A conversation with John Norris (EP206)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Well, g' day everybody and welcome back to the Camera Life podcast. It is Thursday 6th August and being a Thursday morning, we have a treat for you. We are getting to interview yet another amazing photographer. I'm Greg, Joining me is Justin and obviously we're the host of the Camera Life, but we're also part of the Lucky Straps team. Actually Justin owns Lucky Straps team, so I'm an indentured servitude and yeah, I'm happy with my situation. Anyway, enough about me. We are joined today by professional photographer with extensive history and extensive range photography styles. We are joined by John Norris. G', day mate, how are you? [00:01:03] Speaker A: Hi. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Good to have you on board. Before we get into the, into the nitty gritty of who you are, what you do and where you've been, let's, let's hear in your own words, what's your elevator pitch? How do you describe yourself and your, and your work? [00:01:20] Speaker A: I guess I'm a person who chose to make photography my life and I integrated my photography into my family life, my working life, my leisure life. And I'm very fortunate in that I managed to succeed in making a living from it. Starting with skiing as the predominant thing, which then expanded to, eventually to mountaineering, to social portraiture in the small alpine valley where I lived. And I've got a real passion for nature, so I shoot a lot of pictures of trees, forests, things like that, the landscape. Also involved with motorcycling, passionate motorcyclist and motorcycle traveler and I've managed to incorporate that in, in my working life as well. Yeah, so that's, I guess that's it in a nutshell. [00:02:28] Speaker B: Amazing. Now, of course your mates with our, one of our alumni, Jason Lau, who been on this podcast multiple times, you know, and Jason is also a very mad keen. Not only does he ride amazing motorcycles, but he also loves photographing them. When, when did you and Justin sort of cross paths? Where did you meet? Sorry, Jason, not Justin. You only just met Justin now? Silly question. [00:02:53] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I only met Jason once but had a really great conversation with him and it was at the Fuji Creator Summit this year. And yeah, I had a great time there. And yeah, one of the nice things was meeting Jason and chatting to him and I was, I was quite flattered that he put my name forward for the podcast here. [00:03:19] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, he's got a good eye. He can see talent when he, when he's, when he knows it. So yeah, I, I think it's great, you know, and you know, it's Just sort of testament again to, you know, had the importance of these sort of events for networking and meeting peers and like minded folk. We've certainly found a lot of joy in those sorts of things, especially with beef up and you know what. [00:03:40] Speaker C: What drew you to the Creator Summit? Why did you head along, John? [00:03:45] Speaker A: Well, probably be music to your Fuji podcast, but I do [00:03:51] Speaker B: love it. [00:03:52] Speaker A: I do rather like Fuji cameras so I was interested in Fuji but also I kind of was interested in making connections and, and seeing what was going on in, in Melbourne. I only moved to Australia a couple of years ago from Europe so I'm still finding my way out here. And yeah, the Creator Summit seemed like a really good event and unlike most things it was. The ticket price was very reasonable. I thought it was for what they did. I also got to try out the GF100RS which was a real treat to have a go with that. [00:04:40] Speaker C: You liked it? [00:04:42] Speaker A: I loved it actually. It would really suit my lifestyle. [00:04:47] Speaker B: Yeah, me too. [00:04:49] Speaker A: But I think I'm gonna have to wait until I update computers and so on. That's. That's the thing. [00:04:56] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:04:57] Speaker A: Held me back really from jumping straight in. Was that the, the stuff I've got in my office would have struggled a bit with it. [00:05:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I found that I, I used to do a lot of reviews for a site and I remember the first time I got sent to GFX. I think it was the one hundreds Mark II or maybe the one hundreds anyway and I had like a, you know, 2007 iMac. Yeah, it was pretty old. It couldn't handle those files. [00:05:27] Speaker C: It just destroyed it. [00:05:30] Speaker B: I'm turning off. We're not having this conversation. [00:05:34] Speaker C: It'd be interesting to know what level of computer you need now like from the new range of say max, like what level you need to work with those files at a sort of a reasonable pace because I just checked the price on what a top spec MacBook Pro is now and it's. I think it was ten or eleven grand for it for a fully specced. And that's for like the. And I'm sure that's probably overkill for what you need, but I couldn't, I couldn't believe how much that was. [00:06:07] Speaker A: And that's my sort of income from photography slows as I sort of approach retirement. You know, I had to think about investing that kind of money because it's not just the camera, it's everything else that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's something that you, you would. Yeah. I can see myself getting one. I love the way it handled. I loved the whole concept of the camera, but I bought a GFX 50s 2 secondhand before I left and I found that is it's not as compact, so not as useful for the outdoorsy stuff but, but for everything else. That's a wonderful camera. [00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:57] Speaker A: Possibly overlooked in the search for the, the 100 versions. [00:07:03] Speaker C: Yes. [00:07:04] Speaker B: Yeah, it's an interesting, you know, and they've had a couple of iterations of the GFX models. I mean There was the 50R which is the range rangefinder style. It was like a grown up X Pro, you know, X Pro body and. But that, you know, they kind of dropped that after the first iteration. [00:07:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:07:20] Speaker B: But I'm glad they've stuck with the 50, the 50 megapixel sensor. I think, you know, that that could be a sweet spot for a lot of people without breaking the bank, without, you know, needing a new computer necessarily, that sort of thing. [00:07:31] Speaker C: They don't still make that though, do they? The 50? [00:07:33] Speaker A: No, they. [00:07:35] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:07:37] Speaker A: So now it's all 100 really, I think. But there's plenty secondhand, so. [00:07:43] Speaker C: Yeah, well, yeah, if you believe the rumors site, there's a 180megapixel on the horizon for the GFX range. So the 100 will become the 50. You know, that's going to be the little sensor. You know, isn't that crazy? [00:08:02] Speaker B: You'd need to lease computer time from NASA to edit those files, surely. [00:08:07] Speaker A: I just took a little X30 on a, on a trip into the bogong high plains and so it's kind of the other extreme there. I don't know what that is. I think it's 12 or 16. Yeah, yeah. This came out pretty okay. Yeah. I just thought a little, a little return to the compact camera would be fun for a trip. [00:08:36] Speaker B: Well, there's a surge in them again. You know, they're hugely popular. People are calling for them more and more and surprisingly at the moment Kodak have some of the best options on the market, you know, for those sort of entry level point and shoot that are a little bit better than just the, the Teemu versions of things. They sell a lot of digital, you know, compact digital cameras that are, yeah, 12 or 16 megapixel. [00:08:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:00] Speaker B: And so, you know, we, we do see, we are seeing the bigger brands scurry at the moment, you know, and there's rumors all over about Canon bringing out another compact, Sony doing another compact, even Nikon, like repurposing old compacts that they used to make and bringing them forward for, you know, the next generation because they took their eyes off that ball, you know, for years they stopped, they stopped investing in compacts and now no one offers good ones. [00:09:29] Speaker A: Probably rightly at the time that you know, that the telephone had completely compact. And in reality I'm not sure that it has because I came back with pictures of that little X30 that you couldn't have got on a phone. [00:09:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a different character, isn't it? You know, and I think people, people are moving away from using their phone for photography because it's distracting. You know, you're in the middle of taking shots and you start getting notifications. All of a sudden you're not thinking about the shot or the composition or the light. [00:10:02] Speaker C: Next minute you're on Facebook Marketplace. You've been like, hang on a minute, what was I doing? [00:10:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:10:06] Speaker B: Why is there a GFX in my car? You know, it just happens to the best of us. [00:10:09] Speaker C: Exactly. [00:10:12] Speaker B: Very, very good. Let's before we proceed and you know, maybe roll back the clock a little bit, get a bit more of your history. Justin, you want to say good morning to the handful of people that have shown up. [00:10:22] Speaker C: I do. Philip Johnson is here first as always. Morning all from a chilly 0° Blue Mountains. Chilly, chilly everywhere. Morning Lucinda. Julie Powell, she says welcome back Justin. It's good to be back. For those that don't know, I'll talk about it all on Monday night show but I've been in, in Africa on safari trying not to get eaten by lines and I'm back and I'm tired but I'm back. David Mascara says hello from the Bay Area, San Francisco, Robert Varner. Good morning Australia. Saying good morning from where is it? New Jersey? I digifrog is here. Tazzy. Lisa Leach says good morning from the Mallee region on a, on a Bret Wood workshop to the Salt Lakes. Well, lucky you. [00:11:02] Speaker B: Nice. [00:11:02] Speaker C: I've seen some of those photos and they're popping up on my socials and they look insane. Felicity Johnson, Good morning. Cinder says it was eight grand for her laptop a few years ago, so. Wowzers. [00:11:16] Speaker B: Well even this one I got, I got this in 25, the start of 2025 I think. And this is a 14 inch MacBook M3. I upped the RAM, didn't add more storage because I have external drives and that was 3,600. [00:11:30] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's, I reckon that like something around that three to four grand range should handle a GFX file for non high volume use. You know, like for just general, general use. Not for like shooting weddings with it or something. Crazy. [00:11:44] Speaker B: Yeah, doing batch stuff. [00:11:45] Speaker C: Yeah. So anyway, be interesting to know from, from a few like who, who's using gfx. That's got the cheapest laptop currently. And how does it go? That's what I'd like to know. Is anyone, is anyone handling those 100 megapixel files with like a, you know, something old and it's, and it's still handling it. Stuart Lyle. Morning from Hobart Town. Wookie. Morning. [00:12:09] Speaker B: G' day, Shane. [00:12:09] Speaker C: And East Coast Photography. Good morning gents. From Forster, New South Wales. [00:12:14] Speaker A: Nice, very cool. [00:12:15] Speaker C: And John's joining us from Healesville. Chilly. Healesville. [00:12:18] Speaker B: Yeah. What's the temp in Healesville this morning, John? [00:12:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I really don't know, probably six degrees or something. [00:12:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:12:29] Speaker C: Oh yeah, that's warm in Bendigo. [00:12:30] Speaker A: I'm throwing a complete gas out there. [00:12:34] Speaker B: That's okay, as long as you're warm and snug. That's, that's fine for now. [00:12:38] Speaker C: Warm enough to have the heater on. [00:12:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:12:41] Speaker C: Oh, should we do. Before we get into it too, should we do a, do an ad read? Should we talk about our sponsor of the show? Lucky Straps Indeed. Oh, what? Hang on. Apparently the R in Fausta is Silent Forster. I'm gonna say it. I don't. I mean Foster. [00:12:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:12:58] Speaker C: Nah, it sounds wrong. Foster. Anyway, if you would like a beautiful leather camera strap that you can use anywhere around the world, including on safari in Africa to carry your camera and keep it Safe, go to Luckystraps.com and check out our range of beautiful handcrafted Australian made leather camera straps with quick release clips, anti theft locks, cut resistant Dyneema webbing so they can stay safe while you travel around the world. Luckystraps.com use code Greg if you would like a discount or use code Justin if you prefer that. That is all. Okay, on with the show. [00:13:32] Speaker B: All right, thanks for doing that, Jay. It's always nice to keep the lights, the lights on, isn't it? [00:13:36] Speaker C: Yeah, try to. [00:13:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:13:41] Speaker B: All right, John, let's. Let's roll back the clock a little bit. You know, I like, I find it fascinating to find out where, where people, where that spark began for people and what motivated, you know, was it you had creative parents or perhaps a creative teacher in the early years or maybe you didn't pick up photography until a bit later. Tell us a little bit about where your journey began. [00:14:04] Speaker A: I guess in reality it began when I was in my mid teens and my Father lent me an old, it was called an arete and it was a. One of these sort of silvery colored cameras in a brown leather case and with no, no built in light meter. And he, he sent me off to France with this thing with a little card that he'd copied off the back of a film box where, you know, gave you the settings for a cloudy day, the. A sunny day. [00:14:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:14:41] Speaker A: And so I went off and fiddled with apertures and shutter speeds of this thing and amazingly came back with. It's quite interesting with quite reasonably well exposed print photographs from it. Anyway, he reclaimed the camera and I was given a plastic 110 cartridge Kodak. [00:15:04] Speaker B: I Bonnetize. [00:15:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And it lived in the top box of my motorbike for, for a long time and eventually got stolen outside a pub. And the interesting thing was it probably only had a 25 shot film in it, but it, but it was the last six months of. The previous six months of my life was on that film. Yeah, because at the time, you know, I guess I was just taking a shot one week and then nothing for two or three weeks and then another shot. So. So I was pretty gutted about that. So then my dad again at one of my birthdays he, he gave me actually, I actually got it to hand to show you this. [00:15:47] Speaker B: Nice. We love a prop. [00:15:48] Speaker C: Oh, and that's the original. That's the one. You've kept this the whole time? [00:15:53] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's actually still got the original address on the back. But. But yeah, this thing is an amazing camera. And I took it on various motorbike trips. And then years later I went on a year's travel around the world and I left my Pentax semi Super at home and, and took that and the discipline of working with that roughly 40 mil lens, but with all the full manual controls and everything, I guess it's. It really got me into things. My dad was a really keen amateur photographer. He used to do slideshows for local groups and clubs and things. And I got that buck from him too. And my grandfathers both took photographs too. So I've got some quite interesting old transparencies from that day. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. I think where the professional side of it came in really was quite a few years later I went out to France on the invitation of my brother who was living doing winters out there as a ski bum. And I'd been having trouble with my back at the time and I'd just come out of a rehabilitation place and he said, come out, John you know, have a holiday over Christmas in, in the Alps. And so I'll, I'll come out, but there's no way I'm skiing. I've just got my back straight, you know, I'll just come out and sightsee and, and stuff. So, so I, I hitchhiked out there from the north of England, which was a feral journey, and arrived on Christmas Eve in this Alpine village. It was a beautiful, starry night when I arrived and snow everywhere. Anyway, after two weeks there, I was totally smitten and I said to everyone in the bar, you know, I'm going back, I'm going to pack all my things up, quit my job, I'll be back in a month. And you know, they were used to tourists saying that, quite, believe me. And within a month I was back and tentatively skiing. And it grew from there. Initially I went out just for winters, but after, after doing that for a couple of times, bit by bit, I did the odd parts of summer and then before I knew it, they'd met in the middle and I realized that I was living there. It's not, I don't know, I was taking photographs as an, as an amateur, effectively, you know, and I had a job washing dishes up on the mount in a 2000 meter high restaurant on one of the best ski areas in the world, the Grand Monte in Argentieres in the Chamonix Valley. And I was often given the role of clearing snow off the terrace up there. And I always had my Pentax around my neck while I was working away and stop me if I'm rambling. [00:19:18] Speaker C: No, no. [00:19:21] Speaker A: But while I was working there, the p. Stairs were clearing the ski area to make it safe for skiers. And back in the day it was very macho activity. They used to hurl sticks of dynamite out of the helicopter or cut the slopes with, using just a ski line to release these huge avalanches. One day they kind of underestimated the amount of snow and they blew this steep slope right up at the back of the mountain and they triggered an absolutely monstrous avalanche which swept right down the Argentier glacier. And I saw this thing from the terrace and I ran down to get a decent viewpoint and fired off some pictures with my Pentax. Probably a cheap Tamron, you know, secondhand lens on it. But anyway, I managed to get this, the shot. And then along with other shots, I started doing slideshows in chalets and earning a bit of money to pay my way out there. And somebody saw this avalanche picture. It was an author who was writing A guidebook on the Chamonix Zermatt ski mountaineering route. I said, john, you know, I'd love to use this avalanche picture for my book. Do you mind, you know, if I, if I use it? I was fantastic. Yeah, published picture, I'd be really excited. So, so I, I gave him the transparency, which in those days was the original transparency, and took it off to England. And I was really fired up. I thought, oh, I think I'm going to try and be a photographer. So I went back to London and got a job bricklaying to save up some money for more camera gear. And I kind of committed the whole of the summer to that. And then in the autumn, just before the ski season, I got a call from Peter Cliff, the author, and he said, john, I've got some bad news, I'm afraid. The publisher saw the picture and he doesn't want to run it. He thinks it will terrify people who are thinking of doing the route. So we pulled the picture, but by that point I kind of made that commitment and I went out to Chamonix and did another season. And then the following year, my uncle knew he had a neighbor who happened to be the president of the British Institute of Professional Photographers. And my uncle said, you've got to meet this guy, Don Fraser. You know, he's a really good photographer. And this guy was in the heyday of architectural and industrial photography. He was traveling off to places in Saudi Arabia and earning staggering amounts of money in the process. And he agreed to meet me. So I went around to his, to his home with my few prints that I'd got and mounted up nicely and everything to see what, you know, the great man thought of them. And he sort of looked at them and thought, yeah, they're quite nice, but son, you've got to get a better camera. The quality is terrible. So I was a little bit crestfallen by that, but I realized he was right. My little Pentax setup really wasn't delivering the good. So it's probably more to do with the cheap beat nut lenses I was buying from camera shops secondhand, you know, and so I bought a cannon Eos worm. And from that point things kicked off and I started on the path towards, you know, being properly professional. I mean, you can't condense the period, but it took me about seven, seven years of not really earning anything. And I think, I think I was lucky because if you were in your 40s, I don't think you could necessarily give up seven years of your life to not earning Very much money at all. And it just happened that it was the right time in my life. You know, I'd got the time. I was prepared to do dishwashing, bricklaying, whatever it took to buy camera gear and support myself for a season. And at one point I just took the plunge and said, okay, this year I'm not washing dishes. I'm just going to do photography, and let's see where it goes. Yeah, it was a long road, I bet. [00:24:22] Speaker C: So that first year, the first year you decided to not work at all while you're away for the winter and just shoot photography, did you have a plan for how you would earn money? Was it in the hopes of getting published, or were you doing shoots for the mountain or, you know, like, what was, what was the plan to earn some money with your camera in that season? [00:24:44] Speaker A: I think I was incredibly naive, so I didn't really have much of a plan. Nice. I just thought if I take lots of good pictures, you know, something will happen. [00:24:56] Speaker C: And [00:25:01] Speaker A: I think what I did was I wanted to get published in magazines because we're talking late mid to late 80s, and magazines were still king as far as being published as a photographer was concerned. Well, I felt so at the time, especially with skiing. Ski magazines like Powder magazine were the objective. You, you wanted to get your work published in that. And once you were published, if you got published enough, the manufacturers were more interested in supplying you with equipment. [00:25:39] Speaker B: And initially camera equipment or ski equipment? [00:25:42] Speaker A: No, ski equipment. [00:25:43] Speaker B: Ski equipment. [00:25:44] Speaker A: All right, yeah. I had very little success getting free cameras. [00:25:50] Speaker C: Haven't we all? [00:25:54] Speaker A: I've come close, but never quite, never quite managed it. So, yeah, yeah, I, I, I guess I relentlessly took pictures and, and I did slideshows in the chalets, which I found, you know, they earned me back in the day. It was sort of like 200 francs a pop, sometimes more, which, given my rent was a thousand francs a month, you know, was actually quite a reasonable amount of money towards my living costs. And if I did, you know, three. Three a week or something, you know, it went a long way to supporting me, and I really targeted ski action photography and landscape, those two genres. And initially, my brother was the one who gave me the first pointers in ski photography. He was a very good skier and a monoskier, really passionate about it, and he loved the ski magazines, and I think he liked the idea of training his own photographer to. [00:27:13] Speaker B: Are you the younger brother? Were you the younger brother? [00:27:16] Speaker A: I'm the older brother. [00:27:17] Speaker B: Oh, you're the older brother. Normally it's the other way around. [00:27:20] Speaker A: Yeah. And so, you know, I've still got the first picture. I took the first ski action picture, you know, and then we looked at the picture together and they'd say, well, yeah, you need the skier, you know, in this position with the hole in the right place and you need to catch this moment. And so he helped me a lot. And he was going to produce a holiday brochure for a chalet company he was setting up. So he used my photography through this catalog. But the COVID he gave to another photographer. Oh, no. Claire Renard, who was very, very established and still is a well respected Swedish ski photographer. And I thought I didn't get the COVID you know, but I looked at the picture and I thought, actually, that's the kind of picture I want to take. I really like that picture. And yeah, and Felix's work was extremely good. And in Chamonix, it was a world where the ski photographers were quite conspicuous. So, you know, we knew who they were and often came across them socially. And as I say, Felix Sinclair was. He was a very established photographer and he. And a real local character called Gary Bingham as well. He was a filmmaker and photographer. And they came to some of my slideshows and gave me some really nice feedback. And you can't underestimate how valuable that is to someone starting out. You know, when you, when you get a respected photographer giving you some encouragement, it really does make a big difference. And, yeah, I've never forgot that gesture. In fact, Felix bought one of my prints from one of my exhibitions as well. So, yeah, it was, it was a great community. It still, still is a great community in Chamonix in that respect. [00:29:29] Speaker C: Wow, that's. Yeah. For him to like one thing to give some encouragement, but to purchase a print, you know, an established photographer purchasing a print from an emerging photographer, I think is a. Is a big gesture. [00:29:41] Speaker B: That's the ultimate compliment. [00:29:42] Speaker A: It was, yeah, yeah. [00:29:45] Speaker B: Incredible. And, you know, you mentioned earlier that you were out riding a motorbike from quite a young age. What got you into that as a. As a sport or as a leisure activity? [00:29:56] Speaker A: I have a very early memory of back in the days before child seats and rear safety belts. I can remember sitting in the back of a Vauxhall Viva as my dad was driving through town, and I'd be kneeling on the back seat looking out of the back window, watching motorbikes and just absolutely loving them. Like, I guess most kids like motorbikes. But I was lucky in that my dad had had a motorbike in his Youth. So unlike some parents of the 1970s when the accidents were pretty regular on motorbikes, you have teenagers with no experience riding incredibly powerful bikes. And my dad said, yeah, you can have a motorbike but you have to do a, an RAC ACU training course which was run by police motorcyclists. So I thought that was a small price to pay. And as soon as I was old enough I bought a motorbike and I've loved the matter since. You know, they've been part of my life the whole way really. I've never not owned a motorbike since I was 16 really. And they, I lived in a very small rural village where I grew up. So the motorbike was very much that ticket to freedom to get out further than you could get in a day on a bicycle, which in the previous radius, you know, when you, so you [00:31:37] Speaker C: said you did a, you traveled the world for a year. That was in between school and heading away. Was that when, when was that? [00:31:49] Speaker A: That, that was. I did my, the first season in Chamonix and, and then I'd always wanted to go on a hitchhiking, backpacking type trip traveling further afield than the uk. So after that first season I did some casual work with a tree surgeon friend of mine in Bournemouth and saved up some money and I actually that's the only season I, I missed in, in Germany. I, I went that autumn. I bought a one way ticket to Delhi and, and returned about a year later various places including Australia. [00:32:37] Speaker B: So. [00:32:38] Speaker C: Did you really? [00:32:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I visited, I hitchhiked across from, well I got, I actually got the train across the Nullarbor to Port Augusta and then hitchhiked across to Melbourne and then hitchhiked from Melbourne up to Darwin. [00:32:57] Speaker C: My gosh. [00:32:58] Speaker A: And New Zealand as well. In between those two hitchhikes. Yeah, hitchhiking. Just an amazing thing to do. And kind of sat the way it started out a little bit. [00:33:13] Speaker C: Yeah, that's. It's what, that's one of those things that like, by the time I was growing up hitchhiking was just known as something that you shouldn't do in terms of, you know, our parents always just told no, that's not safe, you can't, you can't do that. You never know who's going to pick you up. And then there was the, you know, the various issues with hitchhikers getting killed in Australia and things like that. And it was, it's, there was just that fear of like, oh, that could happen to me. But