This blog post is again early in the week to keep things topical. On Saturday I photographed the NZ Aria finals for the 9th consecutive year. The usual venue is closed due to earthquake safety issues so it took quite a bit of work on the organisers part to arrange an alternative. It was a trip back in time as we returned to the Destiny Church which is in the old Odeon Theatre building. This was the venue that I photographed the first NZ Aria that I covered back in 2009. That competition was won by Pene Pati who has gone on to an impressive career including Sol3 Mio. Pene appeared as guest artist at the 2015 Aria that was won by his brother Amitai.
As always the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and the singers were fantastic, providing a lovely evening of opera. Manase Latu was the standout performer and even to an untrained ear seemed the deserving winner on the night. Rachel Pines took second place and Samson Setu completed the top three.
Guest artist was Aivale Cole who had won the Aria in 2006. At that stage the naming sponsor was Lockwood Homes and the “Lockwood Aria” was what the competition was known as. It was quite fitting to have a Lockwood Aria winner return as guest artist as from next year, for the next five years, Lockwood returns as the major sponsor so the Lockwood Aria is back.
Photographically it was harder work than usual as the lighting is not really adequate. There was some overhead lighting over the orchestra but the singers were largely in front of that with little light on their faces. Fortunately the high dynamic range of the Nikon D810 sensor gave enough latitude to pull some detail out of the underexposed areas. All exposure was manual so after making selects in Lightroom it was easy to batch out all the images with the same adjustments and then simply add some local adjustments to the singers. JPEG exports using JPEGmini from Lightroom gave all the images in 2 sizes and renamed them having the whole job completed efficiently.
Photos with Nikon D810 and Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 VRII. I ran a second setup using the D500 and Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 for wider shots.
For all the photos see the NZ Aria 2018 gallery
