EP117 Chris Benny | Australia’s most in-demand car photographer

[00:00:24] Speaker A: Well, good morning everybody and welcome back to the Camera Life podcast. It is the, it's the 18th of September 2025 and we're coming to you live from right across Australia. Really? But this is the Camera Live podcast proudly brought to you by Lucky Straps. So we make handmade Aussie made premium leather camera straps that will probably outlive you and your camera most definitely. So head to Luckystraps.com use code Greg, Jim or Justin. That's not the whole code. Use one or the other and get yourself a healthy little discount on your next lucky strap order. We sell straps for every size camera for every person out there who wants to shoot. And we also have leather belts and winter gloves and all sorts of things. So yeah, head to Luckystraps.com and we'll look after you. Well, Jim will, that's kind of mostly his job now. [00:01:15] Speaker B: I just say the words, take care of you. [00:01:17] Speaker A: He will. But joining us today, as I've said, we've got Jim and obviously we've got Justin. Someone has to pay to keep the lights on. And we are joined today by award winning director, DOP and photographer Chris Benny. Welcome to the show. [00:01:33] Speaker C: Thanks for having me on. [00:01:35] Speaker A: Pleasure. You've been at the top of Justin's must interview list for quite some time, probably since we started this podcast, I'd imagine. [00:01:43] Speaker C: I am literally wearing one of his belts right now. So, yeah, big, big fan of the lucky strap stuff for years. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Lucky Straps holding you up. That's what it should be. [00:01:53] Speaker C: That's it. [00:01:55] Speaker B: That is, that is good to hear. We, Jim and I are, we're, we're fangirling at the moment. We've been, we've been waiting for this to, to happen for a little while. So we're basically on here just to look at your pictures and be like, wow, that's amazing. [00:02:11] Speaker C: I think you guys are nuts for doing this live. I'm, I'm, I'm nervous as hell so someone has to hold my hand. [00:02:19] Speaker A: Don'T you worry. But look, just before we say good morning to the chat, because everyone's already jumping on nice and early, which is wonderful to see. Chris, can you just give us the 62nd version of who you are, what you shoot, what you're known for? [00:02:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I'm Chris. I've been shooting now for close to 20 years. I built the company Cube Productions, which is a small production company in Sydney where we photograph, shoot, video, do creative post production, everything sort of essentially in house for all production. Yeah. And a bit about me. I've Sort of, I've shot a bit of everything over the years, but I guess I'm sort of predominantly known for shooting a lot of automotive work. So. Yeah, that's sort of a bit of a quick wrap. [00:03:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Your automotive work is. Yeah, it's a very humble way of. [00:03:10] Speaker B: Saying, worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet in the automotive space. Uh, yeah, he's, he's being humble. We'll bring some of his work up soon. Actually, I should just, I've got this thing, this behind the scenes clip that I was looking at before. I'm just gonna. [00:03:28] Speaker C: Oh, God, I hope I'm not picking my nose. [00:03:30] Speaker B: No, no. If I play this, if I play this, you guys need to promise not to like copyright strike our channel or whatever YouTube allows you to do. Just, just be nice. Um, but I'm gonna play this. Just. [00:03:42] Speaker C: We own the footage. You should be fine. [00:03:45] Speaker B: This will give, it's only a quick clip. This will give the viewers a bit of an idea of some of the crazy shoots that you've been a part of. Ready? And look, look, look, look at that camera strap. Look in the background. Can you see it, Jim? Just a brown, brown line. Yeah, yeah, I was the brown line. That is, that is pretty cool. That is a nutshot. And this whole, that whole, that whole Red Bull shoot, the, the behind the scenes stuff and the, the video itself was, yeah, absolutely crazy, actually. [00:04:36] Speaker C: Let's, it was, it was pretty fun. It's, yeah, it's not something that'd be repeated. Right. [00:04:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Is that why? Because you guys made like three or four behind the scenes videos about it and stuff? Were you like, coming into that? Were you like, we need to document this? [00:04:54] Speaker C: That was sort of the start of. Yeah, yeah. And it was sort of, you know, the more, the more weird things we do and strange things we do for work and get paid for it for some reason, I think, oh, we should be shooting the behind the scenes of this. Surely someone will find it interesting. So, yeah, I've been trying to, trying to, as you guys know, it's very difficult. But yeah, trying to sort of show more of what we do. [00:05:15] Speaker B: I, I don't know how you would do it on a high pressure shoot like that. I, you know, I, I, I struggle when we're, when we're shooting weddings. We couldn't do behind the scenes. A little bit different, A little bit different. But you're like, you got a million moving pieces and, and yeah, talent and bloody planes. [00:05:35] Speaker C: That one wasn't too bad. That one wasn't too Bad because I wasn't directing it, I was just shooting it. So we had a massive crew on that, so I was working with another production company on that and hyperpublic. But it was. It was good. It was one of the first jobs where we actually had a bit of time to set up some behind the scenes cameras and things like that. So it was. Yeah, it was cool. Cool to be able to capture a bit of it. [00:05:57] Speaker A: Well worth it, that's for sure. One of our past guests in front of the channel, Lucinda Goodwin, who's a concert photographer in Geelong, she's shot everyone, but she actually uses her. What are they, the Ray Ban meta glasses? [00:06:10] Speaker B: Yeah, the meta glasses. [00:06:12] Speaker A: She doesn't need glasses, she just gets a clear frame. But she shoots a lot of behind the scenes content for her Instagram stories and reels and, you know, she's very, very thorough with social media and she just wears the glasses. So she's shooting like normal. But we're all seeing it. Yeah, so it's. Yeah, it's really cool. And we're seeing more and more of that in the creative space, which is wonderful because it stops that whole gatekeeping kind of mentality of. I'm not going to tell you how I did that, you know, but knowing. [00:06:42] Speaker B: The quality of Chris's work, he'd probably have like an Ari mounted to his Ray Bans or whatever. Trying to get just two. [00:06:51] Speaker A: Just. [00:06:51] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, just getting some behind the scenes, guys. All right, I'm gonna say a quick hello to the chat and then we're gonna. We're gonna get straight into this interview. Tony is here. Tony is a friend of ours, so he's a friend of mine, James. He's here to listen to this interview. He. He does not own a camera. He is a big car, automotive guy. And when he. When he heard you were coming on, he was like, I'll be. I'll be listening. He's also probably repairing a fridge at the same time. Good morning, John Pickett. Good morning. [00:07:20] Speaker A: Sorry, I didn't know. Sorry I cut you off. I didn't know Tony didn't have a camera. He shows up to every single podcast. [00:07:27] Speaker B: He's a fan of the podcast. He's not a fan of cameras. It's. [00:07:31] Speaker A: Love him for it. [00:07:32] Speaker B: He's a different cat. He's currently building a sim racing setup in his shed. So maybe he'll start streaming himself. Yeah. Have you ever. Have you ever done that? Is that a thing you're into? [00:07:44] Speaker C: We have one. We have one out in the office. There so out in the next next room, we've got a Top Gear style leaderboard where it has same track, same car, and clients that come in. And every, you know, every now and then on a Friday afternoon, we'll have have a few drinks and get very competitive. But it's hilarious watching people jump on. They're like, I'll just do a lap. And then you. Hours later, they're like, just one more lap. Just one more lap. It's super competitive. It's lots of fun, though. [00:08:10] Speaker B: It's very hard though, isn't it? Because they're very accurate. So you actually have to drive it more. Like it is a real. It's not a game. It's like supposed to be simulated, your workout. [00:08:21] Speaker C: You work out very quickly who not to get in the car with. Some people you're just like, I'm never getting in the car with you. [00:08:28] Speaker A: That should be a test for Uber. [00:08:30] Speaker B: Drivers telling you if they can deliver faster, just to see if you've got to be safe. [00:08:38] Speaker C: The worst thing is, you know, all us and the rest of the guys at Cube here, we. We do 4000 laps and then because we work with, you know, professional race drivers, quite often they'll come in and within three laps they're beating us. And it's just infuriating. [00:08:52] Speaker B: What about the other way? When you have like. Do you ever have, like, people in from big marketing agencies and things like that, and you have to basically sandbag yourself and let them win so that they feel special for the job or whatever, even though they can't drive for shit? Is that a thing? [00:09:09] Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. You got to play this, Play the safe line because we've got Mario Kart. So, you know, now you can't let your kids win. You go, you got to show them who's boss. But it's funny because we've got the full VR headset and we have some people who jump in and think it's the best thing ever, and then other people who within two to five minutes, they're on the floor literally feeling motion sickness. [00:09:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny that when that happens. Or not funny, haha funny, but it's just really interesting people that didn't know that they were affected by that stuff. [00:09:39] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:09:41] Speaker A: All of a sudden, spin out. [00:09:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Pardon the pun. It's weird. We played with one for a little bit. One of the Oculus ones. No, whatever. It was meta. Yeah, those ones. And some of them are fine. Like, if you're moving around in the space, they're fine. But there was one where it's like you just sit there and you're like FL a helicopter or something like that, but you're just staying put. They're the ones that make you feel, like, unsettled. It's. Yeah, it's. It's different. Who else is in the chat? David Moscaro from San Francisco. Good to see you. Yelena says, another day, another late start. That's how we roll. You know that. Yeah. And she says, Morning, everyone. Tony, Nick Fletcher. Good morning, guys. Oh, Maple Glades. Hey, what's up? Stuart Lyle. Good morning. From Oyster Cove, Tassie. Anthony Stonehouse. Good to see you. Yeah. Tony says, I plan my week around this. Lisa Leach is watching from work. Well done. Nick Fletcher. That is nuts. Yeah, that was that whole. So there's three episodes of the behind the scenes of that Red Bull F1 shoot. It's on the Cube Productions YouTube channel. Go watch all three episodes and then watch the actual video itself. That's. I think. Not now, not now. [00:10:55] Speaker C: Later. [00:10:56] Speaker B: Red Bull Oracle page. It's. Yeah, it's crazy. And. Yeah. Who else is here? I think that's it. Shots by Jack. Good morning from Christchurch. Hey, welcome. Jack. Car photographer. I can tell by your profile picture. Yes. [00:11:10] Speaker A: Yeah, but look, just. Just before we jump into and wind back the clock on. On Chris's journey and work, if you're new to the channel, please give us a like. It helps let YouTube know that other people should look at this. And please hit subscribe and tickle the bell so that way you get notified of any upcoming episodes that we have. We have two consistent episodes. We have the Thursday morning 9am Australian Eastern Standard Time show, and then we have a 7:30pm Monday evening show, Australian Eastern Standard Time. And every now and then we drop a little random one or Justin will be out doing something creative and he'll drop it on. But yeah, so if you hit the bell icon, you'll get notified in your time zone of when we are coming up live in your eyeballs. So, Chris, thanks so much for joining us. Once again, what we'd like to do here is get a little bit of insight into your earlier inspirations as a visual creative. You know, maybe first camera moment, a particular mentor or someone who supported you. Any of those sort of key moments in your early years. [00:12:14] Speaker C: How far do we want to go back here? I mean, my first. All the way. My first. The first memory of sort of realizing, you know, photography is fun and this. This could be. This could be cool was. I remember it was a Melbourne car show. And I must have been 10 years old or something and my dad, dad took me along and handed me the camera and I just, you know, eyes, eyes wide, bright, running around looking at cars and thought, this is the best thing ever. I just get to take photos of stuff. And yeah, and then I remember photos got developed and my parents went, oh yeah, that's quite impressive. You can actually take a decent photo. And that's sort of what probably sparked it for me. And then from there it was just, yeah, straight into school, picked photography. Had to choose photography or maths. So picked photography. Can't add up numbers. Yeah, can't add up numbers now, but yeah, can take a photo. So yeah, and then from there, you know, it developed exactly, exactly. From there it sort of just. Yeah, it developed slowly. [00:13:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And so were your folks creative people or business minded people? Were they? Obviously they were encouraging of your early, early pursuits in photography. But you know, what was that inspiration from a creative perspective? [00:13:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean look, my grandfather was, was a photographer back in the day and then my dad loved, loved doing it. So you know, growing up as a kid, he was always walking the camera and I'd always grab it off him and start shooting shots. So yeah, I guess, I guess it's a pretty creative sort of family in that way. My brother's now a carpenter. Carpenter, builder. So I think, you know, we're sort of that way inclined. Enjoy, enjoy that sort of stuff. Nice. [00:13:59] Speaker A: A good eye, good hands. That's what it takes to be a good carpenter and photographer. Maybe. [00:14:04] Speaker C: I think. Yeah, I think if I wasn't a photographer, I'd probably be doing something like that. Be a chippy or a cabinet maker or something like that? [00:14:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Right, so you like, do you like organizing all your gear and stuff like that, like behind you? Do you do all of that? Do you lay everything out? Is that, do you customize spots to store things? [00:14:22] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm pretty ocd. [00:14:25] Speaker A: Nice. Because to a casual glance behind you looks like a garage. Like a very clean, neat. [00:14:31] Speaker C: It's pretty messy to be honest. Yeah, no, it's quite messy. But yeah, all the keys. Pretty well organized. But it's organized chaos. [00:14:39] Speaker B: Yep, yep, exactly. Love it. [00:14:41] Speaker C: You see all those YouTubers with their perfect rooms and things like that, but it's not real. No one works like that. [00:14:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you turn around and the other side of the room actually I love. Have you ever watched some of that stuff on YouTube where they do. I think Gerald Undone does like studio tours of YouTubers. I don't know if you've ever seen any of that. The bigger YouTubers and they're. It's like the set and then they'll spin it around and you just see all the, like random, you know, stuff they've had to do. Lights hanging from the ceiling, like the random grip working. There's a sound blanket there and one of the guys has to like go underneath a desk to get into his spot to turn the camera on and then get back out on the desk. You know, like, it's all just the stuff that you do to make things work. But the set itself looks. Yeah, perfect. [00:15:27] Speaker C: If it works, it works, right? [00:15:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, whatever makes you happy. [00:15:33] Speaker B: So what happened after school? Did you study photography formally at university or anything? [00:15:40] Speaker C: I went straight out of school, straight into tafe, so did two years of, I think it was called photo imaging. And the day I started tafe, I also started assisting as well. So, yeah, sort of assisted while. While studying as well for two years. [00:15:56] Speaker B: What did that look like? How did you get that assisting gig? [00:16:00] Speaker C: Just knocking on doors. So I did, in year 10, did work experience and then at that point definitely went, yep, photography is what I want to do. And then, yeah, just went banged on doors and you know, it's very difficult to get into our industry. I guess it's sort of fairly, you know, there's a lot of one man bands and then bringing people on to set. You know, it gets expensive, you got to feed them, they got to travel, there's all that sort of stuff. So I was very lucky to sort of start TAFE one week and at the same time assist. [00:16:34] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. Is that still a thing though? [00:16:37] Speaker A: Is that. Sorry, go on, Justin. [00:16:39] Speaker B: Sorry, Greg. I just want to. What sort of assisting work was it? Was it just whatever you could find or was it a specific genre of photography? [00:16:47] Speaker C: It was a bit of everything really. But yeah, it was all photography. There was no film at that point and it was, yeah, a lot of studio work. Product, fashion, lifestyle. There was a bit of architecture in there as well. So yeah, it was, it was a good mix and it was, it was great to sort of use that as sort of, you know, I definitely learned more assisting than I did at tafe, if I'm brutally honest. Yeah, yeah, because you're in there. It's not just. And it's, and it's everything else. It's the business side, it's being able to see how you communicate with clients. It's, it's, you know, what you do after you've taken the photos, you know, the post processing, all that sort of stuff. And TAFE was, was brilliant and it was great. And it was great working with, you know, a bunch of creative people who all had the same interest, but the technology and everything was very far behind. And I was probably right in that cusp of, you know, between digital and film. So we were learning a lot of film at tafe and I was sitting there going, I don't need to know any of this. You know, when I'm assisting, I'm learning everything about medium format and, you know, how to light with new stuff and, you know, try different things. So it was, it was good. I still, I still enjoyed tafe and I'd, you know, I'd recommend anyone to, to do the same thing. [00:18:01] Speaker A: Question about the, you know, doing the assisting work, is that still, you know, is that still happening these days? A photographer still taking on, you know, fresh out of college or uni or art school or whatever, creatives to, to mentor? Is that still a program that's available for people? Do you think as much? [00:18:21] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, we're always looking for people. I'm always looking for people. So if anyone out there is new and. Yeah, absolutely. [00:18:29] Speaker B: Looks like we're doing a road trip to Sydney or if you've ever got a shoot in Victoria, Jim and I and Greg will come and carry anything you need us to carry. Yeah, we'll be quiet, but I think we can bring our own food. [00:18:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, I think assisting is still one of the best ways to get