gosh, it might have been an Experience. [00:33:47] Speaker A: I mean there were, there were horror stories even back then. But prior to leaving school, one summer holiday, I think it was 1976, it was a year, it was an amazing summer. My parents really allowed me an unbelievable level of freedom throughout my life. They were very supportive, but they, they, they let me go off hitchhiking during the school holidays with two mates and we, we split into a group of two and one and we alternated. So sometimes the two of us had hitched together and then all three of us would meet at a set destination at the end of the day. And I went off for about six weeks hitchhiking around the uk, sleeping in hedgerows and graveyards and camping, living a complete sort of free life down to some relatives in Dorset on the south coast, where I stayed for a while. And looking back, you know, I think I didn't, I didn't phone my parents until I got to Dorset. So for probably over a week at least, maybe longer, I had no idea or what I was doing. You know, I think sometimes that I realize there are risks, but I think sometimes kids would benefit from that level of autonomy and freedom these days. Yeah, I know. [00:35:22] Speaker B: Oh yeah, for sure. [00:35:23] Speaker A: But it's not as dangerous as people think. And hitchhiking isn't. I mean my, my boys in, in, in the Chamonix Valley, there's the small village we lived in, which is Argentier, which is near the head of the valley. And Chamonix is about, I don't know, 7k down the road, a twisty sort of descent and then down to the main town. And especially earlier on, the bus service wasn't great, the trains weren't great. And so everybody hitchhikes backwards and forwards between these two places. They still do. And women hitchhike alone and young kids hitchhike. And my own kids, sometimes if they missed the school bus, they wouldn't tell me. They just hitch down and catch a lift down to school. So they grew up with a fair degree of freedom in Chamonix. I guess there was always a risk, but I thought that freedom was good for them. [00:36:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's a trade off, isn't it? I mean, you know, [00:36:42] Speaker A: you're considered completely reckless and foolish, but if it goes well. [00:36:47] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's a good point. I mean, I remember growing up in Australia in the, here in Victoria, in the burbs and we'd disappear on our BMXs for like the whole day, you know, and then we'd have dinner at someone's place and then, you know, you'd make your way home. It's just as long as you came home, you know. [00:37:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:02] Speaker B: And when younger, it was by the street before the street lights came on, which is why summer was so much fun because they didn't come until like 9 o' clock at night. It is, it is a level of freedom that we don't necessarily afford this generation of kids, you know, I think because we're always so bombarded by everything bad that's happening in the world that we feel like the world is bad. [00:37:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:24] Speaker B: You know, and social media plays a [00:37:26] Speaker A: huge part as well. I think they, they did influence my interest and enjoyment of photography because when I look back at the pictures, you know, some of them are terrible exposures and which, you know, it wasn't always easy. You couldn't see what results you were getting. And the camera, the cameras didn't have evaluative light readings. You know, they kind of, you pointed at someone in the shade and they'd come out as a silhouette. You, you know, so there were pictures that were exactly what you'd expect for an amateur at the time. But every now and again I can see in the original shots that I was taking then that I was beginning to understand composition and had an interest in that. You know, I'd take the time to move my position. I wouldn't just pick up the camera and point it, you know, I'd make an effort to compose the picture. So I think all these travels actually did helped me when I came to try and become professional. Yeah. [00:38:34] Speaker C: God, yeah. You must have seen some. A full year of travel, like including to Australia to. Yeah, to India. Like, gosh, that would have been quite an eye opening experience, especially coming from [00:38:47] Speaker B: a small country village. [00:38:48] Speaker C: Small country town. [00:38:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, Yeah. I mean, 17 children in the school when my family arrived, so we swelled the numbers to almost 20. [00:39:01] Speaker C: Yeah, right. [00:39:06] Speaker B: Sorry, I thought you can ask you. No, I did and then it's, it's completely left my brain already. Don't worry, let's move along. [00:39:13] Speaker A: It happens. [00:39:14] Speaker B: Senior moment. No, I do know what I was going to ask. You know, you said that you, you came to Australia as part of that travel period. What were your impressions when you, when you traveled around Australia of this country and the people. [00:39:29] Speaker A: Now that's an interesting question. I was pretty skinned, so I think people were good to me. A couple of people I'd met on my travels gave me somewhere to stay when I arrived in Perth and when I got to Melbourne I stayed with. Well, she was sort of a distant cousin but she was an old lady and I stayed in her little studio. What do you call them? Unit. [00:40:09] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah, like a flat unit. [00:40:11] Speaker A: Stayed a little unit with her. And actually, when another relative gave me a job at Broadmeadows College, where I was, he just gave me some work. You know, he kind of invented the work for me and sort of sent me into these sort of abandoned rooms in the college and said, you know, tidy the chairs up and sweep the floor or whatever. But he didn't seem very interested in me actually doing anything. He was just doing me a big favor and giving me some money for my next leg in. In New Zealand. I enjoyed my. My first trip to Australia, you know, it was. Yeah, it was unbelievably strange and different to me. I don't think I got the best out of Victoria because most of my time in Victoria I spent in Melbourne. I think I visited Hanging Rock and a couple of other places, but I had no idea of what I'm discovering now from Healesville and from my travels up into the mountains. But what I did fall in love with was the Northern Territory. I was absolutely blown away by that place and by the kindness of people on my hitchhiking journey from Melbourne to Darwin, because, you know, in England you maybe hitch a lift and you get a lift for an hour and then you get another lift for half an hour. In Australia, I was getting lifts for four days. [00:41:59] Speaker C: Oh, wow. Yeah. [00:42:01] Speaker A: And people would take pity on me because I didn't even have a tent. I just sort of set off thinking, well, Australia's got to be pretty warm. I know it might be a bit chilly at night, but I'll be all right. [00:42:14] Speaker B: And then you come to Melbourne, [00:42:18] Speaker A: and I thought when I left Melbourne, you know, everything will be fine. So I'm sort of hitchhiking through the. The Northern Territory and. And the people I'm hitching a ride with, you know, so what are you going to do tonight? And I had this sort of cotton quilted blanket thing I bought in India, which I was sleeping under. And I remember one guy in a VW camper said, you know, I've got a tent in the camper. You can use that. Actually, he wrote me into. He was trying to convince me. I got a lift with him, I think it was from Port. Port Augusta. And we arrived in Coober Pedy, and. Which was just. To me, as an English person, that was the most bizarre place I'd ever been. [00:43:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it's bizarre for us Australians, too. [00:43:15] Speaker C: Don't worry. Yeah, exactly. [00:43:17] Speaker A: He was traveling around Australia selling these hideous sort of copper, you know, the copper engravings, that sort of framed copper with black, almost like line illustrations of tigers and oriental buildings and stuff. And he was knocking on doors, paying his way by selling these things to people. And Coober Pedy was actually quite rich pickings because there were a lot of very bored people with plenty of money and nothing to spend it on. So he was quite well received and he said, come on John, you know, you give me a hand. And he sort of gave me half a dozen of these things and told me to knock on doors and sell them. And I never felt so awkward in my life. I really had absolutely no talent for it. So I didn't get a full time job with this guy. On the next day we sort of moved on and he dropped me off. So I wasn't subjected to that. But that was the first time I went to an RSL which at the time was in that term was kind of a bit like mayhem that night. So that was, that was a real revelation for me. [00:44:39] Speaker C: Wow. [00:44:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it was a great trip. It was a really amazing trip. [00:44:44] Speaker C: Any obviously it had a very positive sort of impact on you and just still the way that you talk about hitchhiking now and stuff is very positive. Were there any, any like scary moments any, any times during that trip where you were by yourself or you were hitchhiking with someone where you thought, oh, I don't know if I want to be in this situation right now, you know what I mean? Like, just, just a little bit like shit here. [00:45:12] Speaker A: Yeah, there was one, I, I, the last lift before I got to, I think it was the outskirts of Adelaide somewhere and I'd got a lift with this guy and he was just, he just seemed a little bit strange but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. And he asked me where I was going and when I said Darwin, he said, do you fancy riding the train from Adelaide up to Alice Springs? And I said now, you know I'm going to hitchhike. And he said yeah, but I'm an engine driver, you could ride with me in the cab, I could swing that for you. But the train doesn't leave for two or three days. And I thought about this because I really like trains and I thought this would be amazing. And he said, anyway, have a think about it, come to my place and you know, have a cup of tea and a bite to eat and you can think about it. If you don't want to do it, I'll run you back to the end of the road. So I sort of. I agreed to this. And we drove down this dusty tractor to some bluestone or similar building in the middle of nowhere. And I started to get kind of creepy vibes about the whole thing. Whether I was right or not doesn't really matter, but you have to listen to your instincts. And in the end, I have my. My drink and a little bite with him and. And then I said, no, I think actually I need to keep moving. I'm on a, you know, time schedule. Can you drop me back at the road? Which he did. Yeah, but I. To answer your question, that was the one time where I just didn't quite feel things were. [00:47:03] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I think that's. You spot on. It's like it doesn't matter whether it was right or not, but you got to listen to those feelings, especially when you've put yourself in that situation so many other times and not had that vibe. I think when. When you do get it, you gotta. You gotta listen to it. [00:47:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure. [00:47:19] Speaker C: Yeah. Wow. [00:47:21] Speaker A: That's not exactly at all. Just one slightly sketchy incident, which is. [00:47:28] Speaker C: That's pretty impressive. That's a pretty good odds. Yeah. [00:47:32] Speaker A: It's a good reflection on humanity, I think. [00:47:35] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah, yeah, it's. It's the very few. [00:47:38] Speaker B: Little bit more of that. [00:47:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, I could be here all morning and not talk about photography, just talk about the nice people that had helped me just on that trip alone, you know, so, yeah, we can't really, you know, spend all our time there now, but it. [00:47:56] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:47:57] Speaker B: John, do you still have the photos from that trip? Do you ever look back at them and. And sort of marvel at what was. [00:48:04] Speaker A: I do occasionally, but I've had. I've had a lot of travel since then. I've been really lucky in that my photography has given me some unbelievable opportunities for travel because I started to establish myself with magazines. By the time I left Germany, I was working on and off, sometimes only the ones, sometimes every year. But I'd worked with about 50 different magazines throughout the world and some of my articles got translated into German, Japanese, you know, I really went for that editorial magazine stuff. And eventually it was around about the time my first son was born. So in the late 90s, a lady who's the president of the Ski Club of Great Britain came to my apartment to speak to me and she. The Ski club of Great Britain back in the day was publishing a magazine called Ski and Board. And it was kind of looking a bit tired and lacking in really engaging photography. And it was all a bit happy hockey sticks, kind of. Definitely not of the moment of the free ride kind of feel or the off piste skiing that was beginning to really catch on with the advent of fatter skis and stuff. Anyway, she came to the apartment and she said, would you be interested in coming over to the ski club and discussing how to revive the magazine a bit and working as a picture editor on the magazine and back in. In that time EasyJet had just started. So if, if EasyJet's a bit like your Jetstar and if that hadn't. [00:50:27] Speaker C: Terrible. [00:50:29] Speaker A: Yeah. But fulfills of function nonetheless. And, and at the time, you know, you could buy tickets between Geneva and London for peanuts. And what's more, you could turn up about half an hour, 20 minutes before the flight and just walk straight on because pre 9 11, you know, the security was a different ball together. So there was none of this come two hours before check in. So in short, it made it really easy to travel between Chamonix and London. Geneva's only an hour from Chamonix, an hour's drive and the flight is, excuse me, the flight's about an hour. So I ended up doing this between four and six times during the autumn, the pre winter, pre ski season, and, and was given the role of staff photographer