The Kiwi photographer with her eye on your kitchen splashbacks
Golden Bay-based photographer Rina Sjardin-Thompson’s subject has always been the land. Along with the portraits, her images comprise sweeping alpine vistas, moody forest roads, and placid reflective lakes, evoking a sense of calm and solitude.
Rugged and inspiring, they’re the kinds of views that earn multimillion dollar prices tags for properties in places like Queenstown and Wānaka. So it seemed fitting to the photographer that a décor designer might want to use them.
Sjardin-Thompson is self taught – “I lived too far away from anywhere that I could access a course” – and has been a fulltime professional photographer for about 11 years. Her work is now sold by Art Vault Tākaka, but before being represented by a gallery, she primarily sold her work online, via her Facebook page Rina Thompson Photography.
Then she was approached by fellow artist and designer Lucy Gauntlett, who runs the design company Lucy G Splashbacks. Would she be interested in licensing her images to be used as splashbacks in kitchens and bathrooms?
Sjardin-Thompson jumped at the chance, and her wide, evocative image of Lake Tekapo became a popular image option on Gauntlett’s site.
Now she offers custom images for splashbacks as well as canvases. Some of her best-selling images include moody shots of the Alps, the reflecting waters of Lake Matheson, sunny images of Wainui and Paringa in Golden Bay, and the eerie green tunnel of Jackson Bay Rd, on the West Coast.
“That’s my best-selling shot.”
The West Coast is where Sjardin-Thompson cut her teeth as a photographer, and developed her eye for landscapes. But it was work that drew her north, to Tākaka and wider Golden Bay.
On the road 10 months of the year with her commercial photography business, she would inevitably spend summer in Golden Bay where all the holidaying families were.
“Summer is when people want to do their family photos, so I would stay with a local family – quite often a different family each year – and then one particular family adopted me.”
That was Brent and Nikki Nalder, who she met when they booked her to shoot a family portrait.
They liked her work so much, they took her to Rarotonga with them to shoot their destination wedding. She became such firm friends with the family, they eventually invited her to move in and share their rural home with them and their children when she’s not on the road.
Where many landscape photographers prefer to shoot only during the autumn and winter when the light is muted, and the skies are moody, Sjardin-Thompson is able to shoot year round in Golden Bay.
“Golden Bay lends itself really nicely to summer [shooting],” she says. “Golden Bay is probably the only place so far in New Zealand that I'm really, really happy to photograph in the middle of summer.”
Landscape photography is her passion. She even prefers to shoot wedding and family portraits outdoors, within a landscape. “I've done a lot of destination weddings. We fly up to Almer Hut up in the Southern Alps, on the top of the Franz Josef Glacier, which is very cool.”
Her clients tend to be locals, who want an artful made shot of their favourite spots, or Kiwis overseas who are homesick for a view of Aotearoa.
Sjardin-Thompson doesn’t have a website, she does most of her business through Facebook. She has posted an image every day for more than a decade, and her following has grown from that prolific dependability. “I travel all the time so there's always something new something different to look at,” she says.
As much as she loves Golden Bay, her artistic heart is not done with the West Coast yet. That's where she first picked up her camera, and you get the sense she still has a lot of work left to do there.