in and learn and experience anything and assist as many people as you can. Because everyone has different techniques and styles and, and things like that. So, yeah, it's, it's definitely a good way into the industry. [00:18:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it certainly is. And there's stuff that you learn hands on with someone, especially when you're fresh out of, even just fresh out of high school, when you're studying, you know, you're 18, 19. You know, I remember back to that age I was just walking around bumping into things like I had no idea what I wanted to do. But having that experience and having someone actually, you know, and it's not just about, I've got a good eye, so I'm going to be a good photographer. It's about, like you said, it's about running the business, it's about customer service, it's about having a work ethic, showing up on time when you say you will, you know, all of those things that I don't think you get taught as much in an education. Well, maybe you do these days. But back then, you know, when I studied photography in art school and we did a whole mixed media approach to a bunch of stuff, there was never anything about the business of being someone who can craft. Regardless of what the genre. [00:19:49] Speaker C: It's 2020 is. Is the actual photography. The rest is business. [00:19:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, Yep. And I don't think that's. I mean, maybe it is in, like, in, you know, tertiary education a bit more, but hands on, you know, tools on. Tools on the job. It's the best way to learn. Absolutely. [00:20:07] Speaker B: Sounds like shots by Jack is keen for some assisting. So, yeah, they'll be following around four people. [00:20:13] Speaker C: Get over here, Jack. [00:20:15] Speaker B: And Robert Varner says I'm 70 and still bumping into things. So, you know, good on. [00:20:20] Speaker A: Thanks, mate. Makes me feel so much better. It really does. [00:20:25] Speaker B: Okay, so when do you remember when your first paid. Paid gig was? [00:20:32] Speaker C: Oh, God, I can't remember the exact first paid gig, but. Well, I mean, it would have been assisting, really. Right. So it got to a point where I was, sorry, you go first for you. [00:20:45] Speaker B: Like, first as in so someone. So you've, you've offered someone. You're like, hey, I could come and shoot that for you. Like, I'll take care of it. Let me come and photograph your pet cat or whatever it is, you know, like it was there. Could you remember where you were like, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start doing this thing for myself now. [00:20:59] Speaker C: It was probably Australian Mountain Bike Magazine, so I shot a lot of action sports initially and still, still love shooting it. Don't. Don't get to shoot enough of it. So, yeah, it was probably, probably the guys at Australian Mountain Bike Magazine. It was Mick, Mick Ross. And. [00:21:15] Speaker B: Really, that's crazy. I've done tons of shoots for Mick. [00:21:22] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they went from A and B onto onto Flow. Absolute legend to those guys. And yeah, literally I was. I was shooting, you know, the product stuff for the magazine and we were doing that in my. In my parents lounge room and they'd always. They'd always make fun of. Fun of me. And, you know, the only reason they were coming was for my mum's lunch because my mum would prepare lunch and everything. It was brilliant. It was the best thing ever. [00:21:45] Speaker B: Yeah, amazing. That's genius. Yeah, Feed the clients. [00:21:49] Speaker A: That's. [00:21:50] Speaker B: It is a small world. It is. And yeah, Legend and doing those shoots, like, I've done just small tourism shoots with him and Will another guy from the Flight from Flow. And it's just, it's so much fun. They're always laughing and just. Yeah, we just poke around and film stuff in Beechworth and things like that. It's just. Yeah, it's great. [00:22:08] Speaker A: You do yourself a disservice, Justin. It's not just a small gig, it's a big. [00:22:13] Speaker B: Well, compared to Red Bull. It is, yeah. [00:22:16] Speaker A: You know. [00:22:17] Speaker C: Yeah, but that's social media, right? Not every job is that big and exciting. [00:22:20] Speaker B: Oh, I thought it was. I thought you just did Red Bull. Red Bull. [00:22:23] Speaker A: Audi. Planes and race cars. [00:22:27] Speaker C: Absolutely. [00:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all that. We will, later on in the show, for anyone listening, we will dig into the realities of running. I want to find out from you. Yeah. What is it really like when you're doing these, these big jobs, but then how many. You know, how do you balance that out with, with having consistent work and, and like you said, 20% of it shooting. It wouldn't surprise me if it's even less than that as you go more into the higher level production where there's so much more planning and moving parts. So we'll talk about that later in the episode. But getting back to. Okay, so you're shooting mountain biking for A and B. And I distinctly remember, unless I'm wrong, Jim, there was quite a bit of moto stuff in your early days as well. [00:23:11] Speaker C: Yeah, So I shot a bit for Australian Dirt Bike magazine as well. So it was, it was. Once I got in with Australian Mountain Bike, you know, visiting their office. Everybody there at ACP Magazines at the time, it was sort of, you know, everybody's table was in an arm's reach. So it was, it was quick to get introduced to other people when I went in and visited. [00:23:28] Speaker B: Yeah, okay. And then there was a hub of magazines and the doors opened that way. [00:23:34] Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. [00:23:36] Speaker B: I feel like I remember a shot of. It was some. It was an odd brand of motorcycle and you did like a. Flames across the top of a berm or something like that. [00:23:45] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. That was a cover. A cover shot for Australian Dirt Bike. You've got a good memory. [00:23:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I remember. I remember the shot. [00:23:53] Speaker A: Like they said at the start, Chris, they're fan girls. [00:23:58] Speaker B: I'm trying to find it now. I remember that shot. Hang on. I was deep. I was deep in the Instagram, the bowels of Instagram, looking around at stuff. And I remember coming past it, but maybe I've missed it. Where is it? [00:24:13] Speaker C: That's one of those, one of those ones. I look back now and think, shit, that could have gone wrong really quickly. It was literally just like, hey, let's Pour some, some petrol on the top of this berm and light it and it'll look epic. [00:24:22] Speaker B: It was just petrol, was it? [00:24:24] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:24:26] Speaker B: Okay. This one? Yeah. Oh, wow. [00:24:30] Speaker C: Yeah, that was the one. [00:24:32] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, I remember that. I remember Jim showing me that. So this is, this is interesting. So Jim and I were, you know, trying to become photographers and make a living from this thing, be self employed, were into sports, wakeboarding, moto, all that kind of stuff and like taking those kind of shots, but couldn't really see that being a, a career. It seemed very out of reach to do that and actually get paid for it. And we were watching you and I remember, you know, we would, we would see images like this and be like, has he done that? Oh yeah. So you know, there would have been this here a lot there, and he's done it like this. And then that very quickly went from us being able to break down a shot and be like, oh, we could probably have done that to like, we have no idea how you're doing this. That, that progressed fairly quickly into, you know, as you got bigger and bigger clients, more higher end automotive work and stuff. It was like, we have no idea how he's doing this. [00:25:35] Speaker C: That's, that's 90% of the fund is trying to work out how, how someone shot stuff like that. Right? [00:25:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. [00:25:42] Speaker B: You were. So this is obviously these are, you know, today you would just put AI flames in the background. Everyone's safe and all good. But you, you did a lot of stuff like this that was practical and real. No, no, but you were a big proponent of editing, you know, Photoshop like you lent into that to make your images stand out, even from the early days. Is that, is that right? [00:26:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I pretty much started with Photoshop. So back, back in the day when I was a kid, it sort of. I remember getting our first computer and soon after, you know, getting Photoshop and me being, you know, a rev head as a young kid, it was like, oh, well, you know, how can I Photoshop this photo of this car? So you'd end up trying to work out how to lower it and you know, you'd add body kits and all that sort of stuff, change the color of the car. So that's where it sort of started with me with, with tinkering with that sort of stuff. And then the photography came after that and then it sort of, you know, you just try and blend, blend the two. Really? [00:26:37] Speaker A: Yeah, really. [00:26:38] Speaker B: So you were like upgrading virtual cars just for fun on Photoshop? [00:26:44] Speaker C: Yeah. And there Was like this was back when forums were sort of just becoming a thing. Right? This is pre, pre social media. And yeah, there was a group on there on. I can't remember the name of the forum, but there was a group on there where you, you know, you post up your images that you're working on and then there was a separate photogr. And that's where I started, you know, jumping onto that and thinking, oh, this could be fun, you know, tinkering, tinkering. [00:27:07] Speaker B: Away more and more interesting forums. [00:27:11] Speaker A: That's old school, isn't it? [00:27:13] Speaker B: I don't know what Tony means by this. He says, Chris cost me a lot of money in Audi R8 models he shot. What does that. [00:27:21] Speaker C: Has he bought an R8? [00:27:23] Speaker B: No, he certainly doesn't have an R8 but oh, I think he's got the little models, car models. Okay, so you bought models of images, models of cars that Chris had shot real cars of? Yeah, I don't know. He's crazy. Explain Tony. Okay, so magazines, how did that lead to. Was this full time at that point? Was that, were you making a living from doing this stuff? [00:27:53] Speaker C: So initially I was assisting and then obviously doing TAFE at the same time. So and then I probably went on for about another year and a half of assisting once I finished studying and then from there went, okay, gonna give this a full crack and jump headfirst in and try and try and do it myself. But I was very lucky because I was young, I was living at home, there wasn't any overhead expenses. So I was very fortunate in the way that I got in and just got to give it a crack. I'm always very impressed when people say I stopped my career in finance, whatever it is, to take up photography. I can't imagine the fear in doing that is wild. [00:28:35] Speaker B: When did we have Jeff Cable on Greg? A couple of weeks ago. Two weeks ago, Three weeks ago. Jeff Cable. So he's an eight times Olympic Games photographer for Team usa. For Team USA Award winning photographer, Canon ambassador. He was the marketing director for Lexar in San Francisco. Quit his career to pursue sports photography and, and, and run his photography business. [00:29:03] Speaker A: Yeah, he was already doing it on the weekends or taking annual leave, but he just started running out of leave so he thought, well, I'll just create my own space. [00:29:11] Speaker C: Yeah, good on him. That's awesome. [00:29:13] Speaker B: Easy, isn't it? Yeah, it's like that's such a big. Yeah, big. It gives you hope when you're, you know, when you're 40 and you're like, oh, could I really do that. Like he did it, so. [00:29:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:29:23] Speaker C: Well, passionate about something. [00:29:26] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes it's, you know, it. You know that calling comes a little bit late in life when you realize what it is you actually want to do. But we were speaking to Andrew Helmich last week who runs PhotoBizX. Is that right? Or is it Photo X Biz? [00:29:39] Speaker B: No, Photoviz X. [00:29:43] Speaker A: And he started out as an electrician and found that he enjoyed photography and started doing more of it and it just sort of, it snowballed for him and, you know, now he's running a, a studio with employees and he runs the number one business photography podcast in the world. And, you know, he just built himself up from a completely different starting point. You know, it's just that kind of polar opposite of, of experience. So after university, you've spent a bit more time, sorry, tafe. You spent a bit more time assisting. You decided to go it alone. What was that like for you? What was that first year experience for you as a solo? [00:30:21] Speaker C: I was myself, to be honest, as. [00:30:25] Speaker A: Much as you are now. [00:30:27] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't think it ever stops being. Oh yeah, and being self employed. Right. Like running your own business, it's, it's nerve wracking. At no point do you feel fully relaxed. But yeah, it was, it was exciting. You know, look, I, I pinch myself that this is what I get to do for work at the end of the day, you know, I'm not a brain surgeon. I'm creating pretty pictures and yeah, we get to travel around the world. The places we get to see, the people we get to meet. It's. It's literally the dream job for me. So, yeah, jump. Jumping in and just having a go there wasn't really an option for failure. I guess it was sort of like, well, this is, this is what I really want to do and I want to try and make it work. [00:31:03] Speaker B: Yep. Were there, was there anything in those early years you can remember that was kind of like a, either a turning point or like a, a moment where you're like, this could really, I could really make this work. You know, you land a big job or, you know, a particular client or something like that. Is there anything you can remember? [00:31:21] Speaker C: It was probably the guys at Australian Mountain Bike magazine that kept me going. They, you know, they kept using me and they, you know, were keen to shoot more and, and from there they, you know, those were the guys that really, really helped me sort of see the light. I think in terms of, you know, this could be a career and could actually make, you know, semi decent money along the way. So I think, yeah, it was, it was probably those, those guys. And then from there, you know, it's. It was actually. Tim Robson became the editor of Australian Mountain Bike magazine. And then that was sort of my connection to, to cars because he ended up going from Australian Mountain bike magazine to Top Gear magazine. [00:31:58] Speaker A: I was going to ask you about that transition. [00:32:00] Speaker C: Started shooting cars. [00:32:02] Speaker B: Right. [00:32:02] Speaker A: So you were shooting for Top Gear. Yeah, on your website, that, that, that gallery. Yeah. [00:32:11] Speaker B: So how. [00:32:12] Speaker A: So you've gone from mountain bikes and, and some trail bikes to automotive. What was that transition like for you? Like, was it a very different experience or style? [00:32:23] Speaker C: Yeah, it was totally different. Totally different way of shooting things. It's, you know, cars are very technical in their approach. You're shooting this big shiny object, so they're a nightmare. Right. Everything, everything reflects on them. Lighting them is difficult. Finding locations is difficult. But I was, you know, passionate about cars, bikes, motorbikes, snowboarding, that sort of thing. So it just felt natural, like. Yeah. Why, why not combine the things you love and. And do it? [00:32:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You're spot on there with the technical side of stuff. Like, we used to play around, Jim, didn't we, trying to figure things out. I remember we made a. We're trying to light because, you know, obviously what you want with a car is like a giant softbox you can just drive it into or something and then start manipulating from there. But we didn't have that. So then we were trying to light, paint it and I had this, I had this ice light. It was like an early tube light that Jerry Jonas made with West. [00:33:18] Speaker C: Yep. [00:33:19] Speaker B: I had one of them like that you had. Yeah. An ice light. Yeah. So we hadn't. Very bright. No, but we had that. We built like a cardboard box, like it wouldn't spill. Oh, we tried all sorts of stuff like that. Yeah, I remember. I definitely remember building cardboard box around it and so that the light wouldn't spill so that we could like go along the side of the car and try and get it. Yeah, it is. [00:33:41] Speaker C: You have to dress in black so you don't end up with these pasty legs in the shot as well. [00:33:47] Speaker B: Right. So you were. In the early days of automotive, you were doing all that kind of stuff, just trying to figure it out yourself. Just how do I. How do I make these images, like, look great? [00:33:57] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I was right on that. Like I said, the Internet sort of was, Was becoming more and more popular and finding out techniques and technology and stuff. That would help us create those images was really exciting. So there was those private Facebook groups that I was part of where now, you know, all the top automotive photographers in the world were in that group, which was, which was super exciting. And being able to us all talk about techniques and things that we're trying and yeah, it was a secret group and I'll probably get in trouble talking about it now. It's like fight club. Yeah. [00:34:31] Speaker B: So were you all having success already in that group or. We all just trying to break into the industry to that next level and just talking about techniques and stuff like that. What level? [00:34:42] Speaker C: Yeah, it wasn't even business chat. It was, you know, I would have been 18, something like that. And there was a mix of people in there. There were some really young guys, some much older guys who had been in the industry a lot longer. And it was just, literally just techniques and talking about the love of photography and shooting cars. [00:35:00] Speaker B: Wow. [00:35:00] Speaker A: Very cool. [00:35:01] Speaker B: That's very. [00:35:01] Speaker A: Community is everything. [00:35:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Kicking it around and it's crazy. [00:35:07] Speaker C: It's crazy now. You know, back then all that stuff was gate kept. You never, never knew how. How do people achieve this? Whereas now the amount of resources online to be able to, you know, look up and find techniques and technology and things like that is incredible. [00:35:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:23] Speaker B: Do you think it'd be. Do you think it'd be easier to start now or harder? Because there's absolutely. [00:35:29] Speaker C: I think it's. I think it'd be easier. I think, yeah. Look, there's going to be more, more competition, but learning to get to a high standard is much quicker. [00:35:38] Speaker B: Yep. Just because of the information that's out there. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, even. Just like the. I mean, no one's. No one's jumping into. To shooting Red Bull action sports with a can Am, you know, no one, no one's just jumping into that because they've seen the video. But the fact that you can even like see stuff like that just, just behind the scenes of how this shoot was done. Yeah, it's just available and then same as car shoots anything. Yeah. [00:36:06] Speaker A: Well, you know, YouTube now, friend of the show, Dennis Smith, who shoots the Ball of Light series. He's shot all over the world and without knowing how it, how he did it. It's magical and it's beautiful and it looks incredible. But he publishes everything onto his YouTube channel. Smith makes stuff of how he made the special light painting tools that he uses and, and, you know, and, and how he actually shoots everything he records separately and just puts it all freely available on his YouTube channel so that others can learn and build their own skills and challenge the genre. So, yeah, I get why people gatekeep, because sometimes you have a special source that you just don't want to let go of yet. I get that. [00:36:51] Speaker C: Oh, totally. You learn techniques over the 20 years of shooting. Right. So you. There's got to be some. Some mystery to things. [00:36:59] Speaker B: Yeah. You've got to have a little techniques. Yeah. What do you got? Anything you can tell us about? [00:37:04] Speaker C: I'm hiding them all. [00:37:07] Speaker A: That's behind the. On the other side of the camera. [00:37:09] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. [00:37:10] Speaker A: And so, you know, you're shooting for the magazine. When did. When you know, when was your first big, big brand, car brand shoot? What was that experience like? Can you remember which one it was? [00:37:23] Speaker C: I don't know. I don't know. To be honest. It's probably Volkswagen. Volkswagen was one of the first ones I started shooting. But the funniest moment was probably when I was shooting one of the first shoots I did for Top Gear, where we. We drove out to Lightning Ridge, and I think it was with like, a BMW M3 Alexis ISF. And it must have been something else. There's three cars. But I remember we got back from the shoot and I was like, oh, you know, we. It's rained on the back half of it. So I didn't get enough shots. We needed to still shoot the interiors. And the guys at Top Gear magazine were like, yeah, you know, come grab the cars, take them. And I got, you know, five. Five kilometers down the road, and I get this phone call being like, hey, how old are you? And it was like, oh, I'm 18. And they're like, okay, can you turn around, come back very carefully. You're not insured to drive the cars. [00:38:09] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [00:38:11] Speaker C: So. But yeah, that. That was sort of. I mean, shooting for Top Gear. Right? That's. That, for me, was the ultimate. That was right when the show was going gangbusters as well. And, yeah, to be able to shoot for Top Gear was. Was the coolest thing ever. [00:38:24] Speaker B: Nuts. And that was 18? [00:38:27] Speaker C: Yeah, I think I was 18 or 19. Something about that. [00:38:30] Speaker A: That's incredible. [00:38:31] Speaker B: That's so cool. And so all of this stuff at this point was stills only. [00:38:39] Speaker C: Yeah, it was probably the back half of editorial work that I was doing, where it was like the 5D mark II came out in the video side of things. And I started thinking, seeing the writing on the wall, as print was slowly reducing more and more and the online stuff was becoming more popular, I was like, why? We Were taking supercars out to the outback. Why are we not shooting a little video of this? And at the time, everybody there was agreeing, but the publishers. There was no way to really monetize the print side online yet. So, yeah, there was no budget for it and no real interest. [00:39:14] Speaker B: It's interesting because I think that's. Correct me if, you know, if I'm wrong, but I think that's why Mickey and the other gentleman, whose name I always forget, that started Flow Mountain Bike Mick Ross. [00:39:26] Speaker C: Yep. [00:39:27] Speaker B: I think that's one of the things that led them to head off and do their own thing was they really wanted to lean into video. Yeah. The print media were kind of pushing back against that. Like, I say that it's not really any way for us to monetize this. Like, we'd spend money on it, but it doesn't do anything for our business. So, yeah, it's interesting. [00:39:46] Speaker C: It was sad to see. It was sad to see that the big magazines didn't really put in the effort. And I guess, you know, look, it's expensive and it's hard to work out. Like I said, monetize it. Right. At the end of the day, it all comes down to dollars, dollars and cents for them. So if they. If they can't do it, they won't do it. [00:39:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So 5D Mark II. You were shooting Canon back then? [00:40:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I was Canon for many years. [00:40:07] Speaker B: One of your cameras. [00:40:10] Speaker A: Oh, well, what a camera. [00:40:12] Speaker B: What a shameless plug. I remember. I remember making this strap and being like, we're doing stuff. This is cool. [00:40:22] Speaker C: I remember asking you, hey, hey, can I get my brand on there? And you were like, yeah. And I was like, sick. This is epic. [00:40:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that was. That was really fun. I was pretty excited about this. And then. Yeah. You took this photo of it. I was like, awesome. I probably posted that photo a million times. [00:40:40] Speaker A: How long ago was that? [00:40:43] Speaker B: It was 567 weeks ago. Thanks. They can't just. They can't put the date there. They have to put 567 weeks ago about 11 years ago. Greg, thanks. Yeah, yeah, that was in the early. That was definitely in the early. Really early days. That would have been. Yeah, within the first 12 months, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Product's gotten a lot better since then. But I remember seeing that embossing being like, that looks cool. Yeah, it does. [00:41:09] Speaker A: It certainly does. [00:41:09] Speaker C: I'm pretty sure I've still got that strap. The thing is, you guys make the best straps ever. And they've lasted forever for 10 years. Right. We still use Them, they still look awesome as well. [00:41:19] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not the best business plan. I've. I'm actually working on a new, a new line of dissolving straps. So over sort of 12 months they just slowly turn into dust and then people have to buy, buy one every year. It's a strategy. Yeah, no, it's. This was, this was super cool. But you were shooting with cannon gear. Did that like, did. Have you moved away from owning a ton of your own gear? Like in the early days, were you just trying to acquire gear or were you. In the early days, we like, I'll just hire this, I'll hire that. I assume that's what happens a lot on these, these bigger shoots these days is a lot of bringing stuff in depending on what, what suits the shoot. But in the early days, did you have to build up a giant kit? [00:42:08] Speaker C: I'm still building it. It's. It never ends. I hate, I hate renting gear. It's, it's. Especially shooting, you know, the specialized stuff that we do. It's really nice having the equipment set up the way you like it, not having to set it up before every shoot. So I guess, yeah, I'm quite unique in that I own all the gear that we use. It's rare that we actually rent anything. [00:42:31] Speaker B: Oh, wow, that's interesting. I've seen a lot of professionals on YouTube say that real, real high end commercial photographers and cinematographers don't own gear. They hire the best tool for the job and they don't make silly business decisions like purchasing expensive equipment. So is your. Is your. Which I disagree with. I think it's cool to own your own. [00:42:53] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:42:54] Speaker B: Is you. So is it primarily so that because you're doing generally complicated and unique camera techniques for your shoots, owning this allows you to build it out. [00:43:08] Speaker C: It's that and then it's the business side. Like everyone, you know, growing up, everyone was always like, don't, don't buy gear. You know, and it never really made sense to me why, why would I not own the thing that I can then rent out and package up as part of the shoot? And then once I've paid it off, I can package things up a bit cheaper and have a competitive edge. [00:43:27] Speaker B: I love it. Yeah. Okay. [00:43:28] Speaker C: So that was always, always the logic behind it and now I have way too much. It gets to a point where mentally on, on set you can only, you know, keep note of so many things. So it's good having a few of, the, few of the guys that work with us now just, you know, Being across all the gear. [00:43:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guess that's the thing. It's. Yes, because the last thing you want to be doing is trying to figure gear out at a high pressure shoot, which means you've got to rent it for some period of time prior to the shoot, which adds to the overall cost. Yeah, there's definitely. [00:43:59] Speaker C: Yeah. Then there's, there's trouble troubleshooting and then, you know, the last person that used the camera left it in low res jpeg and you don't realize till halfway through the shoot. Tell me that's, that's exactly how I know. Because that's happened before. [00:44:11] Speaker B: Really? [00:44:13] Speaker C: Yeah. Got halfway through a big studio shoot and I won't say who the brand was, but yeah, we were shooting, shooting, shooting away and thinking, yep, yep, we're good, we're good. And then had that moment of realization of like, oh, now, now what are we going to do? We've got to start again. So literally had to go, you know, back to Raw and start the shoot again essentially. But luckily it was just product products in the studio. So it was, it was fairly simple. It didn't have talent. [00:44:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, man. Okay, that's crazy. So. [00:44:41] Speaker C: But yeah, I love, I love owning all the gear. I'm, you know, I'm a, I'm a bit of a gadget nerd, so I love all that sort of stuff. I'm always researching new cameras and new techniques and that sort of thing. So I enjoy earning stuff. [00:44:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I wondered if you were, if you kept up with modern stuff like do you keep on top of what's being released from camera brands and things like that? Do you only keep up with a certain really high end cinema cameras or are you aware of everything that's going on in the industry in the sort of the pro level? [00:45:15] Speaker C: Yeah, try and keep an eye on everything. Right at the end of the day, all the technology is developing so quick. It's, you know, it's such an exciting time to be in this industry with cameras and you know, like the Nikon ZR that got announced the other day, the Canon C50, I'm watching all that sort of stuff and you know, it's, it's working out things that we can use on set. Like the C50 I'm excited about because it doesn't have Ibis in it so we can hard mount that camera because it's small to cars, to dirt bikes, that sort of stuff where the Ibis moves around and flops around and creates too much jello in the image. Having something that doesn't have Ibis and RAW and open gate, that all gets me excited. You can tell I'm just nerding out here. [00:45:54] Speaker B: I know. I love it. Okay, so if a camera has Ibis and you switch it off, that can still cause issues in these, what would you call them, like, environments with a. When you hard mount it to say, an F1 car or something crazy like that, where there's just a ton of vibration. [00:46:12] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:46:13] Speaker B: So switch it off. [00:46:13] Speaker C: Even if it's switched off, it's still. The sensor still moves around. I don't know exactly technically if it's mounted in there on, you know, springs or however it is, but you get a heap of movement especially. Yeah. Like you said, anything that vibrates a lot. [00:46:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:26] Speaker B: Okay, so. So that's why. Because we were talking about this literally the other night. We did a show about those cameras that had come out and why we might. Why have we seen ibis in the ZR but not in the C50? Despite them not being. They're not competitive cameras. They're at different price points with different feature sets. But I just thought it was interesting that, that they've gone to the trouble to put it in the cheaper ZR but not in the more expensive, more capable C50. [00:46:55] Speaker C: Yeah, it's an interesting one. I'm, I'm really excited about it, though. I'm probably one of the few that's like. Yes. That don't have, doesn't have Ibis. [00:47:05] Speaker B: What about the zr? Do you look at that? Like, do you shoot with red? Do you have, do you own any red cameras? And does the ZR Nikon thing, does that appeal to you in the sense of when it comes to being able to potentially use it as a small camera alongside bigger red cameras? [00:47:23] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we do everything from, you know, the big. The big stuff all the way through to the small run and gun stuff. So having, you know, different, different price points for clients, you know, we will be interested in buying those smaller cameras and things like that as well. So I think that sort of stuff, you know, I'm excited by the zr even, even as a camera that I can take home and, you know, film. Film shots of the kids and things like that. So I think it's. Yeah, it's, it's just, it's exciting. [00:47:51] Speaker A: One thing that came up the other night, we're talking about all the new cine cameras. We had Bruce Moyle joining us to help host the show. And because Bruce has, like yourself, he's very much A tech expert and loves gadgets. And, you know, he's been in, he, he was very similar to you in that he was, you know, breaking new ground on the Internet in the early days, running podcasts and all those sorts of things. One thing he talked about with the ZR was that he could see companies that, that do commercial advertising, buying several of them as potential, you know, cars that, cameras that could potentially be broken by whatever it is that we're shooting. Do you. I'm getting to my point, I promise. [00:48:31] Speaker B: Do you. [00:48:32] Speaker A: Have you ever lost like a camera what, you know, that was mounted to a car or a bike? As in, you know, because I've seen clips where, you know, they'll be doing, they'll be filming a stunt or they'll be filming an action scene and the camera will just flip off the rig somehow and it will just, you know, bouncing down the road. Have you ever had that sort of experience? [00:48:53] Speaker C: I've been touchwood. I'm looking for wood close to me right now. I've had GoPros and things fall off cars, you know. But now, now from learning from those sorts of things, we always run a tether cable or whatever it is. And you know, when you're on the bigger sets now, there's usually a safety officer there who's making sure, you know, there's a backup redundancy, there's tether or something on there because you don't want, you know, a $200,000 camera package falling off a car. [00:49:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The behind the scenes shoot of that, of that Red Bull shoot. When you were shooting Chucky, I love how you were like, we've got Daniel Sanders, but I believe some people refer to him as Chucky because we know, we know Chucky. Yeah, we've sort of been around as he's, as. He's gotten way more competitive in the, on the world stage. And now he's an absolute beast. But yeah, he's always been known as Chucky. No, no one calls him dead. I think only his parents like Daniel and anyway. But I saw on that shoot you had a protective like glass, really solid glass filter over the front of the, the lens in the gimbal and stuff. And he got smashed with a rock or didn't actually smash, which is pretty crazy. Must be tough glass. So is that like, that's the sort of stuff that you do to try and protect on these shoots? Protect? Expensive? [00:50:19] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at the, the lens that we were shooting on there. That would have been a, you know, 50, $60,000 lens. So at the end of the day, if you put an $80 bit of glass in front of it, that protects that front element. That's, you know, you want. You want to do everything you can to protect the glass. [00:50:34] Speaker A: Insurance, isn't it? It's an insurance policy. A physical one. [00:50:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Cinema. Lenses are crazy. [00:50:40] Speaker A: They are crazy. [00:50:41] Speaker C: Everything. Everything. Cinema is just insane. It's scary how much that stuff costs. [00:50:46] Speaker B: Yeah. It ratchets up so fast, but obviously it makes a difference, otherwise you wouldn't be using it and buying it for these kind of shoots. This might be jumping ahead a little bit, but. So you were talking about. You were kind of feeling that you'd be crazy not to be shooting some video on these epic still shoots that you were doing. So when did it go from. How did you go from sort of we should be documenting some of this to actually being able to offer this to clients at a high level for video. How much work was involved in getting yourself to that level of essentially TV quality? [00:51:31] Speaker C: It's still years. I'm still. Still chasing it now. Still trying to learn every day with that sort of stuff. So I don't think I've made it. But, yeah, it was. It was a particular Top Gear shoot that we took three. Three supercars out to the desert and drove them on this big, dry lake bed. And I thought, why on earth are we not taking a video camera out? So while shooting stills, I had, you know, the Canon 5D then as well. So I was like, okay, well, let's start shooting some video. I edited that together, and that went on the Top Gear Facebook page as well. And that was just something that I did on the side. And from that point, it was like, okay, I think I need to start taking this filming stuff a little bit more seriously and. And learn more. [00:52:12] Speaker B: How did you go about learning? Did you. Did you continue to add it into client work, but without, I guess, without kind of including it too much in the deliverables, it was like, okay, I'm going to do stills, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna deliver you guys a video as well so that I can build, learn and build a. A portfolio. Is that how you went about it? [00:52:33] Speaker C: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, there was a few shoots that I did initially where it was like, okay, we'll just throw this in for free. And, you know, I was just excited to be shooting video. Right. It was like starting stills photography all over again. That was learning all new techniques and, you know, ways and thinking about things completely different as well. Right. So Everything's moving. So in the camera, you want to move as well. But it was pretty quick. You know, I learned fairly early on that you don't give away free stuff because it doesn't. It doesn't help you. I don't think, in terms of getting more work or exposure because. Yeah, it just doesn't work. I think. Yeah, I learned that fairly young, that it's either full price or free, and everyone understands why. [00:53:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to look at it. Because, you know, doing favors doesn't pay for. Doesn't pay for the new gear, let alone meals. [00:53:28] Speaker C: No. [00:53:30] Speaker B: Can you dig into that a little bit more? So when. When you talk about full price or free and. And they know why. So you're saying you would. You. You don't just give them something for free. You would outline what this would normally cost and why I'm doing it for free in this instance, to set an expectation for future shoots or. [00:53:48] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, I've even experienced it recently. I shot something for a friend and a manufacturer posted it, but tagged the wrong photographer. So, you know, it's up on big global socials and sits there for a week before they fix that. And you're just like, oh, you know, at least delivering this stuff for free. The least you can do is try and tag the right person. [00:54:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:11] Speaker C: Wow. [00:54:11] Speaker B: Man. [00:54:12] Speaker A: But it's frustrating. [00:54:14] Speaker C: It is what it