and picture editor, which was an amazing opportunity. So I would go over to the office, it was my one and only ever office job. And I would go over and I would go through the transparencies that various photographers from around the world had sent in in the hope they'd be published in the gallery in the portfolio pages and I'd find images to go with things the editor had written and so on. And I'd be involved in design meetings for the new masthead and the new layout. So it was a really interesting learning experience and a really rewarding opportunity. And I did that. I don't remember how many years, certainly maybe 10 years or more, something like that. [00:52:25] Speaker C: Wow. Okay, so it's a big, big chunk of your career. [00:52:28] Speaker A: It was amazing because once I had a business card with picture editor, staff photographer, pretty much I could go to any ski resort in the world and they would comp me ski passes and terrible freedom to go anywhere. And occasionally the magazine would send me places, sometimes I would set up trips and for example, I had a really good relationship with the Canadian Tourist Board and I was able to take a model with me. And by model I mean sometimes in America they call them athletes, basically someone who would ski for my photographs so that I could Create action pictures with someone I could rely on that fit with a resort report. So I went to Canada, I think three years running. And I worked slowly from the Calgary end all the way across visiting different resorts to Vancouver. So in these three years I pick off about three resorts each time. And in that case the Canadian Tourist Board paid for the flights and accommodation and the lift passes and everything. So basically I just gave up my time and took my camera and the skier or skiers or skier snowboarder combination and I would do a lot of stock images, address the skiers and boarders in clothes that I was working with. Clothes companies I was working with, I give them hardware, skis or snowboards, either that they were sponsored by or that I was working with in a companies I was working with. So it was a kind of like a lot of my way of working. Everything was integrated. I'd got the tourist board, the magazine, the clothing, the hardware, all these things tied in. So when I pressed the shutter and took a picture, that picture could suit whichever purpose it was most useful to. So if I felt the picture wasn't that great for illustrating the article, then maybe it would go to the ski manufacturer. And I always kept that freedom with the work I produced. Like I'd never sold out the copyright and I almost never gave exclusivity to the pictures I took and what I did. [00:55:17] Speaker B: That's really interesting. [00:55:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Very mindful though of conflicts. So you know, I wouldn't send a picture to someone that would offend or put out of joint someone else that I was working with. So you had to think about what you were doing. But if it was a non conflicting purpose. So if I shot something for a brand like say Low Alpine, I wouldn't supply it to a rival clothing brand, but Scarpos detouring boots would, would be okay and lower, I would actually like that because then their clothing might appear in the Scarpa catalog. Yeah, vice versa. And it's all of those interacting threads that, that allowed me to actually make a proper income from my photography. It was a, yeah, it was a tightly woven web of connection things. [00:56:24] Speaker B: But it's an interesting approach. You know, you, you basically, you know, working on the, on the one location taking shots, but your opportunity to, you know, sell those, sell that work to a multitude of clients is, is quite impressive provided you can avoid conflict, you know, that sort of stuff. I'm curious to know, you know, is there something from those years of working commercially for this for, you know, whether it be a ski club or you know, a resort or whatever it may be a brand. What's the, what's the greatest learning that you got from that experience during that time that you're grateful for today? [00:57:09] Speaker A: A lot of things I think. I think working as a commercial photographer, where you have to deliver something to a client or, or a magazine, often you're on. Your time is limited. You're not just wandering around, you know, pleasing yourself, doing your personal work, however much freedom you've got, there is always some kind of time constraint. And so I learned to be fast. Like I learned to see the pictures quickly, to assess where the shot was, for example, in a resort or if something spontaneous happened. I learned to be able to manipulate my equipment quickly. And that commercial knowledge actually transfers really well to more artistic work, I think, because my artistic, if you want to call it that, landscape. Sometimes portraiture, but certainly landscape. I tend to be a reactive photographer. I don't tend to study an app to see when the sun's rising or what direction it's coming from. I tend to. There's nothing wrong with that, but I tend to go somewhere and react to what I see. And I enjoy that. I enjoy that side of it. And the commercial and the personal work or the exhibition prints, type work, it really overlaps. A lot of those skills overlap. It really helps if you can work quickly. And the other thing that I think commercial work has taught me is the importance of ruthless editing. [00:59:04] Speaker C: I was going to ask you about your time as the editor and whether that changed your photography, whether it helped you photography in a different way. [00:59:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it did help. It did help. And I think one of the maxims that I had from the outset was I never let work go to a client. That wasn't the best of what I'd done. So any dross I kept to myself, even when I wasn't supposed to, I would just. I would just never. Because I knew that what happens if you send a slightly blurred picture or a badly composed picture? They'll use it as a double page spread on the front cover with your name. [00:59:52] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:59:53] Speaker A: Your reputation by that, you know, so I've always been really ruthless about that. And I guess working with slide film meant that you had to really think at the end of the season. A lot of the work I do was speculative in terms of the early days with the ski photography. So I'd say at the end of the season I might have 100 transparencies. And of course you've only got one of these. There's no duplicates, there's no digital versions. There's just the slide. And very, very few magazines would take duplicates. I found they rejected them out of hand, especially the good magazines. So basically I had, say, these hundred pictures, and I maybe had half a dozen magazines or people that I wanted to send that work to. And I had to really think in the editing process, process, where do I send these? Because in those days, you'd have a slide envelope with your transparencies tucked in the various pockets, and you write the caption on the. On the mound, and you'd fire them off to a magazine. You wouldn't see them again, often for months. So if you sent them to the wrong place, then some of your best work would just be sitting under a desk somewhere and not see the light. So you had to develop a kind of a feel for what to send, where. And one of the toughest magazines to know what was ideal was Powder magazine, which was the bible for skiers worldwide, really, back in the day. And their photography was, you know, a real showcase for, you know, the pinnacle of ski photography. So the temptation was to send all your good stuff there in the hope that they would publish just one of them and. And that. That would put the name on the map and. But of course, if you did that, then you, you know, you sold yourself short with another magazine. So it was a tricky. A tricky time. I mean, it cost you a fortune to send stuff to America or Australia. You know, I used to contribute to Australian skiing when. When that was. I don't know if it's still in print now, but I used to send my stuff all over the place. You do sports, don't you, Justin? [01:02:40] Speaker C: Yeah, never I got into it. I got into photography sort of fairly late. Like started in digital when I was, what, late 20s? And so it was. It was a different world even then. There was a few magazines still kicking around. I got published in a few Australian wakeboard magazines. Boarding being sort of a smaller sport, it was a bit easier to get published, but even then there was no money there. And then I've shot snowboarding, but mainly for either just. Just for myself while I've been on trips, or I did work for a snowboard tour company. So I would go on the tours with them and I would shoot the tour and document it and, you know, everyone on the tour and then they would all come away with, you know, professional photos from their trip, which was great, a great experience for the people on the trip, but also they would share them on social media and everyone would be like, wow, that's a great trip. I want to go on one of those. So it was sort of a marketing and then you know, the trip company, the tour company would use them on their website and all that sort of stuff. So it was, it was never, I never shot snowboarding for the intent of trying to get published. And I can't imagine how, how difficult that would be because I don't know, it's, it's a competitive, it's a pretty competitive world. There's a lot of great photographers and lots of content getting produced and not many places for it to get published. [01:04:09] Speaker A: It is, I mean it's diminished the market. You know, it's kind of interesting how these periods go in photography because I guess I came into it in the really commercially at the end of the 80s is. And I just missed the really, really lucrative world of stock photography. I just missed that. So, so people, the, the established ski photographers that were working at that time had been making an absolute packet out of Tony Stone and Gamma and I can't remember them, all these big stock agencies and that was already beginning to tail off. And I joined Corbis probably in the early 90s and I caught the tail end of it. I wasn't earning the big bucks that the previous photographers had earned, but I still would occasionally get a check cover through the post. That was surprising. But, but then I came in in some ways at the peak of the magazine era. So. Right. You know, their photography had almost no outlets for that and, and yet my era did have that. I also had some great opportunities with outdoor brands that have since almost, you know, vanished really because of the way marketing's done now. So I think each photographer, you know, the era you're in, you have to find what works. So it was no good me pursuing stock photography. I kind of did it because I had the material. [01:06:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:06:03] Speaker A: And I then, you know, random summers would come in, sometimes I'd, I'd look and, and it had been syndicated through three times through different. What happened was if you got paid in the uk where you were part of Corbis, you got your cut, which is, I don't know, 50% or something. If they syndicated it to Kenya, you got half of half and if it got syndicated further from there, you know, so occasionally I would get a check for $3 for a book cover. Oh no, other times, you know, a thousand pound check would just come in out of the blue. So it was worth doing. But really that, that era had passed [01:06:55] Speaker B: financially challenging not knowing, you know, what the, what's going to be left for you at the End of the month, [01:07:01] Speaker A: you know, from your work, you have. [01:07:03] Speaker B: No, not that that's changed. [01:07:06] Speaker A: You know, you have to see it as something that if it made you some money, but it still, it took time to prepare the work. It was much easier in the days of film because you just stuck your slides in envelopes, sent them off. You didn't have to touch a computer, do any of that stuff, send the slides off. They probably take. You might send 60 slides in, they perhaps choose five, they'd send the rest immediately back. They were much quicker than magazines and then you could market them wherever else. Yeah, but the more you got into a stock library, the more it was a numbers game, the more you would make money from it. Yeah, And I mean the guys that preceded my era, they were making some pretty big money from it, you know. [01:07:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:08:02] Speaker C: So the magazine world, you sort of mentioned obviously that that landscape changed pretty drastically. Did you experience that change? Like, were you still working in the magazine world as the decline sort of started to happen and various publications slowed down or went fully digital or just stopped altogether? [01:08:25] Speaker A: I think I was lucky in that I left Chamonix. I think it was in 2016 or something. I continued to work with a number of magazines, but you're right, it was already diminishing. But there are magazines that buck the trend. I still work with a magazine called, called Adventure Bike Rider in the uk, so I still write articles for them and supply pictures with those articles. And they have a sister magazine for Adventure General Outdoor Adventure. But yeah, it's definitely an era that's passed. I mean there are magazines and I think actually a bit like film. Use the use of film. I think magazines will still. And vinyl as well. I think magazines still have a role to play. Yeah. [01:09:28] Speaker B: And there's a growing number of boutique publishers, you know, at least here in Australia there's. There's a few and there's people that are self funding their own magazines and just, you know, getting content out there, which I think is wonderful, you know. [01:09:44] Speaker A: Sorry, mate, I was going to say you have one in Australia, I think, called Better Photography, which is quite a glossy publication. [01:09:52] Speaker B: Yeah, One of our, I think Lisa, who's in the chat, or she was, I think she's written for Better Photography. [01:10:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:10:02] Speaker B: There's still a few curious about that. Yeah, there is a few. I'm curious about the change or the transition, how it impacted you when you moved from film to digital. What was that experience like for you? [01:10:19] Speaker A: It was difficult. It was