Elleni Toumpas

On Thursday The Living End kicked off their “The Ending is just the Beginning Repeating” tour in Brisbane. Even though close to everyone has seen these guys play at nearly every festival in the past, their first headline tour in 2 years was met with much excitement with many cities adding two shows to meet demand.

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In July local band Inland Sea and I hung out for half a day to shoot some new press shots for them. A shoot 6 months in the making (trying to find a common availability for 10 people in a band is a nightmare) we managed to shoot them before they headed out to play at the Red Deer fest. The first shot is probably my most favourite portrait all year so far. A concept that I came up with from the initial chat we had in December, there was a lot of pressure to pull it off. After a few frames a big juicy spider crawled up Steele’s shirt but even with those few frames we managed to nail the above pic. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been photographing a lot of diverse work in the past few months. Band portraits, live music, weddings and all sorts of events. One event that I covered two weeks ago was the finale of one of the Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation session. The finale invited all participants (some 800 women and men) to train in a group workout session followed by a celebratory dinner at the Mariott.

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It is that time of the year again, the Queensland Poetry Festival. I think this year is my 5th year photographing the festival and as my longest standing clients I always enjoy this time of the year. Not only do the words of the poets inspire me but I also see it as a benchmark to measure how far I have come and what I still want to achieve in the next coming year. The poets and friends of the Queensland Poetry Festival have become more then just familiar faces as the years have gone on. Shooting the Queensland Poetry Festival each year has led to some amazing opportunities, namely photographing the weddings of some of the board members.

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Last week I went along to The Zoo to photograph Dead Letter Cirucs for Everguide. The day before the Ekka public holiday, the show sold out earlier that day, so getting in early to get prime spot was mandatory.

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So this week I was asked to shoot the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival in Brisbane for Everguide. I have been shooting a lot for Everguide lately. It has been great dabbling in other styles of shooting.

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This year my Splendour in the Grass festival saw me mainly backstage assisting Dan Boud in the FasterLouder studio. As I knew I wouldn’t have much time to actually shoot much myself I decided to head to the festival grounds a day early so that I could have a full day shooting my own photos. I decided to undertake two projects at Splendour this year, the first being a timelapse of my whole festival experience (video to come soon) plus portraits of the punters at the festival. I spent the afternoon of the Thursday walking through the festival and campsite taking photos of interesting people I saw.

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Last week I caught up with Maggie Collins for a quick headshot/ portrait session. Maggie Collins is a weekend host on Triple J and she needed some shots to accompany her online staff profile on the Triple J website.

The shoot was SUCH a blast with Maggie keen to do pretty much anything. After 20 minutes and a costume change we wrapped with a buttload of great shots. Maggie chose these as her favourites.

Much love goes out to Carla Cosgrove for doing Maggie’s hair and make-up. Also to my helpful assistant’s Michael Battensby and Tessa Fox.

On Sunday Mr Maps performed a free set on a tennis court in New Farm park. In collaboration with Small Lakes and Guerilla Gigs, the gig was held to launch their new single Tennis Party. With weather threatening to call off/ postpone the gig a small crowd hovered around the tennis courts during soundcheck. But almost like clockwork 2PM hit with blue skies and a crowd of 200 people packed on the courts to watch Mr Maps play.

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So Rave magazine is turning 1000. Their next issue is their 1000th issue in 20 years. On Friday 15th July they are having a mega birthday party and ONE of the headliner acts is a Brisbane megaband that has been appropriately named the BrisBand Experience. The band consists of a melting pot of members from current and past local bands including Katie Noonan (george), Steve Pope (drummer with Kate Miller-Heidke, transport), Thomas Murphy (Bloodpoets), Dan James (Drawn from Bees), Caleb James (Rhubarb), Tony Garret (The Boat People) and Ben Dalton (Hungry Kids of Hungary).

As Rave wanted to feature this band on the cover of their 999th issue, and as this band being a one off effort did not have any press shots, I was given the task to shoot the cover and inlay shots for the issue. This was one of those sessions that I had to bring the studio to the band. With all the band members currently doing other projects we had only ONE 2 hour period where the whole band could be in the once place at the one time….in the rehearsal studio TWO days before the issue hit the newstands.

So with a portable studio in tow and armed with concepts, plans and back up plans I was able to shoot the cover shot and inlay shots PLUS back up shots in the rehearsal room next door to the space the band were rehearsing in.

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