is, right? And you learn, Learn from those mistakes. But, yeah, I think it's. It's being smart about that sort of stuff. And, you know, at the end of the day, I don't think it's bad producing free work because usually when you're doing that, like you said, it's. It's known by both parties. The stuff that I missed the most was, you know, those sorts of jobs where you get to be really creative and, you know, there's no client standing over your shoulder saying, no, I don't like that. There's no other creative on the other side saying, no, no, let's do this instead. You know, you've got full freedom. It's, it's, it's. Yeah, but I think, yeah, I think there's definitely a fine line of shooting yourself and the industry in the foot with that sort of thing. [00:54:54] Speaker A: Yeah, true. It's very true. Just a comment here from Matt. [00:54:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I got it. [00:55:01] Speaker A: Totally on board. If I ever do free work, they still receive an invoice at full rate, and then I discount 100% to zero so they know what you're worth. Yeah, that's cool. [00:55:13] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good plan. Yeah, cool. Okay, so go on. Sorry, go on. [00:55:22] Speaker A: No, you're excited, you go, go on. [00:55:26] Speaker B: I could derail this though. I could take it in a whole different direction. That's not lucky. It's not like me at all. So now I've lost my train of thought. All right, I'll be talking about you. [00:55:40] Speaker A: So at what point did you realize that this was bigger than a one person show? And you introduced Cube. Cube Productions. Have I got that right? Yep. [00:55:50] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:55:50] Speaker A: When did that, when did that come into play and what was the, what was the catalyst for that? [00:55:58] Speaker C: I'd been represented by a few people. This is pre, pre Cube, represented by a few, few different people. And that sort of. It never worked. I found there was always issues. You know, you were never getting paid on time. You're, you know, the people representing you were. I don't want to shit on them too much, but it was like a used car salesman, right? Yeah, they would, they would try and sell you and then they'd take a cut, but the cut was humongous and there was no transparency. So. So it got to a point where I'd been represented by a couple of people and it hadn't really worked and they'd sort of irritated existing clients and that relationships. And it was that moment that I found Emma, our producer, worked with her freelance on a job and just said to her, I got to a point where I was struggling. I was staying up till midnight, burning the candle at both ends and I thought, I've got to make a change here, I can't keep doing this. And yeah, got, got a producer on full time to be producer and then agent to help, you know, drum up more work. So yeah, that slowly grew from there basically. [00:57:07] Speaker A: And how, how big a team are you running with now at Cube? [00:57:11] Speaker C: There's six. Six of us full time. [00:57:13] Speaker B: Wow. [00:57:14] Speaker A: Okay, that's impressive. [00:57:16] Speaker B: That's a good roster for the sim racing. [00:57:22] Speaker C: You got to get to the studio, Justin, and have a lap. [00:57:25] Speaker B: I would, that would be. I just, yeah, I just want to come up there and just poke through. I just want you to. I want to hold the camera. I've said this to other people too. And I'll code at any photographer's studio. I just want to hold the camera and you just talk me through every piece of gear in that room there and why you've got it. [00:57:41] Speaker C: It's more than welcome. Any, any of you, any of you want to come by, Just drop past. [00:57:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that is great. I will suck terribly at the sim, I'm sure, but I'll have a go. So. Okay, so. So six people full time. Do you have any like, outside of that, do you work with just other businesses and freelancers to fill holes, expand the team when required. But. But you guys kind of manage it with this core in house team? [00:58:07] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've tried to keep it small and I always want to keep it small because I think with the industry it's always good to be nimble and then we scale up. Yeah. So over the last 20 years of meeting people and working with other creatives, I've built up a bit of a rost different people that I like to work with. So yeah, on the bigger jobs we expand and then for the smaller jobs we can, you know, can just be a core crew. [00:58:29] Speaker B: Yep. [00:58:30] Speaker A: Yeah, that's clever. [00:58:31] Speaker B: How much of your work do you do you have to travel for. [00:58:36] Speaker C: Pre Covid every second week I was on a plane. And since COVID everything seems to have consolidated and I don't know if it's just there's more people in the industry, so there's more choices around Australia and around the world and obviously, you know, the cost of traveling has increased. So 90 of our work now is. Is local. I mean, saying that we were in New Zealand a week and a half ago, so that's local. Most. Most of it's. Yeah, local. Ish. [00:59:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. And how much of it now is automotive versus just everything else? [00:59:15] Speaker C: For me personally, it's probably 70% automotive, but then wider. So Cube has myself as a represented photographer and director. And then we've got Dan, Dan De Silva, who's another photographer and assistant photographer and director. He started assisting with me about 10 years ago and now we're representing him. And then we also have Lawrence Furzee, who's a stills photographer and director that we're representing. So after having all my experiences of being represented by terrible companies and them doing it poorly, I really wanted to, you know, I guess try and do it right and have all the transparency and all the things that I wished I had the opportunity for, I can do now. Do it right. [00:59:59] Speaker A: Yeah, that's very, that's great to hear, I guess because when, when your creatives don't have to think about that side of it too much because you know that you're being looked after, then you obviously produce. You naturally would produce better work anyway than being jerked around and, you know, not knowing what's going on, your pay is late, all of that sort of stuff. Is so impactful on the creative output, I think, anyway. [01:00:26] Speaker C: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. [01:00:29] Speaker B: I have some questions around. So what have you learned about marketing in this industry? It's obviously a very, you know, you're. There's only a select number of clients that you're really trying to attract. You're not out there just trying to get any random gyms, weddings to come and pay you to make a video about him or what Jim's Boudoir. You know, like you're, you're going after, I guess, people at agencies, people like marketing directors at large brands and that kind of thing. And I've seen over the years I was watching, I think I remember seeing you making metal business cards back in the day. And also like pelican case promo boxes that have like some of your work in them and some. What else was in there? Do you remember that? Like you, you made those things to send out. What was the thing? [01:01:36] Speaker C: Trying to do that every year or two. You still do it's. Yeah, yeah, still do it. Still do it. Still. Every couple of years we try and do something. It's. It's hard. And I find that as the jobs get bigger, the marketing gets harder. It's reaching the right people. It's all relationships. Right. I think, I think the biggest thing I've learned over the years, it's relationships. And it's once you, once you have your foot in the door. That's always the goal. Right. And getting your foot in the door is the hardest thing, especially with agencies and things like that. But yeah, promo material I think is sort of where I've tried to look more and more unique and try and stop people in their tracks. So yeah, that was a mail out. Mail out that we did a good few years ago now was. [01:02:25] Speaker B: It was over 10 years ago. [01:02:27] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:02:28] Speaker B: Do you have any ballpark idea like what these cost per unit, you know, to put this together to send out? [01:02:36] Speaker C: Back then they were cheap. They're expensive now. Really. I think the pelican cases. Yeah. Because I think I bought, I think it was like 50 pelican cases or something like that. And they ended up being, I can't remember, it would have been like 20 or 30 bucks each. And then the shot glass must have been. There was a shot glass that must have been like 10, 10 bucks. And then yeah, the little, little bit of whiskey or vodka that I was posting out. And then. Yeah, the business card. And then I had a USB in there as well for to actually see the work. [01:03:04] Speaker B: Oh, good USB too. Solid usb. I like those Ones, they were highly reliable. The metal Samsungs, maybe, I think. I can't remember. [01:03:11] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that was them. [01:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, we used to use them for the weddings after we got. Do we? Yeah. Do you? Yeah, we used to use. We got. We got these. Or I got them. This might have been pre gym, these wooden USBs. Back in the day, wooden USBs were all the rage and you could get your logo on them and stuff like that. We got them made and they were terrible. That was slow and shit. And we were like, never again. We. We don't care if people don't think we're the. The cool, you know, wooden USB wedding photographers, but we're putting these on, like proper. Legit. Yeah, legit USBs from proper. Because they were slow and most of them failed. Yeah, some of them. They failed like crazy. All right. Never again. Anyway, so it's good to see. See we're on the right track there as well. Okay, so it's been something that you've continued to do to cut through, I guess, cut through the noise and try and get people's attention in these unique positions. Is it mainly agencies, like, how do you get this work? [01:04:21] Speaker C: That's a tricky question. And I'm still trying to work it out. It's a battle, especially with the agency side of things. People that work in agencies only seem to work there for three, four years and then move on. So by the time you feel like you've got your foot in the door, they've left and you have no other contacts there. So it's very difficult. And, you know, I still. The advice I still give out is just go bang on doors. Like, just try and have as many conversations, try and, you know, drum up as much as you can. But it's hard, I guess it's hard to cut through. Right. Because there's so many people out there trying to do the same thing. So a lot of them just, you know, you'll send them an email, they go straight to junk. So that was the idea behind the mail outs, is just try and get people to take notice that we're, you know, trying to do things a bit differently. Yep. [01:05:11] Speaker A: Can I ask you a question? Please, Chris, with. Given where you are now in. In terms of your experience and your output and the sort of clients that are looking for your work, what is this? What is the balance between jobs that you proactively go after versus those that come to you, come looking for you? [01:05:30] Speaker C: It's more and more difficult to find jobs that I want to do in terms of being paid to do them. I mean, we've got to a point now where we're essentially a bit of an agency here, so we can come up with creative for brands and things like that. So for example, Yamaha working with them and just, you know, coming up with ideas so that those sorts of clients are the best for me. They're the ones that get me really excited because they're keen to work with us. But it's, it's probably a slim, slim percentage. I mean, we're trying now every year to create a personal project and it's something that I've kicked myself over the years for not doing enough of because I'm a big believer in, you know, whatever you put out in the world is what you're going to attract. So I think, yeah, we're trying to more and more. I mean, we've been doing a lot of sort of longer or sort of short form documentary work, storytelling stuff that's beyond automotive, which I really enjoy because as you guys know, you get, you get pigeonholed in this industry very quickly as, you know, the car guy or the wedding guy or whatever it might be. [01:06:32] Speaker B: Yep, yeah. Breaking out of that, I guess particularly into storytelling the documentary style. I guess people wouldn't naturally see those two go hand in hand. So you've really got to, I guess push that to the front if you want to attract more of that work in the future would now be. I just, I kind of want to play your show. I want to dig in. So in the back half of the show, I want to look at some of your work. Maybe he tell us some stories about the shoots that, you know, behind the scenes of those photos and things like that, or even just anything that pops into your mind. But I kind of want to play your showreel. But this is the Cube show reel. So this would be. It's. It's a Cube show reel 20, 24. I'm assuming the stuff that's in this could have been shot by number of people on your team or even not even shot by your team. Is that possible as well? Like you guys have had a part in it, but not even necessarily operated the cameras for the shoot. [01:07:32] Speaker C: I think from memory, every shot that's in there is either myself or Dan that we've shot. So most of everything in there is by us. [01:07:42] Speaker B: I don't know how this is going to work, but I'm going to see how it goes because I don't want it to look small, but it kind of looks small. No, that's not going to work. Oh, that works. Okay, let's see what happens. There you go. Oh, Sam, it. [01:08:55] Speaker C: Stop that. Stop that. [01:09:04] Speaker B: Stop that. [01:09:07] Speaker C: Stop. [01:09:08] Speaker B: That's. [01:09:29] Speaker A: That's awesome. That's so awesome. [01:09:34] Speaker B: What does that feel every year? [01:09:36] Speaker A: Sorry. You go, justin, I just want to. [01:09:38] Speaker B: Know what you feel when you. When you watch that back. Knowing everything that's gone into every single one of those shots to put that together. What. What goes into your head when you see that. [01:09:48] Speaker C: I could do it so much better now. [01:09:51] Speaker B: I knew you were gonna say that. [01:09:56] Speaker C: I think every. Every photographer thinks the same way in that way. Right. You're always looking at and critiquing it and going, oh, I could do it so much better now. There's a lot of stuff in there that I could definitely do better. And, you know, and I guess I watch it and think, oh, God, I've listened to that song way too many times. When you edit stuff like that, it's. Yeah. You sit there and you hear it and you shudder. Yeah. [01:10:17] Speaker B: So did you edit that? You. You did or you. [01:10:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I edited that one. [01:10:21] Speaker B: Did you? [01:10:22] Speaker C: Yeah, Yeah, I did that one. Yep. [01:10:23] Speaker B: Yep. Wow. Yeah, it's. It's amazing. And like, for. Yeah, for us watching it, it's just like. Every shot's just like, wow, wow. And you're just trying to keep up with the pace of a showreel and. Yeah, I just. I can't believe you're watching it, thinking, you know, could have done that better. This is. Yeah. [01:10:39] Speaker C: I mean, that's pessimistic me, you know, optimist me is, you know, we've done some crazy stuff, and it's. It's so cool that we get to do that stuff. [01:10:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you often hover between those two states of mind where you have to be, I guess, proud of what you've done, confident in your own abilities, able to land the next client because you know that you guys can produce amazing work, but then also looking at it and going, we could have done better. We need to push harder and improve. How do you balance those two mindsets? [01:11:15] Speaker C: I think it's exactly how you described it. You're always thinking, shit, I could have done that better. But at the same time, you're like, I know what we're capable of. We just need those opportunities to show everyone what we can do. So I think I'm always dancing between the two, But I think any good photographer probably feels the same way. That's what makes you a good photographer. You can be critical of your own work and try and improve and for me, that's the excitement. I mean, I still get just as excited on set as I did when I was 18. Now, you know, it's. Yeah, it's. It's always good fun. [01:11:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:11:49] Speaker A: It's a good sign, isn't it, that you're still doing the right thing in life? [01:11:53] Speaker C: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. If I didn't get paid, I'd still be. Still be having the best time ever. [01:11:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely. I. I completely agree. It's always been that, you know, on. You could. In one minute, you could be feeling like you're the king of the world, the best photographer ever, and then the next minute you're like, damn, I suck. I can't. You know. Yeah. And you just. How did I do that? You oscillate between those two thoughts. And I think it's that push and pull that drives you to be better and. And stay at it. Because if it was only negative all the time, you would probably quit. If you always absolutely sucked, you'd probably give up. You have to have those moments where you're like, wow, we did a good job. Yeah. [01:12:36] Speaker A: That'S what I did. Boss. [01:12:37] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, sorry. Sorry. Go on, Chris. [01:12:40] Speaker C: I was going to say that's. That's the exciting thing with film, I find, is, you know, photography, it's. It's always a much smaller crew, there's less equipment, that sort of thing. But the film side of things, exciting because it's such a joint venture with everybody involved. So, you know, the team. It's a massive team effort. So it's always exciting when everybody's excited on set. I think that's what I probably love about the industry so much, is just everybody that you meet in the industry just loves what they do. It's rare that you have someone who's a bit of a dick in our industry because everybody's just passionate about it and they enjoy their work. And, you know, if you added up the hours and looked at it from a business point of view, you'd be like, why are we doing this? This is crazy. It doesn't add up. So I think, yeah, I think the video side of things, exciting because it's a huge team effort to make those sorts of shots happen. [01:13:33] Speaker B: Yeah, shots by. Jack wants to know. I'd love to know your file structure, what your file structure must be like to deal with this kind of showreel and how you manage it all so effectively. It's a good question. [01:13:47] Speaker C: It's a good question. Ten years ago, I did it very differently. It was just hard drives on the desk and labeled job numbers. But I guess one of the things that I learned through assisting was being organized with all this sort of stuff and redundancy. You always got to have backups. So it was very early on I learned that you would number jobs. You try and structure things smartly and make it easier for three years down the track. If you want to find something, you can search for it and find it. Now we've got a big 200 terabyte server that everything sits on and then we back it up from there. Especially with all the video stuff, it's just, you'll go out, you'll shoot, shoot four or five terabytes in a day easily with the big cinema cameras, which is scary how quick you chew through media. And you have to be really organized at that point. So, yeah, in terms of what we do come back from a shoot, we always straight after the shoot or on the shoot, have a double backup, and then from there we pop it on the server. The job