth of field.

With digital, once you get to a certain percentage of the diode, the focus goes soft again, and the larger the pixel count the faster that happens. So what would normally be sharp at f/32 will be softer right back to that magic percentage. And in my case must be shorter than f/11.

So, the larger the pixel count the earlier the fuzzy disk phenomenon kicks in, and as the Nikon sensor is only 12mpx and therefore the pixels are less and larger than that of the Hasselblad’s, the problem did not occur on the Nikon. And apart from focus stacking there is not a hell of a lot you can do about it. Which is not very helpful or useful for anything that is not bolted down.

So there you go, maybe I am just super fussy and expect too much from technology, but have a look below and see what you think.

The shoot had been booked, carefully pre-produced and planned.   The day had arrived and it was time for my assistant and myself to pack up the 4wd to the brim and head out to the shoot.

We were due to shoot the new menu for Obsession restaurant,  in their newly refurbished restaurant in South-bank, the only hitch was, when we arrive there, the electricians were still working furiously trying to connect power, the plumbers had not arrived yet, to install the gas, so the food stylist and 4 chefs could not prepare and cook and the fit out was not complete.

Plan B:  After a little revised planning and a minor deconstruction of some wallpaper, panels and screens, we crammed ourselves back in the now well overly full 4wd and headed to my house.

It was time to give my newly renovated back deck and kitchen, a whirl!

Shortly after, in load 4 chefs, 1 food stylist, the art director and the client, the chefs got to work in my little kitchen taking over every inch of bench space, the art director and client commandeered the dining table and in a short time the whole back deck looked like it had always been a studio.   My assistant and myself, used the screens and panels and we created a backdrop for our Asian tasting table, each dish was carefully prepared by the chefs and the arranging of the food done by the food stylist. 8 hours later, 8 beautiful dishes and every pot and pan in my house needing a good clean, we had our gorgeous new menu images for Obsession Restaurant.

There is always a plan B