This weekend saw the finals of the New Zealand Aria 2019. This is the eleventh year that I have covered this event and it is always an enjoyable evening. See the Aria 2019 gallery for all the images.

It is always lovely to see young talent achieve excellent results with their hard work and I really don’t envy the judges their task in separating them.

My role is simply to photograph the event and having done it for so long I am able to relax and enjoy the performances. The current venue at the Destiny Church is a challenging one to work in because of poor lighting. This was a little better this year with the addition of a light for the performers which was absent and very frustrating last year. The downside was that the light stand obstructed my shooting position so I had to shoot from another spot that didn’t have full coverage of the space.

One anxiety for me this year was that I have traded my deliciously quiet Nikon D810 for a D850. The only thing that I dislike about the new camera body is the shutter sound which is significantly louder. Loud shutters during a performance are not good so I decided to use live-view and completely silent shutter release is possible in this mode. I find it more difficult than using the optical viewfinder but it worked well and got the job done unobtrusively.

Photos with Nikon D850 and Nikon 70-200mm f2.8VRII.