BRONZE: This striking bird's nest image earned Yasmin Mark a bronze in the NZIPP Iris Awards illustrative section. PHOTO / YASMIN MARK
BRONZE: This striking bird's nest image earned Yasmin Mark a bronze in the NZIPP Iris Awards illustrative section. PHOTO / YASMIN MARK
Northland teen wins top photography award
Kerikeri has struck gold in this year's professional photography awards with four of the town's photographers winning a swag of awards - including three coveted gold medals.
One of the more remarkable achievements is that of Yasmin Zahra Mark, who entered the NZ Institute of Professional Photographers' Iris Awards for the first time.
The 19-year-old supermarket checkout operator won a gold medal, a silver with distinction, a silver and two bronzes. The latter included a striking "human nest" image shot in her backyard.
Image 1 of 11: Gold, landscape category (crop from original image). PHOTO / DEAN WRIGHT
Born in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates to a Scottish mum and Kiwi dad, Yasmin immersed herself in photography five years ago.
The spark was being told by a friend that she'd never take a good photo. She took that as a challenge and went on to study photography in Year 12 and 13 at Kerikeri High School.
Over the past few years she has been honing her skills and promoting her work through Facebook, the photography magazine Dark Beauty and now the Iris Awards.
She specialises in beauty, family and creative photography, creating images with an ethereal, fairytale quality.
She strives to express emotion and incorporate nature in her portraits.
"What I look for is anything unique, that's pretty, damaged, or a little bit out of the ordinary," Yasmin says.
"I've had friends who have been so insecure about themselves - I want to show them they're beautiful.
"There's a lot of insecurity and I feel it in myself as well. I like to show that everyone is beautiful."
The Kerikeri teenager is concentrating on investing in equipment and building up a reputation, in the hope of one day pursuing photography full time. Most of her spare time is spent editing photos.
Yasmin says she owes much to the encouragement of family, friends and her mentors Rachel and Eric Jordan, who pushed her to enter the awards.
Her gold medal image is a tangled portrait of friend Ellie Schollum from Okaihau but her personal favourite is a photo of Lucy Oakley of Kerikeri, with her hair full of leaves, taken in Roland's Wood. It was awarded a silver with distinction, just a few points short of gold.
When she created her nest image, Yasmin was trying to convey a sense of new life and the way birds will protect their eggs no matter what.
She built the nest in her backyard and persuaded high school students Bjorn Aslund and Nicole Gleeson-Jones to be her models.
"They were amazing. I felt sorry for them, it was cold and raining."
She photographed the eggs in a real nest and Photoshopped them into the image.
Bjorn was dressed in black and Nicole in white to achieve a yin-and-yang effect of opposite but complementary forces. Yasmin says the judges marked her down because the models weren't nude, "but that wasn't going to happen".
The photo won a bronze medal in the recent NZ Institute of Professional Photographers' Iris Awards. Many hours of editing went into creating the final image.
Opito Bay's Dean Wright is an established photographer with years of commercial work behind him but also entered the NZIPP awards for the first time. He was rewarded with gold and silver medals in the landscape section.
Kerikeri's results in the awards are worth celebrating, he says.
"It's pretty cool for Kerikeri photographers to get three golds. They don't hand them out lightly."
Many of Dean's photos are taken at sea from his 98-year boat Arethusa. His gold-medal shot was taken near the Mokohinau Islands about 50km east of Bream Bay.
It shows a flock of fairy prions and fluttering shearwaters working schools of trevally and kahawai, which are in turn feeding on krill.
Dean says the photo was taken with a long telephoto lens and is just a small section of an immense flock of many thousands of birds.
"It was a wonderful sight," he says.
Kerikeri's other medal winners were Rachel Jordan, who took home a gold, three silvers and four bronze, and Jess Burges, who won two silver and four bronze medals.
Both women are established wedding and portrait photographers with previous wins in the awards.