difficult. But ultimately when it went quite smoothly. But it was a very difficult time because I cut my teeth professionally on slide film and I really loved the kind of. I still do like the honesty and the authenticity of slides. You know, you have to get within a third, half a stop with your exposures. Your composition is what it is. You know, when you send a slide to somebody, you don't crop it, you don't zoom in on it, you just send what you saw through the lens. And I really like that. I like the fact that they're. If you look after them, they're pretty permanent records of what you've taken. So I really enjoyed that era and it was hard to contemplate changing from it. So I used to shoot on 35mil for most of my professional work with Canon and then for my exhibition work, I used the GW690 and the Fuji. [01:11:39] Speaker B: Sorry, who was that? [01:11:41] Speaker A: The medium format Fuji. [01:11:44] Speaker C: I watch. I want one of those. [01:11:47] Speaker A: They are awesome. That's one of the few film cameras that I have hung on to with a view to using it again. It's a piece of a thing and it's, it's. I've got real soft spot, soft spot for it. When you press the shutter, it makes the cheapest, tinniest ring sound. But the pictures are stunning from it. Yeah, you know, the quality is stunning. [01:12:14] Speaker C: Do you know which version you have? I think there's. There's three versions of that. [01:12:18] Speaker A: I'm pretty sure the two Professional. Two professional or something. Yeah, it's. It's very, it's. It's beautiful in its simplicity. You've got, you know, no light. You've only got shutter speed and aperture and ISO and that's it. So there's, there's something wonderful about it and it's actually not that heavy considering the results that you get with it. So I would actually, when I. My knees were in better shape and my body wasn't so tired, I used to cut it along with my Canon stuff on various jobs. So that. But it. Later I got hold of an xpan, which for me was a camera that changed my love of photography a little bit. I absolutely adored that camera. And I wrote, I wrote to Hasselblad in the UK when it came out, begging for a camera because. So damn expensive. And, and the guy who was running Hasselblad in the UK said, you know, Tremont buddy, I'll lend you one for a period of time. [01:13:46] Speaker B: Fair compromise. [01:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah. The camera came out, it was battered and scratched and bits of bronze, you know, body showing through the. The lovely gray coating and, and I think he sent me the, the I think it's 40 mil lens or something with this and I started carrying that with me to ridiculous places, to the tops of mountain peaks and all over the place along with my Canon stuff. And just fell in love with this camera. And in exchange for the loan, Hasselblad had the right to use five of the pictures I took. And I took some action ski pictures with it which they didn't have any of and they used them in the magazine that they were producing back in the day. And then the second version came out. So I tackled this guy again and he sent me the version 2 with the amazing 30 mil wide angle with it, sort of viewfinder that sits on the hot shoe. And so I had all three lenses and I took this thing in the mountains and I actually ended up shooting a lot of really, really useful commercial pictures. One of them in particular got published so many times and was used as a massive sort of 4 meter wide print in the boardroom of Low Alpine. And of course the quality was stunning. I'll never forget I put the first transparency on the light box from the xpan. And bear in mind I've been using professional camera gear at this point and the difference just hit me straight away. The quality of XPAN image was just beautiful. So yeah, anyway, we digressed because I left all this passion for film and had to make the switch to digital. I looked it up last night. The first job I took a digital camera on like a lot of film guys, I guess I took my film stuff and I thought, well, I'll take the digital with me, shoot a few, see what the client thinks of them. And it was 2004 when I actually took the plunge. [01:16:30] Speaker C: Do you remember what camera it was? What was the. [01:16:34] Speaker A: I think it was a 1ds, a Canon 1ds. Okay, so the second iteration, I think you had the EOS 1D and then the 1DS, I think, think yeah, it was a huge brick of a thing. And the, my reluctance really for using digital at the time was I'd watched some of my fellow photographers in this same industry really struggling with getting the file. The camera was taking the raw file to a state where they could send it to a client as a TIFF or a JPEG or whatever. And the whole workflow thing was just so awkward and cumbersome, I seem to remember, and time consuming. And I hung on and hung on because they jumped over in 2000 or 2002 or whatever. But the changes were so rapid at that time. I held on and I remember I got a job, which is. Was another real turning point in my career, but I got a job with Trek Bicycles in usa. [01:17:56] Speaker C: Cool. [01:17:57] Speaker A: Nice. That's another story, actually, because that was one of those really fortunate breaks. But they. After I'd done some product photography for them for probably about three or four years, they were starting a company called Trek Travel, which was luxury bicycle holidays. And I had a conference call, interview with the very top man who owns track and their worldwide marketing manager and a couple of other people. And one of the questions was, if you get the job, will you shoot on digital or film? And I thought, oh, Christ, you know, I haven't started shooting properly on digital and don't really know my way around it. So I said. I said, you know, I can shoot in digital, but would you mind if I shoot in film? And it was sort of left hanging there. And they got back to me a couple of days later and said, you've got the job and shoot it in film, if that's what you're comfortable with and we'll scan them. And that was the last big job, really, that I started it in film. And after about a year I'd switched to digital and. Yeah, and I shot the following seven years or whatever in digital for them. But it was a real. It was a difficult time, you know, a lot of expense. [01:19:37] Speaker B: And Yeah, I remember when we actually talked to Jason Lau for his interview, I'm pretty sure it was him that said that he jumped to digital early, but he decided he then went back to film for a period and waited for digital to catch up because it just wasn't there when it first came out. I'm pretty sure it was Jason who said that, you know, and you talked about that challenge that a lot of photographers, including yourself, faced about, you know, moving on from something that you'd mastered for decades perhaps, and then all of a sudden, it's like learning a whole new style of photography. You don't step from. You don't step through that process without, you know, losing some confidence or perhaps losing some mastery, because it's a whole new system, you know. [01:20:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it was. It was such a big shift as well, in how you spent your time. And with it came some really serious advantages over film for someone like myself. That might not have been the same for every photographer, but, you know, just this descending of images, because although initially you were sending them a DVD with the pictures on posting, you know, or. Or using some clunky FTP Setup, you know, there wasn't the freedom to send them on online. Most people actually wanted DVDs. Most of my clients when I first started, and because storage was so expensive, a lot of the stuff I just backed up onto DVD, I couldn't afford the 250 gig hard drives that were the state of the art. I didn't even know what a terabyte was then. [01:21:27] Speaker C: Yeah, it was a different world. [01:21:31] Speaker A: But the hours you had to spend on the computer, you know, when I shot in America doing a catalog, it was hard work. It would take me all day to do the shoot. I'd get back to the hotel room, I put the films in a little bag and then I could relax. There was nothing I could do in the evening. Boy, that changed with digital backing things up three times and all, clearing, formatting, memory cards and all that stuff. So you ended up often working till 11 o' clock at night, you know, whereas previously you'd gone out for a beer [01:22:13] Speaker B: or an early night. Yeah. [01:22:16] Speaker C: Simpler times. Although, like, the advantages are so huge and, and you, we could, you can trade them now, you can go back to film, but none of us do. I mean, we obviously everyone likes to shoot film, but, you know, for professional work, it's pretty tough. But that, just that idea of everyone's in the same boat and it's just a simpler time of just, you know, you just shoot film and it is what it is. And yeah, there's no editing, there's no computers. It's just. It sounds so nice. But yeah, you know, I mean, we often have, in the, in the live chat, we often have. Every now and then David Dare Parker pops in and he's like, yep, film was great. I never want to see it again. Basically, it's his comment every time, you know, like, yeah, it's like, sure, it looks cool and stuff, but those advantages, if you've worked with it a lot, there were so many disadvantages to the workflow as well. [01:23:12] Speaker A: Really. Yeah. And I think one of the biggest things is being able to see what you were producing on the back of the camera, especially when you're doing experimental stuff, you know, like long exposures, you know, you messed around, you bracketed and stuff. You didn't know whether things would work or not. And sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. But occasionally you'd miss a shot and, you know, it would really hurt because it was something you couldn't repeat and you'd got it wrong. [01:23:50] Speaker C: You know, that's, that's the thing that I don't Understand how, how you did it is, you know, I know from shooting snow stuff, it's. It's knowing whether we need to try and get that again, like whether to make someone hike up again, do do this all again, try and find another clean line or something like that to know that in. Or, you know, did we nail focus or not? Did I get the moment or did I miss the moment? Do you know how many times with film you would, I don't know, do you just do another one just in case or did, you know, did you have a feeling that you got it? [01:24:28] Speaker A: I think it would depend, you know, it depend on why you were taking the shot, you know, whether it was for a client or whether it was for personal work. But a lot of my early trademark kind of pictures were small scare in big landscape in a time when you couldn't touch out tracks. So I went to huge lengths to shoot huge landscapes on glaciers. And we would hike up on touring skis to get to little corners and tucked away glaciers where people wouldn't normally ski just to do a photograph. And in those instances, you got one go because once they'd done it once the track was in there and that was that. So that was an interesting element. But if I was shooting a catalog where you were in tight on the skier, I tended to shoot it three times. Because when a skier hit a pillar of snow and the snow exploded, has one of those little pieces of snow got in front of the logo or in front of the feature of the garment? Oh, yeah, of course, yeah. And. And I generally found that three goes ironed out mistakes by the skier or snowboarder. It ironed out technical things from me and it ironed out the random things like, yeah, tiny little block of snow in the wrong place or whatever. And in film, I just did it three times and crossed my fingers in digital. Of course, if you needed a fourth, you could do it. [01:26:17] Speaker C: Yeah. Because you knew you could see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's cool that, I mean, that is though, for anyone that hasn't ever shot snow sports, which is probably, now that I think about, it's probably a fair few people. I mean, a lot of people might have taken a few photos up at, you know, Mount Buller on the weekend of family and friends or whatever, but I guess not a lot of people have shot in powder snow. It's one of the most fun things because every, everything, every time is different. Like you say they hit and it explodes and it could. That, that's what's fun about it. It's like shooting things in water. Like, it's so dynamic and every attempt could. Could yield a different result. [01:26:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:57] Speaker C: And it's. Yeah, that randomness is so fun. [01:27:01] Speaker A: I love the fact as well that you can be a landscape photographer and you're photographing a peaceful, tranquil scene of mountains, and then you're introducing dynamic action, explosive action into that. Or it might be very smooth, graceful turns, but you're adding a human element to a mountain landscape. And really, ski and snowboard photography, they're a unique way of doing that, I think. And for the photographer, it adds an extra layer of interest because there's timing in a way that there isn't with a landscape picture. You know, a landscape picture you can of. You are thinking about timing, but it's much more slow moving. Whereas, yeah, skiing, you're talking about, you know, 500,000ths of a second or whatever. And when I first started with the EOS one, you know, it had, think a three second, three frames per second motor drive. [01:28:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:28:21] Speaker A: I tended to have to wait until the skier was in the perfect position. Then I press and hold the shutter. So, you know, by the time it took the second and third frame, the skier would quite possibly have moved out of focus or would have moved into a less aesthetic ski position. So it was almost like one frame. When I first started, when it moved to sort of five frames a second or whatever, things got a lot easier. [01:28:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:28:56] Speaker A: And then. Yeah, then 10, and then now, you know. [01:29:00] Speaker B: Yeah, we're pretty spoiled now. Yeah, pretty spoiled. [01:29:04] Speaker C: We're in Africa. And one of the guys. One of the guys on our tour was so funny, like, something he had. He had an R5 marked 2, which I think does 30 or 40. I don't know. It doesn't even matter. 