Wellington South Coast Clean Up 2012

Two weeks ago I photographed the Wellington South Coast Clean-up 2012 event. This is a voluntary event where individuals and groups come together and spend an hour combing Wellington’s idyllic beaches and rugged headlands for discarded rubbish deposited by wind, tide, or by hand. The event stretched out along 11 kilometers of coast, from Owhiro Bay in the East, to Breaker Bay in the West.
I decided to shoot mainly portraits and set-up shots rather than candid. An hour is a small amount of time to visit a number of locations and wait for volunteers to find interesting pieces of rubbish, especially considering that not every location I visited had a large number of volunteers to photograph. Here are a few shots from that day:

A volunteer rummages for trash amongst the natural tidal debris on Island Bay beach.

South Coast Clean Up 2012 volunteers Tim Alexander (left), and Jo Lundon, pose for a portrait while collecting rubbish on Island Bay beach.

Fellow photog and volunteer Katrina Ching poses for a photo while collecting rubbish from Lyall Bay during the South Coast Clean Up 2012 event.

Rubbish collect from local beaches is piled by a bin at Dorrie Lesely park, Lyall Bay.

Volunteers are fueled by the quintessential Kiwi sausage sizzle, after the event in Lyall Bay.

South Coast Clean Up 2012 volunteers pose for a group portrait in Lyall Bay with sack-fulls of rubbish collected from Wellington’s south coast.