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Tauranga-based Jacki Key has spent the last few years documenting different aspects of water, and travelling the world in order to do so. Recently, she sought out an East Coast community, Hinerupe — ‘people of the sea’ — which lives in symbiosis with the ocean. “It was about gathering food, preparing food, sharing food, it was about sustainable living,” she says.

For more than 50 years, the Kimberley Centre provided a home for the intellectually disabled. At its height, the complex hosted around 800 residents, with an equivalent number of staff. If you lived in Horowhenua in the 1970s, you knew someone who worked at Kimberley. But by the time the last few residents left in 2006, it hadn’t been properly maintained for several decades. Since then, the buildings have stood empty, rotting and eroding.

If the job is connected to food, Sarah Tuck can probably do it. Develop a set of recipes from scratch? No problem. Photograph them for a story? She can cook, style and shoot from home, using her studio (which used to be her eldest son’s bedroom) and the props spilling out of her garage.

A central Auckland suburb squeezed in between a train line and a motorway, Kingsland is little more than a single strip of shops and a network of residential streets. But it’s also home to elegant heritage buildings, an eclectic mix of businesses and a diverse cast of characters — soon to be celebrated in a large-format photography exhibition by Lee Howell.

Because he couldn’t persuade any of his clients to send him to Myanmar, Marcus Adams sent himself. Previously, he’d photographed throughout Southeast Asia for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spending a month documenting its humanitarian projects in Vietnam, Laos and Indonesia. But Myanmar was just a little too far off the beaten track for New Zealand-based clients.

The brief didn’t have a list of shots for Ian Robertson to seek out, or a series of images that the client expected him to recreate. Instead, it offered up colour tones — green and gold — and a series of textures. There were reference images of people in action, observational and offhand. Palliser Estate Wines was rebranding, and this was how designer Helen Milner wanted Robertson to capture its autumn harvest.

After a decade working in Thailand, Jose Cano made a list of places in the world he wanted to live in — and Nelson came out on top. There, he began making theatrical portraits, inspired by the colours and religious motifs of his childhood in Spain, and his early career in fashion photography. At the beginning of last year, drawn by Cano’s style, a Christchurch woman booked a portrait session. She’d just had a double mastectomy, and she wanted to feel beautiful again.

Jenny Hope has always noticed the little things. In the process of establishing herself as a photographer in Oamaru, she launched a personal project that takes a loving look at an overlooked subject: weeds.

It started at Purakaunui Bay in the Catlins, over a couple of beers. Vaughan Brookfield’s friend Tom Lynch had just ordered a high-powered new projector for his event production company, and they started wondering out loud what they could do with it outside the remit of their jobs — Brookfield shooting advertising and Lynch bringing concerts and conferences to life. Maybe they could make a new kind of landscape art.

When D&M Hair Design enters international hair competitions, it commissions fashion photographer Mara Sommer and stylist Rachel Morton to create a photo series that also becomes the salon’s campaign imagery for the following season. After a run of success with confronting, dynamic black-and-white images, salon co-owner Danny Pato decided to take things in the opposite direction for Autumn/Winter 2016, and work with colour — as much colour as possible.

A couple of times a year, Alex Wallace spends a week on location with Sibelco, a global mineral company, at various mines and processing plants in Australia and New Zealand. Early in 2016, Sibelco flew Wallace to Indonesia and Malaysia to document two mines the company had recently purchased, with the images intended to appear in the company’s annual report.