New Zealand’s beauty inspires local photographer
New Zealand has been the country of choice for many a photographer and movie director in recent years due to its wide range of landscapes and climates. This is one of the reasons local photographer and 2008 Hudson graduate Austin Fassino chose the Kiwi nation as the destination for his two-month trip.By: By Jordan Willi, Hudson Star-Observer
- Austin Fassino poses in front of some of his work
- Cliffs on the coast of New Zealand
New Zealand has been the country of choice for many a photographer and movie director in recent years due to its wide range of landscapes and climates.
This is one of the reasons local photographer and 2008 Hudson graduate Austin Fassino chose the Kiwi nation as the destination for his two-month trip.
“I had been planning to take a large trip for a few years now,” Fassino said. “I’ve known about New Zealand from movies and other things. It was high on my list of places to visit.”
Before he left, Fassino was approached by Kelley Frame and Fine Art Galleries, located at 512 Second St., about getting some of his pictures from the trip into the gallery for a show upon his return. The gallery set up a showing for his work that opens this Friday, July 1.
“They saw some of my stuff prior to my going and they liked it,” Fassino said. “It put a little pressure on me to not spend too much time lollygagging. I had to prioritize my time to make sure to get pictures for the show. For the most part I traded off taking pictures and times to be there and experienced everything without taking pictures.”
Fassino worked for seven months straight without spending money on anything that was not necessary to save up for the trip. He left on March 18 and spent just over two months exploring the New Zealand scenery. He returned home on May 31 after a 23 hour flight.
“I had no plans prior to going on the trip. The idea of the trip was to spend two months not really planning anything and just see as much as I could,” Fassino said. “It worked out fantastically. I rented a car and I took a road trip around the South Island and that made it more convenient to stop and take pictures. You can’t really stop when you don’t have a car, because you can’t ask the bus driver to stop for you.”
In the end, Fassino shot around 2,000 photos altogether and was forced to narrow down the best ones for the gallery showing. Fassino focuses most of his time on taking landscape photographs, but he says that his style of photography is not quite that simple.
“While digital is forgiving and now the industry standard, there’s an allure to archaic processes that constantly reminds me that simple, well thought out photographs are much more successful than the ones that push the limit to what photography can be. This means that more often than not, I think about the pictures I don’t want to be taking more than the ones that I do,” Fassino said.
“I try to constrain myself to images with clean, basic elements that draw myself, and hopefully everyone else, to pay close attention to a level of detail that illuminates the world beyond the immediate image.”
In his last semester of school before his trip, Fassino was studying visual technologies at Century College with an emphasis on film photography and will be back at school this fall. Fassino began his college education at UW-Stout where he went for a year and a half before he decided to switch schools.
“At Stout they were starting to get away from film photography and were changing to strictly digital. I really wanted to do film photography, so I began to look around for somewhere that still taught film,” Fassino said. “Then I found Century. They have a really nice set up and a great dark room.”
Fassino’s gallery, named “Two Months in New Zealand,” event opens Friday, July 1 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and runs until July 15.
For more information on Fassino’s gallery showing or about Kelley Gallery, go to kelleygalleries.com, call (715) 386-4112 or e-mail Hudson@kelleygalleries.com
Tags: arts and entertainment, lifestyle, arts, travel, fccnetwork
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