then gets shot edited, and then it's probably a week or so later. We'll then make it another double backup off the server. One will live on site here at the studio and the other one I'll take take home as redundancy. But it's, it's expensive and it's all those little things that, you know, clients and people don't understand the cost involved in that sort of stuff. And yeah, they don't see it. The Internet in Australia is still so that you can't actually, you know, upload this stuff. It's to take too long. And then the cost, the cost of, you know, I looked into the cost of getting fiber to the, to the warehouse here, and it's just, it's, you know, 12, 1500 bucks a month. It's just not worth it. So we've stuck with the old 3 1/2 inch spinning drives as a backup. [01:15:37] Speaker B: Right. So you literally just. And you put like a single job on a big three and a half inch drive or something, and that's just, that's the backup. [01:15:46] Speaker C: So we'll go everything to the server and then from there we'll buy sort of 15 terabyte three and a half inch drives and then however many jobs we can fit on that and then split it in two and have a double copy of that. [01:15:58] Speaker B: Yeah, right, okay. Yeah, that makes sense because, yeah, it's, it's. I mean, because otherwise what. The other option would be to have another 200 terabyte server off site, which. [01:16:09] Speaker C: We still, we still want to do. Really. We'd love to have another 200 terabyte server on site would be ideal. So we could have an additional form of redundancy. Because every time we've got an IT guy that comes past and every time we talk to him, he's like, you know, all those spinning drives were made in the one batch, right. And he always puts the fear of God in me. It's just like, yeah, if one fails, it doesn't mean that, yeah, they're not all going to fail. So I'm always stressing in the background. [01:16:35] Speaker B: Did he set that up? [01:16:37] Speaker C: Yeah. So I bought the server and prior to this I had little NASDAQ's desktop, you know, drives. But as Cube has grown, you know, we could have a project where three, three of us are working on the same project at once. So one, one person will be editing, the other person will be in another room color grading and then the other person might be doing audio. So the server made sense to, yeah, allow us to collaborate on projects like that. But yeah, it's, it still always stresses me out. Data, Data is one of those things where, you know, especially on the big jobs where it's, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of, you know, production and if you lose something, it's your ass on the line. [01:17:18] Speaker B: Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, so that, that Red Bull shoot, for example, like, it's not easy to, to do a reshoot, you know. [01:17:26] Speaker C: No, it just wouldn't, it wouldn't happen. [01:17:28] Speaker B: That's what I was going to say. Let alone the money, like, push that aside, which is crazy for your business. But, but then even if you're like, okay, now we've gotta, we've gotta pay to have a reshoot and they're like, no, we can't do it. There is no, we cannot line this up again. Those people aren't gonna love it for a year. [01:17:43] Speaker C: You know, it's that and then it's, you know, you're closing roads so, you know, you need a month prior to be able to lock all that in. And you know, the amount of logistics on that shoot in particular was humongous. So it's. Yeah, yeah. That sort of stuff is nerve wracking. [01:17:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. How do you go about quoting stuff like that? That's just, just a huge job. There's just so many moving parts. It's like a spinny wheel or a dartboard and you just. [01:18:12] Speaker C: It's difficult. Spray and pray. No, we were like, it depends. It depends. Some of the times we get clients coming to us with, hey, we've got X amount, this is our budget, what can we do for this? Other times it's hey, you know, can you, can you quote for this? And we'll do three quotes and one will be, you know, small budget with a smaller crew, medium budget with a medium crew, big budget with, you know, big crew, locking down roads, all that sort of stuff. So it, I find that three quote thing works quite well because at least it gives people and it starts a conversation more than anything of, you know, a lot of the time you'll say up front, what's, what's your budget? And some people are cagey about it and it's tricky because at the end of the day we always say that, you know, we just want to create the best thing we can for that budget. So we're not here to make millions of dollars. We just want to, you know, make cool stuff. [01:19:03] Speaker B: Well, you mentioned earlier that was so you have like having your own cameras is a benefit to you being able to adjust the pricing or not have to rent out equipment as well. And then you said that having multiple levels of camera can allow you to price the product or the, sorry, the service differently. Say if it's a smaller client, you'd be like, hey, we're not going to bring out the most expensive cinema camera and lens. We'll just bring this potato out and film it on that. Is that, is that like, is that how you, you, if, if a client is like, cool, that's not the budget that we were hoping for. Is there anything we can do to pull the price down? Is that one of the tools that you use is. Is equipment? [01:19:46] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely, equipment. And I mean, it depends on the job. Like you're saying before, if those jobs that I'm really excited about I might have, might end up bringing along the big cinema camera, you know, just because I know it's something that could be portfolio worthy or you know, show real. Show real worthy. But yeah, I think it's from, from my perspective, it's always been a smart choice to offer those different tiers and it depends on the output as well, where it's ending up as well. [01:20:14] Speaker B: I don't have a lot of options. Yeah, I don't have a lot of options with cameras, but maybe I'll start using that if people like, how many. [01:20:20] Speaker A: Cameras have you got? Yeah, but I'll just say three times more than me. [01:20:24] Speaker B: Yeah, but I don't have, I don't have any cheaper ones. I'll just say I can I can shoot it on my phone if you want. My phone. [01:20:33] Speaker C: That's probably more. More cinema. Whereas stills. Yeah, no, stills is probably one of the areas that I still do rent. So we've got, you know, Sony, Sony stuff that we shoot on mostly now. And, you know, you mentioned before I was Canon, and then in that group that I was talking about, the Facebook group, there was a few guys that were shooting Sony at the time and I looked at it and thought, wow, you know, the specs are crazy. That's, you know, 40 megapixels, that's impressive. But the camera body, you know, I don't, I don't like it. I'm going to stick with my Canon. But it got to a point where eventually I was like, all right, I've got to try this out. And I remember Sony doing a deal with, I think it was a Metabone, so you could adapt all your Canon glass to it. And I was like, this is smart move. I'll jump in and give that a go. But yeah, it's, it's interesting with that sort of stuff of just. I'm not really brand loyal in that way. I'll go wherever is going to, you know, produce the best results. [01:21:28] Speaker B: Yeah, interesting. [01:21:29] Speaker C: I can't remember the question you asked me. [01:21:31] Speaker A: Now, that seems to be a common, common theme amongst cinematographers that we've, you know, that we've interviewed and, and even just mates that we have that at that level, when you, you are calling yourself, say, cinematographer or director of photography, whatever it may be, that you become agnostic to the brand. I think Lee Herbert used that word in his interview, that he's agnostic. And it is about what is the. What is the best tool for the job, the budget, the conditions, the outcome, where it's going. All of those sorts of things are going to play into that, aren't they? [01:22:05] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. [01:22:08] Speaker B: All right, I'm going to put a pin in the stills gear because I want to find out more about. So what, what you shoot with, with if a job come up today, what you pick from and stuff like that. But there's a couple of questions first in the chat. First of all, shots by Jack wanted to just clarify, if you're editing, say if there's a few of you editing, are you editing footage that's referenced directly from the server, or do you transfer it onto a local drive and edit from that? [01:22:36] Speaker C: No. So we've got a system where we've got 10 gigabit ethernet ports at each desk. Everyone plugs into it, everyone can access the Server at once and everyone can edit it straight off the server. So yeah, editing directly off the server. [01:22:48] Speaker B: And what, what are you using? DaVinci Resolve or. [01:22:52] Speaker C: Yeah, so years ago we were using a bit of a mix, but DaVinci resolve now is so good. And I got sick of bloody premiere crashing every 10 minutes and googling different errors and things like that. So yeah, jumped. Jumped over to DaVinci and now we're all on that for video. [01:23:07] Speaker B: Yeah, nice. And another question from I think is a. That Jordy Lillis, what do you got on your shoulder there? Looks like. Yeah, Jordy Cinema camera of some sort. In such a competitive industry, how do you find maintaining relationships with other similar creatives and mates that are all essentially competing over the same work? [01:23:29] Speaker C: I think the industry is so small that you got to not shit where you eat. You know, at the end of the day, it's such a small industry and there's been so many people that have helped me out. Out over the years. I think you just got to try and work as, you know, collaboratively as. As possible. Yeah, I've worked with Jordy as well. He's a legend. [01:23:51] Speaker B: Oh, nice. Very cool. Okay. [01:23:55] Speaker C: Jordy was actually on that Red Bull job. [01:23:57] Speaker B: Really? [01:24:00] Speaker C: He was. He was running camera, so he was on long lens most of it. [01:24:05] Speaker B: Okay, so how many. How many of like, what was your team for that shoot? I know you said you were part of a larger crew that was being directed by someone else. What was your team? How big was that? [01:24:17] Speaker C: We came in just as the tracking vehicle team and drone. So there was three of us. Yeah. Myself, Dan and Ollie. [01:24:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you. Do you fly the drones anymore? I know you used to. You still. [01:24:35] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:24:36] Speaker B: And stuff. [01:24:37] Speaker C: Yep, still every now and then, depending on the scale of the job and what's. What's happening. I still love. Yeah. At the end of the day, I love being on the tools and flying drones. I got into them fairly early on, had everything from the big heavy lift stuff through to the smaller stuff. And yeah, now we've just got like an Inspire 3, which is. Which is perfect for 99% of the stuff we do. And anything that's bigger than that, then we just reach out to a third party for that. [01:25:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's. Isn't it insane how. Well, from the outside looking in, how much simpler that level of drone cinematography has got than what it was in like building your own or getting a custom built octo copter thing, you know, like to be able to lift a full. Yeah. Full size camera. And now you can just get. Yeah. Just get an Inspire 3 out of the box and. And get pretty INS footage. [01:25:32] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. It's incredible how, how quickly that stuff is developed and, and how many opportunities it's. It's open for shots and creativity. It's. It's really cool. [01:25:41] Speaker A: And some of those bigger drones are just insane. Like just recently I saw on socials of them using a drone to lift people out of a flood area. The drone was big enough and strong enough to pull, I think. I don't know if it was a child or just. It looked like a very smallish person, but they use the drone to actually lift them up with a harness and get them to the bank. [01:26:01] Speaker B: It's crazy. Yeah. [01:26:03] Speaker A: And you know, 4K footage the whole way, of course. But no. [01:26:08] Speaker B: Oh, that's insane. I wonder what the payload capacity is. You can just imagine where they're flying over and they're like, not that one, not that one. We could probably save that one. [01:26:19] Speaker A: Some of the agriculture drones, I think, you know, they can carry up to like 100 kilos. Some of them. [01:26:23] Speaker B: Oh, it's nuts. [01:26:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:26:27] Speaker C: Scary, scary flying. I've never flown anything that big, but even when we had the big octocopter, flying that with a camera package on it, you would just. [01:26:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:34] Speaker C: Quietly. In your pants. Yeah. [01:26:38] Speaker B: That's a lot of money flying around. Yeah. [01:26:40] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. [01:26:41] Speaker B: Potential for it to. Yeah. Land on somebody is also successful or something. Or something. Yeah. [01:26:48] Speaker A: But just the amount of like lost drone stories you see in here, you know, especially even just doing this gig and knowing a bunch of people that are in the business, the amount of people who drop a drone, you know, and have to go on a very long bushwalk to find it. Yeah, it's nerve wracking. [01:27:04] Speaker B: I'm pretty good at flying mine into trees. Doing mountain bike shoots with drones is trickier than you would think. When you're not like, I'm not like an fpv, you know, pilot. I can't. I don't have the dexterity to do that. So I'm just like trying to. And it's because it's just me too. You're like watching the screen, trying to get the shot so you stop, you know, you sort of lose track of where your drone is. [01:27:25] Speaker C: Don't say that Cassie will come and come and get angry. [01:27:29] Speaker B: I was doing this and looking at both. Leave me alone. Cassie. Your rules are silly. And there was no one around and we hit a tree. We're on private property, private airspace. [01:27:45] Speaker C: Keep digging, keep digging. [01:27:50] Speaker B: It's all just for comedy. This is a comedy show. None of what we say is real. Should we look at some of your work and talk about it? I think we should. [01:28:01] Speaker C: Did you want to talk about stills? I can touch briefly on cameras and stuff. [01:28:05] Speaker B: I would like to, yes. I really would. So, all right, so tell us about cameras now. Do you. So you've got some Sony cameras that you own that you could shoot stills with with in your studio there? [01:28:16] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So over the years, the, the resolution and everything has become so good that, you know, back in the day it was like you shot medium format. If it was anything commercial, you shot medium format. Whereas I find now the Sony stuff and yeah, all, all the manufacturers now are doing such, such good jobs with latitude and megapixels and things like that that you don't necessarily need to always jump to medium format. If, if I could, for every shoot, I'd love to. So it's a different look. The resolution's always crazy and the dynamic range is epic. But I find that the gap between medium format and 35 mil stills now has shrunk a little bit more. So, yeah, 90% of the time we're just shooting on. I've got a couple of the Sony A1s and that camera is just brilliant. Love it. [01:29:03] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. Enough resolution for your high end work, but still fast enough that if it's an action shooter shoot, it's no problem kind of thing. [01:29:12] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:29:13] Speaker B: Best of both worlds. [01:29:14] Speaker C: So one camera that does it all. [01:29:16] Speaker B: Yeah. So I've seen on your old Instagram stuff, I've seen photos of a phase one kit, I think. Did you go down the medium format path of owning years ago when there was a bigger difference, or have you always rented medium format? [01:29:34] Speaker C: I've always rented the medium format stuff. And. And yeah, it's always been a tough line. There's been a bunch of times where I was like, all right, I'm gonna go buy a full medium format kit. But it's just. Yeah, it's a big. It's a big ask on something that I don't do enough of. If I was doing huge commercial stuff every day where I required it and the client was requesting it, I'd buy one tomorrow. But yeah, I just find that. [01:29:59] Speaker B: What would you buy? [01:30:00] Speaker C: The 35 mil stuff is good. I'd definitely go phase one, I think. Think. [01:30:03] Speaker B: Would you really? [01:30:04] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:30:06] Speaker A: They're just a quiet little achiever, aren't they? You never see advertising for them. You never like, you know, you hear a lot about Hasselblad and the gfx. And Phase one is such a quiet achiever. [01:30:17] Speaker B: Who makes. [01:30:18] Speaker C: Yeah, I've shot with. [01:30:20] Speaker B: Hey, who makes it? [01:30:23] Speaker A: I can't hear. I've lost my volume. [01:30:26] Speaker B: Who makes the JFX? [01:30:27] Speaker A: Yeah, Fujifilm, $20. [01:30:31] Speaker B: Greg's on the Fujifilm payroll. Payroll. They pay him to mention it on this podcast as often as he possibly can. That's why his background light is green. [01:30:41] Speaker A: So is yours. [01:30:42] Speaker B: It's also why it turns off halfway through the podcast. Yeah, that's true. So, because. So Phase one in general, I guess, is the highest end. Is it? [01:30:54] Speaker C: Well, this is the thing. I don't even know anymore because we shoot so much with the Sonys. I haven't really kept track of, you know, what's going on. I know Hasselblad launched their new, you know, mirrorless medium format thing the other day. That looks epic. I'd love to. Yeah, I'd love to, love to play around with those things. But yeah, I just, I haven't had, I guess, the need for it or the desire to, to chase it too much. [01:31:20] Speaker B: Yeah. To any. This is what's interesting. So do any camera brands or cinema, like, camera brand, you know, any brands ever want to get involved with the stuff that you guys do or are you not present enough on the World Wide Web because you're too busy just doing client work? That camera brands aren't sort of knocking on your door saying, hey, you should use our gear or whatever? [01:31:49] Speaker C: I wish, I wish. If there's any camera brands out there, yeah, give us a call. No, I mean, I probably slept on the social stuff at the start way too much. I was always head down, bum up trying to shoot as much as I can and looked at the social stuff and thought, ah, it's not worth my time or effort. Whereas now I think it's probably worth your time and effort. The amount of clients and things like that that don't comment. They don't like the image or video, whatever it is, but they'll bring it up in a conversation two weeks later and you'd be blown away that they're actually on there paying attention. So it's probably. Yeah. One of the things I regret is not jumping on social earlier and trying to make a bit more of a presence there. [01:32:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it's not too late. Yeah. [01:32:27] Speaker C: And look, we'll, we'll keep, keep doing it. So. I mean, there's brands out there that'll help us, but yeah, I'm still waiting for, for a deal to come along would be Great. Someone, someone to come in and look. Yeah, I wouldn't take a deal unless I love the product and use the product. I mean, Broncolor is one of the ones back in the day that helped me out when buying a kit and I, you know, I love their stuff. It's epic. It works really well. And that's not me saying it because they helped me out. It's just I've literally had the same kit now for