Last night was the finals of the NZ Aria 2017. This one of the annual photographic jobs that I look forward to and was the 9th time I have covered the event. As always it was an excellent evening of music with fabulous talent on display backed by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Maestro Johannes Fitsch.

The winner was Jarvis Dams who I have photographed as a finalist a number of times and who started competing at the NZ Aria as a boy soprano. It has been great to see him develop and I expected him to do well after having heard him in rehearsal in the afternoon. His performance of Puccini’s Questo amor was beautiful and well deserving of the win.

Second place went to Monyoung Jang’s moving performance of Gounod’s, Ah! Je veux vivre . 

Third place went to Boyd Owen singing Puccini’s Che gelida manina. I have photographed Boyd in previous finals and his placing was well deserved. If he returns again it wouldn’t surprise me to see him as the winner.

Guest artist was previous NZ Aria winner, Jud Arthur who performed a number of classical musical numbers including Old Man River and the Gershwin duet, Bess, You Is My Woman Now,  with his wife, Taryn Fiebig.

See the full gallery of photos from NZ Aria 2017

Rotorua Daily Post report using my photos.

From a technical perspective it is a relatively simple event to cover with constant lighting making manual exposure easy. I routinely use a full frame DSLR (Nikon D700, D3s, D800 and now D810) with a 70-200mm f2.8 tripod mounted on a gimbal head. 1/250s f2.8 and ISO 800 gives me files I can efficiently batch out in Lightroom and export with JPEG Mini. This year I added the Nikon D500 handheld with the Nikon 300mm f4 PF lens. The 450mm (full frame equivalent) reach allowed me to get some close-ups of the singers and pushing the ISO to 1600 gave me the equivalent exposure value. The sharpness of the 300mm f4 PF continues to amaze me and I needed to use some negative clarity on some of the files in Lightroom as they were a little too sharp on the stage makeup.