30 or 40, it's the same thing. It sounds ridiculous when it goes off. I've. I've got the same camera and I've set mine down to, like, I think My Max is 20. And then I. I have my main sort of motor drive set at 15, like for. [01:29:33] Speaker A: For action. [01:29:33] Speaker C: I find that to be plenty of frames, unless it's something I can Never repeat again. 15. Quite a lot of choice. And so he had this, this thing set up and there was these odd times where, like, with nothing. Like, so a bird sitting on a branch, an eagle sitting on a branch, not moving. And he just hear from the back of the. The vehicle we're in, like, just this full speed, 30 frames a second for like two seconds, and we'd all just turn around. And be like what are you doing? And he's like, I don't know. Like it would have been, it would have been 60 of exactly the same [01:30:13] Speaker A: photo [01:30:16] Speaker B: and the storage. [01:30:17] Speaker C: Exactly. [01:30:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:30:18] Speaker C: But he was, he was having a great time. [01:30:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:30:22] Speaker C: So the, what was I going to ask about? Oh, have you ever this, I got this a lot now. I was working with, when I did my snowboard stuff I got to work with a couple of professional athletes and then a few like semi professional athletes, but not. That was kind of on the side of, of the main thing I was doing which was mainly just shooting punters, just having a great time in the Japanese powder, you know, just, and they could, most of them could board but they weren't pros or anything. I'm interested to know how many times did they turn, did people that you were working with turn, turn the wrong direction and absolutely just fill you and your gear in with powder. Did that ever happen? [01:31:02] Speaker A: Did Very, very rarely. I, I, I. The secret to, to snow sports photography I think is, is communication. And the second thing is, is working it, it really helps if you work with, [01:31:23] Speaker C: I thought you were going to say people that know what they're doing. [01:31:28] Speaker A: I've been hit by a snowboarder that was not a model of my choice and I wasn't best pleased with that. Nearly knocked me senseless. And I've been also hit by a skier that I did trust but who, who clipped a small twig that was sticking out of the snow and it just sent him off slightly. I put my arm up to protect myself and slice my arm in the process. So safety is actually a big deal when people are coming close. People would often ski extremely close to me if I were with them for years. And so the spraying with snow thing didn't happen very often. Snowboarders are the worst for that because they absolutely massive amount of snow. [01:32:28] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:32:29] Speaker A: Invariably what I would just do at the very, very last second after getting the shot is I just spin round and turn my back and tuck the camera into my chest and I just hear this wall of snow hit the back of my jacket. Develop a self preservation instinct. [01:32:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:32:50] Speaker A: Because I mean it is a problem if your camera gets doused. You, you can recover but it's not great for the camera. [01:32:57] Speaker C: Yeah. It takes a while to dry it all and so the, the worst one and I only ever did it once I left my bag. I had a really good bag set up and, and the flap sort of, I would have it open to be able to change lenses or whatever quickly. And this One time I just left the flap open and. And of course that one time a guy just come down and just absolutely just hammered a turn right in front of me and just. It was, it was like a mini avalanche. Just, just copy. And my entire bag was full of snow and that, that so I was like never again. Every time. Zip the bag up every time. [01:33:34] Speaker A: Well, I had a horrific experience with a camera bag once where I was working in a snow park which was not my favorite environment anyway. I didn't really enjoy it but it was part of the job sometimes. So I was in this snow park photographing a skier on doing some rails and I'd left my camera bag near one of the other features in the snow park. There's no one much around so I thought it's, it's safe. And while I was working with the guy in the background I could hear a piece machine working its way around the slope. And I turned around to see this piece machine virtually on my camera bag and it continued and drove over the camera bag. No crunching sound. I've got 202.8 lens in there, filters, all sorts of camera equipment. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I'm just standing there with my mouth open as these two semi stoned park drove off into the distance leaving my flattened bag in the snow. I had a real battle with the resort owner who refused to take any responsibility and the insurance company let me down. So it was a real tough experience. [01:35:10] Speaker C: And was it all trashed? Everything just destroyed? [01:35:15] Speaker A: Number of rolls of film were bust open and useless and filters were cracked and stuff. And I think it destroyed one lens. Of course I had the camera around my neck thankfully so. [01:35:26] Speaker B: Yeah, thankfully. [01:35:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a bad moment. [01:35:32] Speaker B: Hard, hard learned lesson, that's for sure. [01:35:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:35:36] Speaker C: I love that you said a couple of stone dumb. It's funny because it's accurate. I'm sure the, the what was your last film camera you were shooting because you were shooting on Canon. Did you have the, the one V? Was that your last film camera? The latest one? Yeah, that's on my, that's on my list, that camera. I'm trying to find one second hand. [01:36:01] Speaker A: So you like props? [01:36:04] Speaker C: Absolutely. [01:36:05] Speaker A: This is the first EOS one. And the thing I loved about this camera, I think this is one of the most ergonomic cameras ever made. These three buttons that you either press singly or together, the combination in that triangle is an absolute masterpiece. And I was able to use this camera wearing thick mountaineering mittens and I could feel Those buttons like Braille, even through the thickness of the mittens. I could use this camera in conditions that a digital or a touchscreen would be completely useless. And there was the other thing I loved about it was this great big lock button, you know, click that and nothing moved. And yeah, it was a wonderful camera, but a bit, a bit slow. And that one V is a beautiful camera as well. Really lovely. [01:37:07] Speaker C: I've got, I've got two one ends but. But yeah, I'm just waiting for the right one V to come. Come along and I'll. [01:37:13] Speaker A: I'll probably sell those, Justin, just before going to Australia. Oh, no. Motor drive two batteries charging up a lot. [01:37:23] Speaker C: No, that would have been the dream. It's exactly what I want. I just, I love. I've got, I've got the Canon EF, the 50mm 1.2 and a 28mil 1.8 lens. And they're just sitting, sitting there just waiting for my, my dream film body to come along secondhand at some point. [01:37:40] Speaker A: You know, it's interesting, I. I put away my film cameras when I went digital and the price they were selling for, I don't know if I mentioned, but the two Hasselblad X pens I ended up buying from the guy in England at a really heavily discounted price after I tried them and, and the price that film cameras were fetching when I made the switch was next to nothing. So they sat in the cupboard. Before I came to Australia, I thought, right, I've got to have a bit of a clear out. So I took a little contacts, T2 compact camera, a Bronica Etrsi and my beloved X pans and I took them to a classic camera shop in London and I was absolutely stunned by how much money I got for them. [01:38:38] Speaker C: All those expans are worth a fortune. Absolutely. [01:38:43] Speaker A: Well, I bought the, the GFX 50s 2 with the proceeds. [01:38:49] Speaker C: Wow. [01:38:49] Speaker A: And I had plenty of money left over from it. I mean, they would. The 30 mil lens went for three and a half thousand pounds. [01:38:58] Speaker C: Oh my gosh. [01:39:00] Speaker A: And the bodies went. The really battered body went for about two and a half grand. And what really surprised me was that little contacts T2, the titanium one came in a little suede box with a pink satin lining and everything, you know, and I kept all that and that fetched 1200 quid, you know, for an ancient compact film camera. Yeah, a lot, isn't it? [01:39:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:39:30] Speaker C: And especially since, like you say, they dropped. They dropped right down when the, the big switch to digital had happened and everyone was like, well, these Will never be useful again. And then they had their resurgence. [01:39:40] Speaker B: Yeah, they continue to. Which is amazing. [01:39:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:39:44] Speaker B: John, if we could shift. I'm just conscious of time. If we could shift our focus a little bit to the present day perhaps. What are you shooting these days? And we'll lead into some conversation about gear. But what are you shooting now? What are you. Where are you spending your time? [01:40:01] Speaker A: I'm still plotting little trips, adventure trips in the outdoors, hiking, the ski trip I did in the high plains the other week a couple of weeks ago. And I've got some motorbike projects and travel trips that I'm doing. I shot some pictures for a. For Donington Auctions. I've shot some vintage motorbikes for them when I first arrived. But it's too much traveling really from Healesville so I'm not doing that currently. So I'm picking up bits and pieces. I mean I'm 67 years old so I've already started drawing a French and an English pension. So I'm not under massive pressure to chase commercial work now. But I'm still extremely active. I still love photography as much as I ever did. And the latest project that I'm working on is a series of double exposure prints taken in the forests around the Yarra Ranges. And I'm shooting man made structures and then overlaying these structures, being in the forest on the whole and then overlaying complex second exposure of forest scenes. And the end result which you've seen, Greg, the three I sent to you, it gives the impression almost of these places in some future time when the forest is reclaiming the land from these structures. So it's about the intrusion of people into the forest and it's about passage of time. And I thought it would be a fun project to use the feature on the GFX 50s which has this double exposure filter which, you know, talking of advantages of digital, you know, it means that you can actually see the composition. So although there's still a bit of surprise in how these things work out, these double exposures, which elements get laid over more strongly than others can be a bit surprising to you when, when you take the picture, what you can do is control the composition in a way that you couldn't when you were doing it blind with a film cam. So yeah, they. I'm printing them as black and whites and they. And they look rather like pen and ink drawings. Very, very, very detailed pen and ink drawings. I'm shooting them on a real wide aperture so you get every twig, every leaf Every detail, yeah. So they have really complex images. So that's one of the things I'm working on and I'll be showing some of those at the open studio in, in the Yarra Valley on the 10th and 11th of October and the 24th and 25th of October. [01:43:39] Speaker B: Nice. [01:43:40] Speaker A: I got a house here in Healesville that had been owned by artists before we moved in and they built a kind of gallery space in the room behind where I am here. Put track lighting in, just most beautiful space to exhibit photography. And it didn't really dawn on me until after we'd moved in just how good a space it would be for putting my photography in. So I'm going to use that for the open studios. [01:44:15] Speaker B: Nice. [01:44:16] Speaker A: Nice. [01:44:16] Speaker B: I wonder if a friend of our show, Greg Carrick, who's also been a guest and watches every episode. He's. He's from up your way. He's always sticking his nose on anything, into anything that's to do with photography. So I'm sure he'll show up at some stage. And he's a fellow GFX shooter as well. [01:44:33] Speaker C: So. He's got a 50? Yeah, he's. [01:44:35] Speaker A: He's got a 50. Yeah. You guys have time, you're welcome to come up too. [01:44:40] Speaker B: Thanks. [01:44:40] Speaker C: Well, it would be nice to visit, that's for sure. [01:44:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:44:45] Speaker C: Greg Carrick's actually a good person to talk to in terms of GFX's. He experiments with tons of weird lenses on them. He's made his own print, got his own like lens mounts, 3D printed and put weird projector lenses and all sorts of weird stuff on there, so. [01:45:01] Speaker A: Oh, that sounds very interesting. [01:45:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very clever. Yeah. [01:45:04] Speaker C: Yeah, he has a lot of fun with that. [01:45:07] Speaker B: So we've talked about the gfx. What other gear are you using on the regular? [01:45:15] Speaker A: I use, I still use my Canon. I shot some pictures for the local choir here and you know, I just, I find the Canon is still. What is the equipment that is most instinctive for me, most ergonomic for my big hands? I find all the fiddly buttons of the. For example, the Fuji x E3 a little bit tricky if you're under pressure. But when I'm on my motorbike trips and outdoor trips, I'm tending to use more and more The Fuji X E3 and the X Pro 2. [01:45:54] Speaker B: Nice. [01:45:55] Speaker A: Various prime lenses with those. But. Oh, I would have, I would have given my right arm for the, the little fugees when I was working in the mountains because I, I used to Carry ridiculous amounts of, of weight up and, and down mountains and, and yeah, when I was doing things like every, every year I, for some of my clients, I had to do a small number of ice climbing photographs. And it's a really spectacular subject, but part of me always used to be, you know, a little bit anxious about it the night before. It's probably one of the more dangerous of the mountain sports. The ice is unpredictable. Your protection is not always totally bomb proof. And I used to be quite intimidated by it. But at the same time, as a photographer, aesthetically it was a fantastic subject matter. So I just used to take a deep