Re-Visiting the Familiar

 
I was born in 1962 in Hamilton a provincial town in Western Victoria, 285km west of Melbourne the state capital, where I currently reside. I remember as a child the population, marked on signs at several main entry points to the town, was 10,200. Back then that seemed like a whole lot of people.
As a [...]

A Life Contained

I photographed this gentleman while on an outing with the Leica Society, a camera club based in the Melbourne suburb of Canterbury. While I’ve attended many camera clubs as a judge or guest speaker, the Leica Society is the only club where I was registered as an active member. Unfortunately, a full work schedule stopped [...]

Marion

This image was made during a course I was running on Portrait photography. The shoot was held at an artist’s retreat in Melbourne, Australia.
I have a particular love for and, therefore, affinity with existing light photography. We were working in a darkened room with very low levels of light. I looked around and noticed a [...]

Pic of the Week_Close-Up_Yarra Valley

This image was made on a workshop to the fine wine-growing region of the Yarra Valley, north of Melbourne, Australia.
Actually the original image came about, at least in part, by accident. I was setting up a shot with a Canon 180mm f3.5 Macro L  series USM lens. I remember fitting the lens to my Canon [...]

Architectural Concerns

One of the concerns an architect has when designing a building is the need to design a space through which people can move. Depending on the era in which they’re designed and constructed, major metropolitan train stations may feature either grand or contemporary facades. But, as they are designed for the prompt passage of large [...]

Photographing Graffiti_Why?

What is the purpose of photographing graffiti? As man-made subject matter it’s more like photographing statues or architecture than the natural landscape. Is the idea to document someone else’s work, whether you consider it to be art or otherwise? If so, fine, make it a sharp accurate rendering.
But if you want to make art from [...]

Photographing Graffiti_Art or Vandalism

One of my favorite themes in photography is duality: that is, a thing and its opposite. So, for example, horror and beauty, war and peace, despair and hope. Many of the very best photographs contain such dualities.
To my mind graffiti is a case in point. Is it art or vandalism? To my way of thinking [...]

Abstraction through Shape

Abstraction allows the artist to present the world in a way somewhat differently to how it would normally be perceived. I believe there are three ways by which the photographer can present the world: realism, by that I mean depicting the subject in a recognizable manner; suggestion, where the object is photographed in such a [...]

Abstraction through Reflections

I’m doing some work for a very good friend of mine, a doctor who needs a camera/lighting system that members of his staff can use to photograph patients both before and after certain procedures are undertaken. As the staff members in question are amateur photographers there’s no chance of using a DSLR and either portable [...]

Alone versus Lonely

Photographing in the Docklands precinct of Melbourne, Australia on a bleak morning I decided to make an image that explored notions of loneliness and being alone. The point is that you can be completely on your own (alone) and not feel lonely. Conversely you can be in a crowd and feel lonely. So isolation is [...]