years and it's been an absolute workhorse. [01:33:01] Speaker B: Wow. [01:33:02] Speaker A: Can I ask you a question? From your experience and in your particular genre, is there something that the Sony A1 is lacking that you wish it had? [01:33:14] Speaker C: Probably more of a professional body in terms of ergonomics and weather sealing, but in saying that I've shot in the bucketing down rain with it and it's been fine. So genuinely, it's, Yeah, I, I'm a definitely a gadget person and I struggled to think, you know, like the A12 came out and I was like, I don't really need to, to jump on that because there's not enough of a bump technology wise for me to consider it. But yeah, yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. Let me come back to you. [01:33:50] Speaker A: If there's nothing, that's because, you know, so often we speak to photographers, even just when we're out and about and there'll be something about their camera that I just wish it had this or. [01:33:59] Speaker C: Oh, it overheats for video. There's one of the issues there. [01:34:02] Speaker A: It is. [01:34:04] Speaker B: I mean, I don't work for any camera brands and I mean, Greg gets his dollar every time he says the word Fujifilm, but I wish if I was. [01:34:16] Speaker C: Lucky straps, Lucky straps, Lucky straps, Lucky straps. [01:34:21] Speaker B: There you go. If I was Fujifilm and I had just heard that segment, I would be sending you a GFX kit and when it comes out, one of those new GFX Eterna 55 Cinema cameras. And I'd be like, we want you to use this on this level of production. That's what I would be doing if I was them. Because a GFX kit is, is, it's not insanely expensive. It's not expensive like a phase one kit and it's that next level up, 100 megapixels, insane, like sharpness. The lenses are insane and they got that new cinema camera coming that is going to be obviously the start of their, their entire cinema range. So if I was them, if I worked for Fujifilm, I would be knocking on Chris's door. Greg Martin, I'll go. I, I don't want to say negative things about Fujifilm, but they seem to lean more towards the, the influencer market. [01:35:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:35:25] Speaker B: For promotional stuff. [01:35:27] Speaker C: I think that's probably where the money is as well. Right. And I'm shooting myself in the foot here. But you know, it's the same with DJI and things like that. It's the prosumer, you know, semi professionals where they're plugging it and it's the achievable equipment that makes the money the most. [01:35:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, their marketing is designed to make you feel like you can achieve pro quality outcomes, you know, and it's, it's a money game, it's a marketing game. Fujifilm at the moment is heavily invested in that kind of youth demographic, especially in Asia. But we're seeing like the creator summits and Green Blooded is their current promotion. You know, we just, I just went to a collaboration a couple of weeks ago with Fujifilm and Converse. Obviously Converse is a relatively youthful brand so they're really pushing into that, into that youth marketers and because maybe they see it as a opportunity. There's people that have never had their first camera but have only been shooting on their phone and they're really trying to influence people into that market to say, hey, you can actually have a better experience, not necessarily a better image quality, but a better experience than your new iPhone, you know, So I mean the iPhone 17 must have got a 48 megapixel front facing camera. Like that's insane. [01:36:37] Speaker C: Oh, it's epic. It's, it's so cool being able to, you know, everyone gets to shoot now. Right. And. [01:36:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yep. [01:36:44] Speaker C: At a high level. [01:36:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:47] Speaker B: Do you ever get tempted by the iPhone specs for video and stuff like that? Like I know there'd be, there'd be no point using it because you've got crazy cameras there. But whenever they release these new iPhones, there's always someone that makes like a crazy high end commercial with the iPhone or whatever. You know, you always see that stuff come out shot on iPhone. Does that stuff ever tempt you or are you just like, ah, it's not. [01:37:09] Speaker C: Really, I think like anything. It's, it's 90% lighting, blocking camera movement. It's less about the tech. Right. So yeah, it's, it's about, about light and framing really. At the end of the day I think you could shoot 90% of stuff on a small little mirrorless and you'd get, yeah, 80, 80% of the quality of what you want. Yeah, but yeah, I'm a gadget whore. I love all that stuff. So I'm always, always looking. [01:37:34] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. Let's look at, let's look at some photos. Yeah, I was just this. So this is just the stuff from your, your personal stills portfolio on the Cube Productions website. From these images, is there any that stand out that you have a cool story about or anything that comes to mind? [01:38:01] Speaker C: Well, that was that Top Gear shoot I was talking about on the Right. That was sort of one of the first ones where I shot a little bit of video on. That was just fun because it was one of those pinch yourself jobs. We got to drive all the cars. It's not often you get to drive a, you know, a supercar on a dry lake bed and, and have freedom in terms of shooting as well. These are the days that I really miss where it was like we had, you know, the journalists organizing the shoot. Glenn Butler was the journal. I was on with that. He organized that. And it was just a wild idea that he had. And he was like, hey, let's take, take these cars out here and write a story about it. But that was. Yeah, it was one of those ones where you go out there, there's no client sitting over your shoulder. It's like, okay, well, we need, need a cover image for the magazine. We need, you know, a couple of nice shots of each car. Let's, let's go do it. Those were the, the dream days of, of work. [01:38:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:38:58] Speaker A: And can I ask a question? Was that the real Stig or was that a stand in? [01:39:03] Speaker C: As real. As real as the Stig gets, I guess. Yeah, I do remember, I do remember trying to put the helmet on and thinking, holy, this thing stinks. I'm not putting that on too many shoots. [01:39:15] Speaker A: Never takes it off. [01:39:17] Speaker C: But that was, that was one. That was one where I don't even know I should tell the story. I have to tell it now that I've said that. We shot. We shot everything. We got everything. The cars were amazing. You know, we got all these incredible shots and a bit of video as well. And on the return we're driving, you know, and it's. It was like a 150 kilometer drive on dirt road. So we're crawling these things along. We've got one support vehicle with one front spare tire and one rear spare tire for each car. And that was it. And driving along and I think we got a flap on the back of the Porsche. So, okay, we stop, jack it up, change that. We then drive another 40km front tire on the Porsche goes down. Okay, we stop, swap that. And then it was probably, I don't know, another 20Ks down down the road. The, the sump plug in the R8 fell out. Because it's a dry sump when it's running. It was fine, but as soon as we stopped, turn the car off, it just dumped all its oil out. So we're out in the middle of the outback, and this would have been, you know, four, four o'clock in the afternoon. We've gone, oh, what, what are we going to do? How are we going to fix this? So the guys jumped in the, the support vehicle in the Nissan and kept going down the road while we looked around, you know, what can we find? And I ended up finding a bolt in the jack that I brought with me that fit in the hole for the sump plug. So we're like, okay, you guys go get, you guys go into town, which was, you know, 100k's down the road, try and get some oil and come back. So at that point, yeah, the Nissan and the Porsche went off and we were sitting there with, with the Audi. But what we didn't know is, you know, over the hill, a little bit further down, another tire went on the Porsche. So now we had another flat tire on the Porsche with no spare, no way to get anywhere. So they ended up getting stuck further down. The guys ended up driving, you know, the support vehicle into town, managing to get some oil at least, but there was no spare tires or anything. So we ended up leaving us on the side of the road in the Audi R8, you know, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. You know, we had one car drive past us and be like, what are you guys doing out here? And we were there, we were there into the night, you know, thinking, oh, my God, we're going to be stuck out here forever and die. But long story short, we got the oil, you know, we managed to get the tire repaired on the Porsche and drive there and back and, you know, swap it and, and take it all back. But yeah, it was, it was one of those fun shoots that I'll never, never forget. [01:41:59] Speaker B: That is awesome. [01:42:01] Speaker A: They made you work for it, that's for sure. [01:42:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:42:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:42:05] Speaker B: Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. Well, what stories are going to be able to top that? What else are we. So. [01:42:16] Speaker C: There'S a story with every shot, like, like anything, right? There's, there's all sorts of fun stories. [01:42:21] Speaker B: But like, on these sorts of shots, these, like, I don't know what you. Hang on Let me find that. That one. These sort of really, I guess. What would you call this, like, lifestyle. Lifestyle catalog shots. Like what goes into this kind of shoot? [01:42:45] Speaker C: Those ones are. There's a lot of work that goes into them, obviously, from finding the location to getting client approval. It's a huge process. So the client will usually come to us and say, we want something that feels modern and sleek or it might need to feel rustic and old. So it'll start with us putting forward locations and location scouting, looking for things like that. And then obviously, the shoot itself, it's getting there at the right time of day. So we'll go out and work out. Out exactly what time we need to be there. Schedule a day around it. Schedule the shots around the day, I guess. Yeah. You can't be too. Too organized with this sort of stuff. And it's expensive when you've got, you know, a biggish crew there. This one was fairly small, but, like the house in the background, that wasn't actually there. [01:43:32] Speaker B: Oh, really? [01:43:32] Speaker C: Yeah. A heap of. A heap of post that goes into it. Yeah. So the actual white parking structure that cars parked under was there, but the house off to the left of frame wasn't. Wasn't actually there there. [01:43:41] Speaker A: Oh, wow. What about the palm trees? [01:43:45] Speaker C: Palm trees were there from memory. Yeah. [01:43:47] Speaker B: Okay, so whose vision is it to add the house? Who come. Who comes up with that? Where they're like, we need to make this. Like, is. Is that there from the beginning or is that something that evolves through the shoot? And in. In post where you're like, this. This will be more compelling. This will be a better. Yeah, how does that. [01:44:05] Speaker C: Yeah, it usually evolves. And yeah, this one was my idea. I was like, okay, I think we need something to balance the left side of the shot. And I was working on the post on this one, so I was just tinkering away and literally dragging and dropping things in the background and thinking, oh, that works. That doesn't. What works? Likewise, what have we got on file that could work? Or if I'm set. Usually when you're shooting this stuff, you're seeing. You're seeing what's missing. And usually if we've got the time and the budget to do it, I'll be looking for background plates that will be shooting at the same time. So, you know, if. If that house was there, I'll go grab a shot of it, make sure we're shooting at the same sort of light. So it's going to match and, you know, be easier to drop in and Post? [01:44:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow, that's amazing. Let's just. I'll bring that stuff back up in a second. I have a question to ask you about a very controversial topic. Oh. So prepare yourself. We might get cancelled already. What do you, what do you think about AI? Are you using it and in what parts of your current business is it being used and what tech keeping an eye on for the future? [01:45:23] Speaker C: Sorry, the, the compressor's going off in the background. Yeah, yeah, we'll give that a couple of seconds. I'll wait. I'll wait. [01:45:30] Speaker B: Have you got like an air powered camera or something? [01:45:34] Speaker C: Yeah, we just got a compressor in the corner for just clean cleaning off camera gear. [01:45:38] Speaker B: Oh, that's next level. I've got one of those blowers. I've got like a little puffer. You've got an air compressor. That's awesome. [01:45:49] Speaker C: You gotta, you gotta have the right tools for the right job. I'll wait for it to finish and then I'll answer. I don't know how loud it is for you guys. There we go. [01:45:58] Speaker B: Oh, there it is. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. [01:46:01] Speaker C: So look, AI, how deep do you want me to jump? Jump into this? Because it's, there's so many levels. Right? [01:46:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:46:08] Speaker C: Let's go beyond our, our industry of photography and film. It scares the out of me. I think we're fucked, to be honest. To be brutally honest. And yeah, I mean the more and more I lean into it and read about it and listen to things about it, it scares the hell out of me because I don't know where we're going. There's, there doesn't seem to be any sort of, you know, safety is in place for this. So beyond the industry. It scares the hell out of me. In the industry still scares the hell out of me. We're still using it like it's, you know, going out of fashion. It's super handy, right. Like at the moment it's another tool that we're using whether it's for storyboarding, whether it's for, you know, creating mood boards, presenting things to clients for ideation, that sort of thing. Yeah, using it as much as we can and you know, it's another tool is the way I'm seeing it at the moment. But I think beyond the industry probably scares me the most of, you know, what's going to happen for everybody and everybody's jobs. And it shits me to tears if I'm, if I'm being completely honest because why can't it steal the boring ass jobs? Why does it have to come up with creative stuff, right? [01:47:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:47:24] Speaker C: Why can't it wash the dishes for me or, you know, do something, fold the clothes, do something useful, whereas it comes after the one. You know, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, do I think, you know, our jobs will be taken, I would have said, oh, yeah. The creative industry will never be replaced. So it'll. There's so many things we can jump into with this topic. Right. And it's, you know, I guess it's being talked about lots and I try and look at it with a positive hat. [01:47:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So you're trying to, trying to look at it as like, okay, what can we utilize? Where can it help me day to day? Where's it going? But this is like looming undercurrent of, of dread. [01:48:08] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. [01:48:09] Speaker A: And I think we see it a lot with software, like editing software especially. You know, there's all of these new, new brands and, and, and products that are being made available to photographers for cropping, for editing, for, you know, subject removal, subject replacement, sky replacement. Like, it's all you can make. It's, you know, it's almost like, like taking Photoshop and just automating everything. You can change the shape of a person's body. You can, you know, you can change their skin color. You can add makeup. [01:48:40] Speaker B: I put you on a mountaintop, Greg, as an example. I, I recolored Greg. Tell me that. How much do you know about black and white, Chris? Like black and white photos? [01:48:51] Speaker C: A little bit. Probably not enough. [01:48:52] Speaker B: A little bit. Am I, am I just thinking about this completely wrong? Is there something in black and white images that references color definitively? Because I asked it to recolor a black and white image of Greg. This was Google's Nano Banana. Have you played with Nano Banana? [01:49:11] Speaker C: I haven't yet, but I've been looking at it pretty closely. [01:49:14] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty advanced. So I just threw a black and white shot of Greg in there. It was a jpeg. And I don't think there's any, like, data being carried with it, but, like, it knew Greg's beard was. Had a bit of ginger in it. It, you know, like, it, it knew. So he had this top on and it recolored this Lucky Straps logo, which you can buy these T shirts on Lucky Straps.com and it re. It recolored it to gold. Yeah. Like it. [01:49:40] Speaker C: Yeah, right. [01:49:41] Speaker A: It got the pastiness of my skin. [01:49:43] Speaker B: Like, the only thing it got wrong, I think the camera strap was the wrong color. I think Greg had a different, slightly different tone or Black and it went to brown or something like that. But everything else looked accurate. And I'm like, how did it do that? [01:49:58] Speaker A: Scary. [01:49:59] Speaker C: Yeah. Interesting. I don't, I don't think any color stuff would be transferred over. Right. Once you desaturated. I don't imagine there would be any information saved there. [01:50:07] Speaker B: That's what I thought. Other than it knowing, like in general, something that's this tone, this, like this level of gray is probably this kind of, you know, one of these colors. But. [01:50:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, but my T shirt could have been red. That would have shown up as black in a, in a black and white shot. [01:50:23] Speaker B: Got. [01:50:24] Speaker A: But it just need to go black with gold. [01:50:27] Speaker C: What are your thoughts on, on AI guys? [01:50:31] Speaker A: Well, look, I'm a photographer and a writer, so I'm doubly. I can't win. You know, I thought, oh, this is going to be a safe, you know, comfortable end of life career kind of stuff. You know, just keep doing this for a while and not end of life, you know, end of career stuff. I'm not going anywhere to tell you boys. This is the last episode. A I, I, yeah, I, we've talked about this on the show quite a lot and even just outside of, you know, talking to industry friends and that my issue with AI is that it's unregulated. Okay. And the people that are trying to tell us that it's safe are the people that own it. You know, the people that are telling us that it's effective, that it's flawless, that it's whatever it is. You know, you see the ads for companies and they're throwing around the term AI like it's, you know, like it's, it's the next great evolution of business. And, and yes, it will influence it, but they're promoting a product that is still fundamentally fr. Flawed. And they're trying to tell people this will, this can replace your scheduling, this can replace your, you know, HR processes. Like they, they're telling people it can do everything and it's unregulated. And I think, Sorry, I was going. [01:51:48] Speaker C: To say it's hard. It's hard because you don't want to be left behind, but at the same time, you don't want to help train the model. Right. Because you're shooting yourself in the foot. [01:51:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's a lot we don't know about, you know, what our images that we drop on Facebook or Instagram are they being harvested and used for AI learning. And I know they have to disclose all that, but, you