In January 2020, before the world was turned on its head, I was given the opportunity to shoot the spring/summer campaign, for UK adventure gear company Montane.

The shoot was located at the Puhi Peaks station, an hour north of Kaikoura, and provided us vast amounts of land with many different scenarios, rolling fields, trails, river valleys, shingle peaks, and rocky outcrops. The location was excellent for mulitple setups covering a range of different kit.

I brought Luke Stockman in to cover the moving assets for this campaign, and not only did he manage to create fantastic visuals, he also managed to find the time to document the trip with these stunning behind the scenes images you see on this blog. All credit to Luke for these amazing images, I’m so stoked with what you managed to capture.

Here’s a link to Luke’s stuff here, go check it out after you read this.

Harry McArthur assisted on this shoot, and helped with location and production. Including scouting, transport, access and general assisiting.

Jacob Ainsworth joined us from the UK to provide direction for the shoot. This was his first trip to New Zealand, so we can only imagine it was a lot to take in going straight from the airport to the mountains out of reception within 24 hours.

The talent in front of the camera was a group of legit individuals from around the area, thanks to the team at Further Faster NZ for helping to source this talent. Jake Vargo, Mandy Robinson and Jack Lai. This team brought some real authenticity with them, and were awesome to have with us.

Jake and his mate Alistair literally packrafted into this shoot, and hiked over the range to meet us, then hiked back out and continued their packrafting trip once we wrapped. This is how authentic we’re talking. Also, cheers to Alistair for being the cook for the team, and helping out.

Now let’s enjoy some of Lukes stunning BTS images.

Day One

We set off from home via the airport and collected the crew, and made our way to Kaikoura to meet the rest of the team. Shoot plan was to get up high for sunset, showcasing trail running gear. We didn’t get amazing colours but we did get a moody inversion layer that ended up working well for us. Getting down the mountain well after dark, for some dinner and a bedtime of around 12am!

Day Two - Morning

We set our alarms for 5am so we could get some food in then take the machines back up to the halfway point to capture some of the morning light. This morning would be focussing on fast-packing, and finding some gnarly terrain.

Day Two - Evening

We returned to the Woolshed for some refreshments and a well earned breakfast. During the harsh part of the day we did our interior shots, the woolshed was a great setting for this. Once the light got a bit better we headed out for some hiking and walking shots, firstly in the green bush down low, and then to head higher for the sunset.

Once again it looked as if the sunset was going to fizzle, but Luke and I remained optimistic and made everyone hike up a steep hill to a great vantage point, where we ended up getting amazing colours.

Day Three

Starting with a 4:30am alarm, after a 1am finish, and many black coffees, this was going to be one of the most physical locations we’d get too. The plan was to get as high as we could for sunrise, and push up to well over 1300m for some gnarly views and scree. This meant a few hours on foot in the dark and a hard push with gear to the top.

It's also where we said bye to Jake and Alistair who just hiked off over the range to continue their adventure.

Gnarly.

If you come this far, thank you! Thanks for sticking around.

Thanks to Luke for these epic images, and thanks to everyone who helped make this shoot happen!

You can see some of my actual images at work here.