breath and go and do it and coming back out from the climbs because I often would go in at the time top, you know, prusiking back up a rope with heavy EOS 35 mil cameras and stuff was, was extremely hard work and, and tiring to use things like Little Fuji would have been wonderful for that sort of circumstance. [01:47:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:47:40] Speaker C: I can't even imagine. Yeah. Having to climb. Yeah. Climb. Ascend a rope with that sort of gear. It would not be fun, especially, especially. [01:47:49] Speaker B: And you're all bulky because you're wearing a lot of protective. [01:47:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And you'd often be very cold. Very wet. [01:47:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I was gonna say. And then you get sweaty trying to climb up a rope and then you get cold again. Be wonderful. [01:48:05] Speaker A: But you know, the, the, as I say, as a subject matter, it's exceptionally photogenic. [01:48:13] Speaker C: So that'd be amazing. [01:48:15] Speaker A: Yep. [01:48:16] Speaker C: At the top of the show you said that you've managed to use, or I can't remember the exact words you use, but photography has been a part of almost every aspect of your life for decades. [01:48:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Can you, like. [01:48:33] Speaker C: I know it's pretty tricky because the world has changed so much now, but do you have any advice for people that want to do that now with their life, make photography a part of it, part of their personal life, their travels, their business life for the coming decades. [01:48:52] Speaker A: Yeah, it's difficult. I mean, reflecting on the way I did it, I worked primarily my subject matters. The sports people were often close friends and if they weren't, they became friends. And so I had a pool in Chamonix of people I could work with. Some of them were absolutely the top of their game. So something like ice climbing, I wouldn't just go with anybody because it was something where my safety was super vital. And so I would go with a specialist, someone who really knew ice climbing was so comfortable with ice climbing that they could strike a pose or pause in A really different difficult point of the climb for me. So you build up that trust with people. I worked with the same skier for 25 years. Wow. We went out every winter for 25 years, and we traveled all over the place together. He was a Scottish guy called John Bicus. And I learned a lot about a lot of mountain craft from him. And he was an interesting character because he. He really cared about the finished image. He wasn't motivated by money, although I paid him. He was primarily motivated by creating beautiful pictures of skiing. And when you work with people like that, you become a team of two people. And that's how you can really chase a kind of excellence in what you do, is by having that support and that extended to friends who supported me before I could pay them and who would be very patient and climb up me down and do ski pictures for nothing. Maybe a free jacket or something like that. And then also my family. You know, my wife has featured in my commercial work over and over and over again. And in fact, at a point where she started complaining that I was only photographing her from the back. And the reason I was doing that was because my clients was starting to think, you know, we can't keep seeing this same person so anonymous with ski goggles and a buff or take pictures of backpacks with her and stuff. And my kids the same. You know, when my kids were very young, I decided it was time to hook up with somebody for ski clothing for them, starting with when they could just about walk and then ultimately ski hardware until by the time they were about 14 or 15, they could do very convincing action pictures that would have been okay for a magazine, but all through. We would work as a family. You know, we. We would go on trips together and write a resort report from a family perspective. [01:52:20] Speaker C: That's a great idea. [01:52:22] Speaker A: Well, yeah, and the kids would understand that, you know, that sort of burger and chips, lunch on the mountain, or that ski pass or that nice hot tub they were going to go home to had to be paid for by a little bit of cooperation with pictures. So they were really good about helping me create the pictures I needed to make the whole thing work. So. And I think it's hard to, because we were saying before, you know, about stock photography being something that I just missed. And then I enjoyed the magazine and the product photography of outdoor clothing era, which, incidentally, has now almost dried up because most of the content is shot by climbers and skiers themselves on their phones, their head cams, and it's just for the Internet, so they don't need to be high resolution files. So it's actually eliminated a lot of the things that I know made a living from. So to suggest how a young person could integrate photography with their life, which was your question, I think they'd have to find their own path because they'd know more about the market that they might be able to sell to. But I think the thing I would say is follow your heart, photograph what you really love, be really particular about your photographs, you know, really, really struggle for as close to excellence as you can and be prepared to sacrifice a lot of time and not be very wealthy. Ultimately, you know, it is possible, but you know, there's a lot more people want to be photographers than become photographers because it is really, it is really hard. And you need a good dose of luck as well. Yeah, you need, you need a bit of luck just here and there at the right moment. I mean, one piece of luck that happened for me. I used to go around. I used to go around trade shows in Munich. They used to have one of the biggest outdoor trade shows in the world there. It was absolutely enormous. 17 massive halls full of people trying to sell their products to buyers, not to the public. It was trade only. And I would go there not with an iPad, but with a heavy black portfolio with my published work in, in her sleeves. And I would trudge around these halls to try and drum up business. And you were the least welcome person on those trade stands. You know, as soon as they saw you for it's all, the marketing manager's not on the stand at the moment or he's too busy with a client he can't see. And I would trudge around and I'd spend five, six days at these shows. You know, they lasted for nearly a week. And if I got one client out of it, then it was successful. So it was an investment in a hotel or a hostel and a lot of time and a lot of effort. But ultimately, by the time I'd established myself, I'd go around and I'd be on friendly terms with the people I was then talking to. So the marketing manager would then perhaps stop the boring stuff he was doing and sit down and look at some pictures and chat to me about the mountains. And ultimately, after working with some of my clients for over two decades, some of them I worked every year for 25 years, they became friends. And actually, I suppose what is quite interesting, I don't know if you could do this now. And I didn't know anybody who'd done it before me. But because I was working regularly with the same clients. For example, I worked with Low Alpine when they were still producing clothing and backpacks. An English company called Mountain Equipment, Scarborough Ski mountaineering boots, and some ski brands. I'd work every year with these people, and there would be at least two shoots a year. The, you know, the winter collection and the summer collection, or spring and fall. And after a while, I thought they would hire me for a set number of days, you know, to get the jobs done. And I realized that this was becoming so regular that I proposed to four of my clients. Why don't we set up a rolling contract? You retain me, you commit to a certain number of days. I give you my day rate. We agree a fee for editing time. So I would get half a day, right, for the time I spent editing and stuff. And so I had the ski and board picture editor and staff photographer role, which was a regular thing in the autumn. And then I had these four rolling contracts where I knew exactly how much work I was getting. And I was paid quarterly for them. So I basically ended up almost with a known income for a number of years. That arrangement meant that they secured my time and I had a certain amount of security and the way they would work. The advantage for me was that I was based where they wanted their pictures shot. They wanted them shot in the mountains. They wanted authentic pictures in perfect weather for the job. So if it was. If they wanted something shot in a blizzard, I could go up and shoot it in a blizzard. If they wanted blue sky and sunshine, I could do that. So they would send their products to me. And the ground floor of our house would be absolutely roamed with cardboard boxes to the ceiling, literally. And then all these products would arrive. Scores of jackets and gloves and clothing and stuff. And then I would take this gear out. I would arrange with models, and I'd take it out only when the conditions were right. And previously, what they'd done was they'd all have a big jolly from the company and say, right, we're off to Chamonix. You know, we'll do the photo shoot. You know, you've been a good boy this year. You can come and they come out. And then the lift would all be closed because it'd be raining and too windy, and they get absolutely nothing. So by working the way they did with me, it allowed them to get prime conditions. [01:59:47] Speaker C: That's a great way to leverage something that it advantages you. But it's a big advantage for them as well. And to leverage that into saying that, okay, the way that you can work with me like this is through this contract. You can't. If you want to just pay my day rate ad hoc, you can't also just expect me to drop everything and work when the conditions are right, like you. You need to commit to me, and then I will make sure that I. I plan to shoot your stuff in the best. [02:00:18] Speaker A: That. [02:00:18] Speaker C: That's a. That's. It makes so much sense. And, and it's looking out for their best interest and yours at the same time. [02:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And it, it, it gave, you know, that rare thing for a freelance. It gave me a degree of security because I had a young family and I had, you know, mortgage to pay. And the big challenge for me was I'd got the winter working nicely, but I had to fill the summer. And that's, that's where mountaineering photography started coming in. And also I spoke about a dose of good luck at one of these trade shows. I went to see Trek bicycles, and I'd been trudging around this trade show for all day. Note takers went to all the big brands. Nobody was interested, or there was just some young person that didn't call the shots that would speak to me. And the very last one of the day was Trek. And I, by chance, got a meeting with this woman who said she'd be delighted to look at my portfolio. So we sort of went over to a quiet part of the hall and I laid out my pictures. I didn't have any bicycle pictures of small skiers in big landscapes and that sort of thing. And I said, this is my work and this is what I do with skiing, and I'd love to do it with your bicycles. I'd love to photograph your bicycles in dramatic landscapes where the landscape's as important as the bicycle. And she liked what she saw and started off by sending me some bicycles in exchange for doing some sample images, and then started hiring me. And then this Trek travel thing that I mentioned earlier was they were starting this luxury bicycle touring business and Trek are a big company, and it was at the peak, I just happened to make contact with them when Lance Armstrong was doing his thing. Their budgets went through the roof. They were doubling their bicycle sales every year in America. Every time he went France, their sales doubled so exponentially, they were growing hugely. And so I had the interview for the job, and the first year, they had no business. They had an idea, and they commissioned me to go out with two models and two of their bicycles and go to the various countries where they were going to be running The Tours. And imagine the experience the cyclists would have eating picnics in Tuscany, cycling along the Loire Valley, you know, whatever it was. And I would take two different models each time and go and visualize this experience they were then going to sell with a catalog the following year to real clients. And so I did that for the first year, traveled all over the place for them with that, and then they established the company and it really took off. So subsequently, each year they were sending me to new countries, but this time I'd go with the group. A bit like your Japan trip, Justin, you know, where they would. They'd send me with the group. It was hard work. I'd have to be there at dawn with people setting up the bicycles for their clients, and I'd still be there at 11 o' clock at night, photographing them sipping a nice glass of Bourdain by the. By the Loire, you know, Finally, I'd go to bed absolutely naked. But the wonderful thing was I. I got a lot of traveling and I could shoot work that I could use myself as well. Yeah, so that was a fantastically fortunate break. I mean, I kind of initiated it, but I had no idea the travel thing would start and it filled out my summers. So, yeah, I really was then busy all year round, so that was a turning point. [02:05:00] Speaker C: It sounds like you. Yeah, it is fortunate and there is an element of luck in everything, like you said. But like you also said, you put in a lot of work trying to open these doors, trying to meet with people, and I think that's one of the things that. That everyone should take away. I know. It's something I definitely believe is that it's not that you can make your own luck, but you can certainly give yourself the best chance at luck striking by putting yourself in those situations, you know. Yeah. And there is always an element of luck, but you get luckier the harder you work. I do believe that. [02:05:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:05:43] Speaker C: Saying. [02:05:45] Speaker A: I mean, the breakthrough I had in France was with a magazine called Vertical, which was the. Probably Worldwide, one of the most respected climbing magazines. And this was really early, early on, when I was still finding my