know, as a Social media user, you don't go looking through the T's and C's to work it out. You're either on or you're not. But I think for me the biggest. [01:52:17] Speaker C: Concern is firmly fastened. Good. [01:52:23] Speaker A: My, probably one of my fundamental issues with AI is that unregulation, but also the impacts it has on young people. You know, we've seen stories and I've written about this and spoken about this at length, but we've seen stories of kids putting their. Basically using a selfie or the teachers profile shot on the school website and, and putting them into porn and lingerie and boudoir settings, you know, and thinking it's funny or fellow students. And I think there's a, there's a real risk there. [01:52:57] Speaker B: They're not even using Photoshop back in the day, you know, like if you were going to do this stuff. Oh yeah, teacher's head on a naked lady. You at least learn Photoshop first. [01:53:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:53:07] Speaker B: You can just say, hey, hey, take this photo. Developing a life skill. [01:53:12] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, you are. [01:53:13] Speaker A: It's very true. But yeah, so we're seeing some of that nefarious use of it. My partner, who's a lecturer at a university, the amount of, you know, online cheat or not online. Sorry. The amount of cheating for written content and assignments. And the universities all have these, these bots that kind of check it for AI, but they can't always definitively prove it. [01:53:36] Speaker C: So you've got AI bots to clean up as well. [01:53:41] Speaker B: Right. [01:53:41] Speaker A: I mean, there are. She's told me some horror stories, but also some funny stories where a student has used AI to write an essay and find references. And this is another example of where it's not ready. AI isn't as clever as you think it made up. It couldn't find the references, so it made them up. It just made them to look convincing. And of course they got caught up on that. That and the staff spoke to the student and the student was given an opportunity to resit because that's policy of the school and they just went news day again. It just made up new references. It's not as clever as people think it is or are led to believe it is. [01:54:18] Speaker C: Yes, I think, yeah, I think that's true. But you look at, at how, how quick it's actually, you know, the bell curve of its development and as it learns and gets better, it's not a, it's not a progressive graph that slowly goes like this. It goes and then goes ver. [01:54:34] Speaker B: Right. [01:54:34] Speaker C: So I think it's going to progress Very quick. I even heard the other day of a kid using it to record his parents voice, to be able to then call the school, to call in sick by using his parents voice. And it wasn't till the third or fourth day that he called in to be sick that the teachers actually called the parent and said, you know, oh, just checking in to see how he's going and the parent's gone. I had no idea, you know, so. [01:54:57] Speaker A: See, that's clever that that's. [01:55:03] Speaker B: That kid's either going to be very, very successful or one or the other. So I think it's. AI is, is an amazing tool. It is still very dumb. We use it a lot. So we've been trying to find ways to use it to speed up, up workflow for tasks that aren't the core of what we do. So for this podcast, for example, I'm like, can it do chapters for the podcast? Sometimes, sometimes it's really, really dumb and it just spits out chapters that are completely all over the shop. It'll stop three quarters of the way. It does all sorts of dumb shit, but it can speed things up. What it's really great from for this podcast is I've been getting it to go through the transcript and find quotes from. I mean, I'll get it to find quotes that you said that are relevant to, you know, to insightful things. And going through that, making note of those quotes for a human would take quite a bit of time. And it seems very, very good at pulling that out. But what, what we're really sort of trying to out our framework for AI is like, like use it to enhance the core of what we do, but do not let it enter into being the core of what we do. As in we're not going to make a podcast with AI, we're not going to let the podcast, we're not going to get ChatGPT to come up with, you know, an outline and then we just talk about what it come up with. It's, it's like, no, no, we'll just use it to enhance something that, that we do that can't be replicated by a machine that doesn't know any of this stuff. [01:56:54] Speaker C: I have this chat all the time and I jump between both sides where I think, you know, it's going to be a fad. Everyone's going to, you know, jump on AI in terms of commercial work and, you know, documentaries. Is it going to ever feel real? And I think, you know, that's, that's why we'll, you know, it'll be a fad and then it'll come back to us shooting things naturally and, you know, in person, because it's the flaws and there's the spontaneity of what happens on set that's, you know, creates the magic. But then I go back to the, the, the negative, Chris, where I think, well, it's just going to get better and better at replicating all of that. So it's. Yeah, it's, it's interesting and it's scary, but, yeah, I don't know what the answer is, and I don't know what my answer is in terms of is it going to be amazing or is it going to be the demise of us? I'm not sure. [01:57:38] Speaker A: I think it's going to take. It's going to take, like, in a commercial space, I imagine it's going to take brands and marketing companies to take a stand against it, to say, say, and even maybe harness it a little bit to say, you know, genuine human content. I don't know what the terminology would be, but, you know, we, we. Everyone else is using AI, but we use real humans to take our photos or real humans to write our words or whatever it may be. Like, brands actually promote originality and genuine human content. But as we all know, we live in a con, in a, you know, consumerism world where money talks. And if a marketing agency can get it done for a third of the quarter or an eighth of the cost compared to the time and money and energy it takes to actually do it with people, I fear, like you, that they're going to swing the other way. [01:58:30] Speaker B: I remember there's a. There's a YouTube channel. It's kind of like a kid's YouTube channel, but you might have been familiar with it. When they first started, they did basketball trick shots. It's a YouTube channel called Dude Perfect. And they just, they like. The first video was this. Them just making, like, ridiculous basketball shots. And then it's evolved into this giant business and YouTube channel. But I was listening to a podcast with those guys and talking about AI and that kind of thing, and they said they use AI a lot to mock up thumbnails. And they'll often mock up their thumbnails before they film the video because they want everyone to have a sense of like, what do we, what are we trying to create? Because on YouTube, it's. It's really relevant that the thumbnail attracts people, but then also is consistent with what's in the video so that people aren't like, oh, that was clickbait. And they. They dropped a thousand basketballs out of a massive carrier aircraft trying to get one of them to go in a basketball ring, which is very difficult by the look of the video. And they. So they did. They mocked one up with AI and they had multiple passes on this thing. They had photographers there. The plan was to build, basically try and replicate that shot with a real shot, replicate the thumbnail with a real photo of what they were doing, because they don't want people to think it's fake. They want to show, because they really did it. They're like, we really dropped a thousand basketballs out of this thing. It's not a trick. But they couldn't get a photo as good as what the AI one was. And then they tried and they tested three thumbnails, and the AI One outperformed the other two by far in terms of getting people to click on their video. And they were like, it was a real, real tough pill to swallow as to, like, you know, is this the right thing? Is this the wrong thing for us to do? You know, does it matter? You know, we still filmed the video and did the thing with real stuff. But, yeah, it was an interesting, interesting thought. They weren't just trying to cut money from their production costs. They just couldn't get what AI delivered them. Even trying to replicate it later on on. To know. [02:00:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it's tricky. And I think, you know, with software, we like Adobe products, obviously they're introducing, or they have been introducing AI they have been for a couple of years now, probably longer, but just called it other stuff. And we're seeing, you know, Denoise AI and other elements in, say, Lightroom. And my. My concern is, where does that. Where do we draw the line on that? When all of a sudden, Lightroom pretty much becomes like every other AI editing software where, you know, it'll just. You'll. You'll stick in your memory card and it will go through it and pick out the. The 20 bangers where you nailed everything that you've asked it to look for. You know, I. I worry about that tipping point for the stuff that we rely on that mostly is not AI yet. You know, we're still sliding sliders on software and things like that ourselves. When do we lose that creative control of the end product? That's my concern. [02:01:36] Speaker B: Yeah. My advice to people would be definitely not yet, because I'm telling you, it cannot reliably create podcast chapters from a transcript, so do not let it do something important without you checking it, particularly like culling images and not so we tried, Jim and I tried an AI image culling service and it was slower because, yeah, it picked say 80% of the images we would want, but we still had to end up looking through the whole shoot to see what it missed. And it missed the most interesting ones because it thought they were not, they didn't fit this perfect standard photo rule of thirds. Whatever it thinks is like a good photo and it just went past them and it was, it was just a waste of time. So I don't know, maybe, maybe it's better now, but there's definitely some good. [02:02:30] Speaker C: Uses that we've been using. Like, you know, as you mentioned, the transcript thing is very handy when we're doing long form interviews and we literally like, you know, the client will be like, oh, you know, they mentioned this about this product or whatever it might be and you can just punch it in and go bang. You know, like they're, they're amazing tools. Being able to do things like that and pull those sorts of things out is great. I mean, literally a couple of weeks ago we shot a big TVC for a car commercial and we had a dog that we wanted to get a reaction out of and we weren't able to get the reaction on set that we really wanted to because of time and all that sort of thing. So we ended up recording our faces to get the reaction that we wanted and then used AI to add those movements into the shot of the dog. So there's definitely uses of it that are great and just allow, you know, those sorts of things to, you know, get you what you want. But yeah, there's definitely good uses and I think there's definitely technology where it's, you know, it's still lagging behind. [02:03:29] Speaker B: What would your advice be to the young 18 year old Chris, that was starting right now in this world where you've got so much access to information but you've got access to these AI tools as well? Well, how would you tell them to navigate this situation so that they can end up, you know, being successful five, ten years from now? [02:03:53] Speaker C: Become a chippy? It's a really good question and maybe I'll look back at this in 10 years and think, well, I was wrong. I don't know. I'm, I'm hoping that the industries, you know, it's just developed and we're just using it as another tool and it's, you know, another creative way to create amazing work. But I'm not sure. I just, yeah, at this point, I just don't know, to be honest. To be 100% honest, I'm hoping that yeah, it'll be a great tool that we'll use. And yeah, I guess like anything and like I've always done is just read as much information as you can, try it all out, shoot, shoot as much as you can. My advice is always just shoot. Because the more time you spend behind the camera, the more you learn. It's like anything you learn, hands on. So yeah, I guess my advice would just be. And it's difficult at the moment because Nanobanana was nowhere three weeks ago, I'd never heard of it. And then suddenly now it's a new thing that we need to learn. Right. So it's like which areas do you actually invest time and effort into? So, so yeah, ask me again in five years and we'll see what, see what happens. [02:05:04] Speaker A: We will and it will be interesting because at the moment when you see AI generated content on say Instagram, there's always a tell, there's always a few tells. You know, it doesn't quite have its poker face game on yet, but it won't be long before we can't tell. And I think that's the, that's when things are concerning because, because from a competitive point of view as, as professional photographers, you can either pay the ten grand to get your professional photographer to do this or you can give it to the kid who's offering you two, who wants two grand instead and guarantees the same result. Because they're going to use AI to create it. They just need to be good at text prompts and refinement. You know that, that. [02:05:44] Speaker C: Well, like, like you said, it's not, it's not just the photographer, right? It's the model, it's the voiceover artist, it's the post production team, it's the color greatest, it's the sound designer, it's whoever's, you know, the band or whoever's creat music. There's, there's so many layers to it. Right. So it's, look what I, what I always end up coming back to is it's a bloody exciting time to be alive and to be witnessing this all happening. You know, there's, in terms of, you know, you look at our life and human history, it's a pretty exciting time to, to be around. Yeah, that's, that's the most positive thing I can take out of it. True. [02:06:24] Speaker B: Do you see like car manufacturers potentially using their kind of computer generated images to then punch it into AI for sales stuff or do you think that they'll yeah. [02:06:36] Speaker C: I mean, look, it's. It's tricky because this has sort of already happened with cgi, right? Yeah. But it'll be interesting to see how good and how quickly these tools develop in terms of will the manufacturers just have. Have the CAD rendering of the car. They input it into AI and say, I want it to be on a beach with a beautiful woman running along there with some. Some kids. Bang. Done. So it'll be. It'll be very interesting to see how these tools develop. And I think one of the other things is, yes, you know, the industry will definitely change, and it's going to change. It's. Clients and agencies still don't really know what they want. Someone's going to have to create that vision. I'm hoping whether. Whether it gets to the point where it's just like you punch in, you know, we're trying to create a Facebook ad that needs to capture a thousand people's attention. Whether you just literally say that and say, this is the car and it then goes and does it, I'm not sure. Or whether it's going to be that that creative process is still going to be there in terms of, you know, this is the concept, this is the look that we're going for. [02:07:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:07:44] Speaker C: It'll be interesting to see how, how it develops over the years. [02:07:48] Speaker B: Yeah. I think what people might be missing in the, in the gold rush is exactly what you're talking about there, where it's like, if it gets to the point where everyone has the ability to. To punch something in and say, generate me an ad that cuts through on social media, if everyone does that, that's the definition of something not cutting through, because all of it will be be built from the same formula. That's what, that's what creatives like you have made a living out of doing is how do we think outside the box to create something new that will capture attention. AI isn't. Isn't good at that because it's been trained on what already exists. And if everyone, if every car brand types in similar prompts to generate similar ads that they say, well, we want this to go viral. If everything is designed to go viral, nothing goes viral. You're not going to stand out doing the same thing as everyone else. And so I wanted to bring this up before we run out of time. I know you've been on with us for two hours and eight minutes, which is insane. This is one of the images, the image we used for the thumbnail of the show, which is obviously, I'm assuming Not one single image. Be cool if it was, but I assume there was potentially some Photoshop manipulation done here. But is this an example of someone had to come up with this idea? It's not about whether or not you could execute it with AI. It's like someone has to come up with this idea for a campaign. [02:09:31] Speaker C: Yeah, it was. It was actually a shoot for Mercedes Benz and from memory, it was for Mercedes Benz magazine, but ended up being used as advertising. If you go back to the series, I think there's a series of images for this. And if you scroll up to some of them, even to some of the other ones in the water, like that shot there. If you go back one, that shot there is a single frame. The only thing that I added in was the cityscape onto the left of that building. [02:10:02] Speaker B: Is it really a single frame? I thought these would all be composites because I was like, oh, they probably. It probably wasn't worth them trying to do this in one shot. [02:10:12] Speaker C: Wow. It was just a small editorial shoot and I had one of those. I've literally got it sitting in the wall next to me. One of those little. What are they called? The Dicker pack? Underwater bags. [02:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I got one. [02:10:23] Speaker C: So literally just chuck. Chuck the camera in that and. Yeah, it was just an idea that I had. When I found out that we were going to be shooting a swimmer and that we were able to get the car close to the pool, I was like, man, it'd be epic to be able to shoot, you know, a single image and try and split the water. And it was. Yeah, it was a tricky, tricky shot to try and get. But, yeah, there wasn't. The other shot that you started with, that was the car was shot by someone else and then that was used as advertising for Mercedes and their C Class. [02:10:53] Speaker B: But that. That would have never existed if you hadn't been there and just come up with this idea on the fly and shot this single image, I assume that other image would. That wasn't planned ahead of time. [02:11:06] Speaker C: Well, I planned it ahead a little bit because I knew what. What was happening and, you know. But in terms of seeing it. Exactly. Because I hadn't seen the location to literally flew up to Queensland for this and, you know, flew in, jump. Jumped in the pool and. Yeah. [02:11:18] Speaker B: Interesting. I thought this must have come from a. We. We've got this idea for a creative with a split shot for this campaign. I thought that's how that would have evolved. But you're saying it was more evolved as you knew you were shooting a swimmer so why wouldn't I try and get this shot? [02:11:36] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:11:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:11:37] Speaker C: And it was a small shoot. Yeah. There was no. I think I had one assistant on there with me and. Yeah. Just jumped on the pool. [02:11:46] Speaker B: Love it. So no lighting or anything in the pool? [02:11:49] Speaker C: Nothing. Yeah. All natural light. [02:11:52] Speaker A: It's incredible. [02:11:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Beautiful shot. See, if. If that was me, I wouldn't have been