feet, and I'd sent them a couple of phone calls, you know, and. And tried to make contact with the editor, and nothing much was happening. So I packed a big, heavy green suitcase that I've still got to this day, that I used to take my slideshow equipment in. I filled it with mounted prints of ski pictures, and I walked into the offices of Vertical magazine with this big suitcase and said, can I see the editor? And I managed to get a meeting with him and I sort of plunked this suitcase down on his desk, opened it up, and he started looking at the pictures and he said, we want to run these. And they ran an eight page article with the ski pictures that I'd shown him. And it had a huge effect for me locally in Chamonix, to be published in this vertical magazine. So as you say, you know, that was, you know, I initiated it. I couldn't have predicted his reaction, but. But you're right, that piece of advice that you've just outlined applies whatever era you're in. [02:07:27] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:07:29] Speaker A: It doesn't matter whether it's film, digital, magazine, you know, whatever. There has to be ways that young photographers can make a living and make photography part of their lives. It's just figuring out the puzzle and then. And maybe just keep taking pictures and, you know, hoping that something will come to you, that you'll find what direction you want to go in. [02:08:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's wonderful advice. [02:08:06] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's true, you know, you've just got to keep showing up. I think that's, that's the way I [02:08:11] Speaker A: kind of look at it. [02:08:13] Speaker B: I. I find that luck, like hope, is a fool's game. You know, you've got to make things happen to a certain degree. [02:08:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:08:21] Speaker B: And then happenstance takes care of the rest, you know. Very conscious of time. We're over the two hour now. Two hour mark. I told you it was that quick, John. Well, I'm gonna go. You can stay. [02:08:37] Speaker C: That's fine. [02:08:40] Speaker B: A couple of final questions. One question I have for you. And we, I gave you a heads up before we, before we went live, you know, if someone was to, if you were to recommend someone to fill the seat you're in right now and have a chat to us about their craft and their journey and, and their art, who would you recommend? [02:09:02] Speaker A: See you. You. You made the mistake of telling me about this just before. I'm not sure I could answer that without giving it some real thought because what I'd like to suggest is someone young perhaps, rather than somebody who's my age, but I think it's something I would have to get back to you on. Greg, I really. [02:09:31] Speaker B: That's good. [02:09:32] Speaker A: Would need to think about it because I want to give a flippant answer. [02:09:39] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I respect that. That's really good. [02:09:41] Speaker C: I've got an adjacent question then. Are you, are you a. Are you a photo book purchaser? You know, do you have any photo books of photographers that you admire that you've got on your bookshelf still now. [02:09:55] Speaker A: I do, I do. And I've got photographers who I really admire who have been influential that I. That I couldn't afford to buy the books off. [02:10:07] Speaker C: Yeah, me too. Some of them are expensive. [02:10:10] Speaker A: I've got one by Lartigue, Jacques Lartigue. I. I admire him for his. For two things. First, his pioneering in. In trying to capture motion in the form of skaters and. And racing cars. Those lovely old pictures where the wheels become like ovals because of the way he's shooting them on a slow speed and. But also he had a real joie de vivre like La Tue, took pictures for fun because he really loved taking pictures and in the end left a legacy. Cartier Bresson, he's almost a cliche to say he was an inspiration, but I'd never heard of him. A girlfriend of mine when I was in the early years in Chamonix said, oh, there's an exhibition of Cartier Bresson in Switzerland. Who's Cartier Bresson? You know, I hadn't heard of him, didn't know anything about photographers really at that point. And I thought, okay. So we actually cycled there. It took us two hours. We went over two coles into Switzerland, two mountain passes on our bikes, and we went to the exhibition in Martigny. And it was a big exhibition of his work. And I remember looking at it and just being blown away. And although he's famous for the decisive moment, I think the biggest influence he had on me was composition. I thought he. He just had the most exquisite eye for composition, even though his pictures were often about movement and timing. Another one that was really influential was a Japanese photographer called Fukase. I think that's how you pronounce it. He did a series called the Raven, and I saw it in the Canon Gallery of the VA in London. And it's a series of pictures he took when he was really depressed, of ravens. And they're really kind of abstract, poetic images. And I remember I spent an eternity in the gallery staring at these pictures, thinking about them. They seemed so random, but as a whole, as a work, they seemed to convey a really poetic message somehow. And it kind of made me really think about that side of photography. Something that wasn't literal, that was really. Really just struck to you with its. With the feeling behind it. It was an amazing piece. So, yeah, that's cool. But we're running out of time, aren't we? So very cool. [02:13:13] Speaker C: No, yeah, there's some. I've written Down a few of those names. I was just pulling up some of Jacques Lateague's work. Yeah, it's crazy. Very cool. [02:13:27] Speaker A: Early, early days photography. [02:13:31] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:13:33] Speaker C: One, one final question. I guess we normally ask all of our guests, especially people that have had a lot of cameras over the years, if it was the end of the world, you know, some sort of zombie apocalypse or something, or you're stuck on a desert island and you could only grab one camera and one lens to document that, what would you grab? [02:13:59] Speaker A: Oh dear me, am I trying to. It's the end of the world. I, I think it would have to probably be the gfx. I think I could find somewhere to charge it because I think if the end of the world was on its way, I wouldn't be too, you know, feel too stressed about how much time I had. So I think I could take the time to compose a few nice pictures with that camera. [02:14:30] Speaker C: Now you can, you can pick any camera you want, even if it's one you don't own. So would you, would you switch that out for the GFX100RF that, that nice light. [02:14:39] Speaker A: Let's keep life simple. Yeah. One len, one lens, one camera. Yeah, that, that would be the one. Actually. Quite how I download the pictures, I'm not sure, [02:14:56] Speaker C: Solar panel or something. Download them straight to your phone. You'll figure it out. [02:15:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it's not important. [02:15:02] Speaker B: You gotta become resourceful anyway, so you'll work through it. [02:15:04] Speaker C: It's funny, everyone has different answers to that question because quite a lot of our guests, they go more in the direction of like what would be best for self defense. And they're like, well I'd, you know, I'd take my 600 mil 5.6 and just bash, bash people with, with it if I get in trouble or something. So it just depends. Everyone's got a different answer. [02:15:22] Speaker A: I, I think I, I would, I would choose that one because I, I, I like taking panoramics and I think if, yeah, you know, I would amuse myself by pursuing the whatever it is, 24 by 68 format, whatever. [02:15:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I've been cropping a ton of stuff in Lightroom to that format. I just, it suits so well. Some of the stuff that I did in Africa in on the streets, I cropped to that and I wish my Canon had that natively as a crop mode because I'd love to compose with it, not, not just have to imagine what it will look like later. And that's what's great about the GFXs. [02:16:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it really Is it really helps if you can. If you can see what you're doing through the lens? [02:16:08] Speaker B: Most definitely. [02:16:09] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:16:09] Speaker B: Makes a difference. [02:16:10] Speaker C: I agree. [02:16:13] Speaker B: I think that might be a nice, neat place to tie a bow. In today's episode of the Camera Life podcast, John, just on behalf of Justin and I, and obviously everyone that's been watching and listening and will yet to watch and listen, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your amazing story. You know, it's. Hearing you detail each of the steps in your journey, where every step is. Seems to be a challenge, but you faced it and you overcame it and you created a profession and an art practice out of it. And I think that's worth celebrating. So thank you so much once again for being here with us today. [02:16:50] Speaker A: Thank you both. It's been a real pleasure. [02:16:52] Speaker C: Yeah. And thanks so much for the stories about hitchhiking. I love that. That was great. [02:16:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:16:57] Speaker C: Could have done a whole show just on that. [02:16:59] Speaker A: We did go off track a little bit. [02:17:01] Speaker C: No, that was. That was awesome. [02:17:03] Speaker A: I'd love to. [02:17:03] Speaker B: Part of your journey, literally. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Justin, have you ever hitchhiked? [02:17:12] Speaker C: Not. No, not properly, I don't think. Not like I've been given a lift or whatever, but. Never, Never heading. Yeah. Like this is. My intention is to travel somewhere in this way. I think I've been. I've been offered a lift before, but it was because we're. I can't even remember, like we were stuck somewhere or something like that. You know, it's not. Never, never been like I'm going to get from here to here and I'm going to just hope. Hope people will help me. Never. So, yeah, maybe I'll have to try. [02:17:41] Speaker B: Me either. I did. I did get a lift at the first BFOP we went to. I was picked up by someone on the side of the road because obviously it looked like I was lost and. [02:17:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:17:48] Speaker B: And trying to find a workshop. But. But, yeah, but that was a fellow beef upper, so it was fairly safe. [02:17:55] Speaker C: We almost made a full episode without saying be. Damn. [02:17:58] Speaker B: I just ruined it, didn't I? [02:18:00] Speaker A: Sorry. [02:18:01] Speaker B: I'm sorry, everyone. [02:18:02] Speaker C: It's a. Sorry, John. That's the. The Bright Festival of Photography. That's what BE stands for. So it's. Yeah, it's in October. [02:18:12] Speaker A: On the podcast lately, I became slowly aware of that as a newcomer to the area and it looks like something. [02:18:22] Speaker C: If you get a chance. It's very hard to get a ticket. They sell out really quickly, like within a few days of the event. They release the new dates and then they sell out pretty much straight away. So yeah, next year's will sell out a couple of days after this year's event and but if you can get a chance to, to get a ticket and get up there, it's reasonably priced. I think it's, it's in the three or four hundred dollar range for a three day festival. So it's not, it's not super expensive but it's not as cheap as the, as the Fujifilm one. And if you, yeah, if you get a chance you'll meet so many people. Like it's just, it's yeah, 600 people all there for, for photography and there's, I think this year there's 42 or three or four instructors or something like that that are from all different genres and things and different backgrounds. It's, yeah, it's pretty fun. [02:19:11] Speaker A: Very, very fun. Nice. [02:19:14] Speaker B: Hard not to get excited. [02:19:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:19:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Well on that note, I think we'll, we'll roll the music and we'll say goodbye to some people. But John, thank you once again and yeah, we look forward to seeing what you do next. [02:19:28] Speaker A: All right, cool. [02:19:29] Speaker C: And maybe October, what'd you say it was? 20 something. [02:19:33] Speaker A: The open studio the weekend of the 10th and 11th and the 24th and 25th. So yeah. Of October 24th and 25th and anyone welcome that happens to be watching this that wants to come along and talk about photography and the pictures. It's a really nice environment and obviously Healesville's a cool place to go and grab a cup of coffee or whatever. [02:20:01] Speaker B: Yeah. All right. I feel a road trip coming on. [02:20:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:20:08] Speaker C: All right, let's do this. Felicity Johnson says, thanks, John. Interesting life. I agree. Very interesting. Lucinda says, great chat team. Loved listening along while working. See you Monday. Yeah, see you Monday. [02:20:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:20:22] Speaker C: I hope you got some work done this morning. I think Julie Powell's voting that that if you were going to fight zombies off, you need a tripod because they've got more reach. That's a good idea. [02:20:31] Speaker B: That is a good call. [02:20:32] Speaker C: And Julie Pal's never been to the snow, let alone shot it. Well, you should make, make the trip one day, Julie. It's fun, very fun. Oh, and let's, let's read this one out. So sometime through the show today, East Coast Photography said, can I have an online gripe? Nothing to do with today's interview, but I turned up to my first shoot today. A builder's house not ready. Windows filthy zero landscaping and the guy says you can Photoshop, but yeah, that would have been frustrating Tony says thanks for gracing with. With your presence. Castles. Yeah, I'm back. I'm back from Africa and I'm here, so I feel the same, Tony. [02:21:07] Speaker B: Don't worry. [02:21:09] Speaker C: All right, thanks. Thanks, John. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, everyone in the chat, everyone that was here. Stuart Lyle, Lisa Leach, Digifrog, you're all legends. We'll catch you guys on the next one. [02:21:20] Speaker A: See you, team. [02:21:21] Speaker B: Bye. [02:21:22] Speaker A: Cool.