able to add the city skyline. I would have been like, nah, I want to be able to say that this is. This is just like one shot. It is what it is. I wouldn't have been able to do it, even though it makes it cooler. [02:12:06] Speaker C: I'll have to dig up the raws for you and send them. Send them through. [02:12:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Such a good photo. Wow. Yeah. Well, that's very cool. So would that be one shot except for the city? [02:12:19] Speaker C: Yep. That was other than the city. Yep. [02:12:22] Speaker B: Nice. Crazy. Yeah. I. I really thought these were composites. Yeah. Just. Just because of how. How difficult I thought it would be to pull these shots off. [02:12:35] Speaker C: Yeah. If I was to do it again, I'd probably do it composite because trying to get it in camera would be difficult. [02:12:41] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:12:43] Speaker C: You'd be scared to promise a client that, you know, this is what we can do. [02:12:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:12:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So. So if this was the. If this was the creative direction from the start, would you. Right now in your head, you'd be thinking, okay, we'll do a composite. I'll set the swim shot up. I'll set the car location up. Maybe they'll even be in different spots because the. The spot near the pool won't necessarily be the right, you know, spot for the car. And. And that. That's how your mind would work in the beginning. [02:13:07] Speaker C: It's all control, especially for the big commercial stuff. So, you know, they're going to have copy that's going to go somewhere. They're going to need to be able to put it on billboards that are, you know, 100 foot long. And then they're also going to need social crops out of it now. So, you know, if I was approaching this now in a commercial sense, I'd definitely be thinking of composites for sure. I mean, yeah, a lot of the commercial stuff, if you jump back to some of the. The Kia shots, even looking at the driving shots, I can talk you through some of those. So the top left. Yeah, that one. If you jump to that driving shot, I mean, that. That driving shot was shot static, that first shot. So car is stationary. We jack the car up, spin the wheels. We then drive the car out of frame. We then shoot background plates so that mountainscape wasn't there, that sky wasn't there. But what that then allows us to do is we sit down with the client and we say, okay, well, how much dust do you want there? Is that covering too much of the car? Do you want to be able to see the emblems on the wheels? Do we want to speed the wheels up more, slow it down? Same with the background blur, this lens flare. Do you want more of it or less of it? And it's a huge collaboration with this sort of stuff. And the amount of thought that goes into every one of those shots is huge. While at times it can be amazing, other times it can be infuriating because you could be having the most incredible sunset over to your right, and you're working on this image that's meant to look dark and moody. And that's where I say, I miss the old editorial days where it was like, you would be the boss, essentially, on set, and you'd just be like, that's the shot we're going to get because it looks incredible. But, yeah, I guess all this post stuff, just the level of control that allows you. And if we were to shoot this shot, shot for real, whether it's using a hard rig pole to the car and a slow shutter speed, you're always then at the mercy of, you know, how much bounces in the shot. Is the car going to be sharp, whereas shooting this stuff static is. We get to control the reflections, the light on the car, you know, the speed, as I mentioned, the amount of dust, all that sort of stuff. [02:15:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Insane. Yeah. I wouldn't have guessed that much would go into that shot. Yeah. Uh, yeah, it's crazy. And Whereas the other shot, I was like, oh, that'll definitely have a lot of composite work in me, apparently. I have. I have no idea what I'm looking at. I love it. [02:15:28] Speaker C: Well, that's good. That. That means I'm doing it right. [02:15:31] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I. I can't tell what's. [02:15:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll take that as a compliment. I think. [02:15:35] Speaker B: I think that is. That is exactly as. The way you should take it is like I'm. I'm looking at it going, it's an amazing photo. And here's how I think it was created. And it was opposite to what I thought. [02:15:45] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [02:15:45] Speaker B: Insane. Like, these are just. Yeah, it's nuts. [02:15:49] Speaker C: And the same with that. Like, it was bucketing down with rain when we shot that. So that was shot in a. Yeah, it was shot in a gazebo, essentially. So we were under a gazebo. We'd already had the background plates shot and then we knew where the, you know, the key light was going to be coming from. So we light for that and then it's lit in parts. So this was literally lit with one broncolor flash. So we'd just use the softbox and then in post, you'd light essentially each part of the car. So you'd light the front driver's seat, the front passenger seat, the dashboard would then shoot plates of the infotainment screen. And then we'd chuck blacks over the car and shoot long exposures to get the ambient lighting. So it's quite technical, this sort of stuff, but it's, it's fun when, when you. You're thinking, you know, this is what I want the shot to look like. And then you piece it all together and it ends up looking exactly how you'd planned. So it's. It's a fun process. [02:16:46] Speaker A: Rewarding. [02:16:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That's insane. I'd love that. Yeah, I. I know you. You're trying to do more of it, but yeah, the, the quick behind the scenesy kind of even just a still of this thing sitting under a gazebo in the rain would be. Be so cool, you know, just to be like. But before, after, you know, it's. Yeah. That's amazing. Quick question here. If you have to go, just yell out because otherwise, no, I've got nowhere. [02:17:13] Speaker C: Nowhere to be. They've got me for the day. Perfect. [02:17:15] Speaker B: We'll stay on. This will be the longest live stream. Yeah. Shots by Jack. What's your best advice for controlling vehicle reflections? How many people do you require and what. What sort of tools are you using? [02:17:28] Speaker C: It depends on the scale for this sort of stuff. I mean, you could go out there as just a single shooter and absolutely nail it. My biggest advice with this with cars is, like I mentioned at the start of this is they're shiny. They're a big, big reflective orb. So location is probably the most important thing. It's location and then light. So time of day, what's around. And this is one of the things that we found over the years that's really difficult is we'd get location scouts to go out and look on the. These big commercial jobs for us. Excuse me, sorry. Doesn't have a water. [02:18:00] Speaker B: Go for it. [02:18:03] Speaker C: Where the location scouts would find this incredible location and send you photos of it. But you turn up on the day and you'd turn around and there'd be orange bunting from some construction right there. That you can't cover up or can't remove, and that reflects on the car. So I definitely say location is probably the best first step in terms of controlling the reflections on the car. And in terms of how many people. It depends what's. How far you want to go. I mean, if the light's incredible, you don't need anyone there. It can be just you shooting by yourself. But if the light isn't there and you need to sort of replicate it, that's when you're bringing out big negative fill to create horizon lines on the car or bounce in there to bounce in, you know, know, get the details on certain parts of the car. So it. Yeah, it's one of those variables that's tricky to give a single answer to. But, yeah, my best advice is just good location, good light. [02:18:59] Speaker B: So you spend a lot of time with layers in Photoshop, just piecing it all back together. [02:19:04] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. For those sorts of jobs, like, not every job is like that. Right. So some, Some. Some shoots, they want a very natural look. And, you know, we'll just go and make it look as clean as we can in camera. And then other jobs it'll be, you know, one. One shoot, we might be creating 50 to 70 images a day. And then other shoots, you'll be shooting two to three frames a day, and that's it. [02:19:31] Speaker B: How much of the Photoshop work on a shoot like that? Do you still do, or do you have someone that does all of that for you? [02:19:37] Speaker C: Now, it depends on the scale of the job and what other jobs we have directly after. So sometimes I'll be using. There's a couple of guys that we'll use, and Dan is one of them. I've got another guy who was from one of the groups, the Facebook groups that I spoke about and I've known for years, and he's a great guy who lives overseas. And then I'll jump on depending. But I mean, generally myself or Dan will manage the image if we're using someone externally. So it varies. It varies job to job, but I still love doing it as well. I think post production is such a big part of these big commercial images because there's so many things you pick up on set from the client in terms of conversations. So to brief someone would take a huge amount of time, and sometimes it's just quicker to jump in there and make sure those things are done. And other times we'll get someone externally to work on the initial part, and then I'll jump in, do the color grading, do the cleanups. That I want, change the things that I want. And I think it's. I think whatever, you know, for commercial photography, I think if you can understand the post and do it yourself, you learn how to shoot for it as well. So you learn the process. It's like video editing. I always say the best cinematographers are video editors because they understand the storyline, they understand the process, they understand the cutaway shots that are required, all that sort of stuff. [02:21:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So they'll get that stuff on location because they know that otherwise it's a pain in the ass when you don't have that. Yeah. Trying to piece exactly together. Yeah. [02:21:11] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:21:12] Speaker B: All right, I'm going to take a stab at this. This is either a single frame of exactly as it was shot, this photo, or it's a golf cart in a McDonald's car park. And then the rest of it was. What went into this shot? Tell me about it. [02:21:33] Speaker C: This was actually shot in situ in that building. The rays of light weren't there and the light in the ground wasn't there. So we actually went outside with a flash and flashed each window, essentially to try and get the light onto the ground. And then. Yeah. Walking around the car, lighting each panel of the car from the. [02:21:52] Speaker B: There. Okay. [02:21:54] Speaker C: Smoke. The smoke was. The smoke was there. So we did have a smoke machine on the day. But most of, you know, the haze and smoke was added in post. [02:22:04] Speaker B: Okay. But the background is. The background. [02:22:08] Speaker C: Yep, that's actually there. [02:22:10] Speaker B: It was parked. Okay. So when you say you lit the car, walked around lighting the car, are you using continuous light or flash to light the car? [02:22:18] Speaker C: It's a mix for this one from memory, it was just purely flash. But a lot of the time we'll actually use a combination of light painting and flash. It's literally one light on the light stand. Someone will walk around with it. We'll flash parts of the car to get the nice reflections to light up each panel and then composite that in post. It could be, like I said, a combination of flash and then light painting as well. Just depends on where we're shooting at, how much control we have over the location. [02:22:47] Speaker B: If you were to layer this together in the worst possible way, this car, so as in every time there's a reflection from a softbox or whatever, you put it in as opposed to leaving it out, I assume there would be. There'd be tons of reflections that you have to manage from the lighting. Is that. Is that how it works when you're saying piece it together, each panel and that kind of thing. Thing so if you were to just say, I'm just going to put everything in there that's bad, it would look like the worst car photo ever. [02:23:19] Speaker C: Absolutely. And, you know, light levels and things like that, we're adjusting in post after the fact as well. So we'll shoot, you know, the wheels correctly exposed with a nice large, soft, soft source. But then in post, you know, when putting it all together, you might think, well, at 100%, it, you know, it doesn't look natural. We're on the shadow side of the car. It should be down a little bit. So you'll then bring it down in post as well. So just by these sort of composite. [02:23:46] Speaker B: Shots, looks like just to taste, basically. [02:23:50] Speaker C: Exactly. [02:23:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:23:51] Speaker C: And that's. That's the interesting thing. When you hand these images off to someone else, their vision could be completely different to how you initially saw it and how you originally, you know, shot it. [02:24:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:24:04] Speaker B: It'S so interesting. Ding. Okay. Yeah. I. I honestly looked at this one for a second. I was like, I genuinely can't figure out if that background's fake or not. So I'm gonna bring that one up. What. Okay, let's. [02:24:15] Speaker A: This is. [02:24:16] Speaker B: This is a fun game. Before you have to go any. [02:24:19] Speaker C: Go the second. Second one in. Second, top left, second one in the key. Yeah. [02:24:27] Speaker B: This photo or one of the other. [02:24:29] Speaker C: Ones, that'll be a good one for you. What do you think's real? What do you think's fake? [02:24:35] Speaker A: Nothing. The tree. [02:24:37] Speaker B: I think I saw it behind the scenes of this or something. Well, you can't play. [02:24:40] Speaker C: There is. There is. There is a. Behind the scenes of this. There's a. So the. The timber house is not there. [02:24:48] Speaker B: Oh, it does look a little bit rendered, but I. I just can't tell. I couldn't tell for sure. Is the tree. This tree next to the car, Little one. Is that real or fake? [02:25:01] Speaker C: It's real, but I think from memory it was moved about a foot to the left because it was slightly overlapping the car. [02:25:07] Speaker B: Just move that over. Wow. What about the dude? Is the dude in this shot or is that. [02:25:13] Speaker C: Yeah, he was there. He was. He was shot and situ. [02:25:17] Speaker B: So is that doorway real? Like. Like this part is real, but this part is. Is fake or all this is fake? [02:25:26] Speaker C: Yeah, no, so the. The concrete structure is real with the bush on top of it, and then everything behind that is essentially fake. And from memory, the mountains and the water and everything as well. [02:25:37] Speaker B: Oh, wow. Oh, gosh. [02:25:39] Speaker C: And then this. This location you couldn't actually see, but in front of the car, there's probably a meter and a half and then there's a wall. [02:25:49] Speaker B: Really. [02:25:49] Speaker C: So the car. Yeah. We got to the location and we were thanking. There probably wasn't enough pre production done on this one, but actually getting the car in there was touch and go for a little bit of whether it would actually fit through the opening that we had there. [02:26:02] Speaker B: Oh, wow. So I just don't understand. Is it just, is it just years of practice? But how do you, like, how do you see a location like this to scout and then just know that you'll be able to make it look amazing afterwards? I just, I don't, I guess my brain just doesn't work like that. It's too literal. I would see it and be like, well, that's ugly. There's a wall there. You know, like, yeah. How do you, how do you know what is controllable and what is just like, this is too hard. We should just find somewhere else. [02:26:34] Speaker C: I think that's probably the experience of doing the post yourself and understanding the process as much as possible. But you know, look, there's, there's times, like, there's times where I turn up to set and go, well, we're, we're stuffed. This is going to look terrible. But then with post you're able to make it look, you know, pretty good. [02:26:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:26:53] Speaker C: And it's, it's always hard. These big commercial shoots, you know, like this is. I think there was about three days of post spent on just this image. [02:27:01] Speaker B: Wow. [02:27:02] Speaker C: So there's. Yeah, a lot of time. And yeah, we're shooting plates to extend left and right, up and down to cover all formats. [02:27:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So. Okay, quick question on that, that side of things. How much? So obviously with stills it's a little bit easier to be like, okay, we'll just make sure this can work for vertical, like social, all that sort of stuff for video. How much of the stuff that you do now is being partly guided by this? This has to be good for social as opposed to the traditional horizontal format, like 16 by 9 or whatever. [02:27:40] Speaker C: Probably 99%. Everything has to go to social now. Right. Which is hard, especially with lensing choices because I love using nice anamorphics which just give the image character and an interesting look. So it's tricky to always try and create a unique looking image with spherical lenses. [02:28:00] Speaker B: Yep. But that limits your ability to be able to crop a vertical and is that what you're talking about? Open gate. [02:28:07] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:28:07] Speaker B: With it, with a taller sensor is going to be useful for you in terms of multiple format outputs. [02:28:15] Speaker C: Absolutely, yeah. I'm interested to see when manufacturers start creating more square sensors or more even almost vertical orientated sensors that then can be cropped. I'm sure that's the next thing that that'll be happening. [02:28:28] Speaker B: Well, that, that Fujifilm. [02:28:31] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:28:31] Speaker B: Gfx return is 4x3 and 100 megapixels or whatever. I don't know what the rest of its specs are like for the sort of work that you do, but this just. The sensor aspect ratio is very interesting for that multiple. That's one of the things they're really pushing is the flexibility of formats from that sensor. [02:28:51] Speaker A: Yep. [02:28:53] Speaker B: Any other, any other weird ones on here that we should have a look at? Anything else that you've done that would very much surprise you? This. [02:29:03] Speaker C: I'm trying to think. [02:29:04] Speaker B: These people. These were actually dolphins. [02:29:11] Speaker C: The people. The people were there. The car was positioned in post. [02:29:15] Speaker B: Oops, damn. Went the wrong way. [02:29:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:29:19] Speaker B: Okay. So. So it can't, it can't drive on a beach. [02:29:23] Speaker C: We actually use pieces of timber to get the car onto the beach. So we laid down timber tracks and drove the car into position. And it was just a time thing. So I ended up, you know, getting in the tent to shoot. Shoot the talent and the tent itself and then to reposition the car and reposition the tent was going to take too long. So it was quicker for me to shoot a background plate of just walking up to the car and shooting the car and, you know, framing it, keeping in mind the rule of thirds and where I wanted to place the car in that opening in the tent. Tent, yeah. [02:29:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. [02:29:59] Speaker C: And then everything, everything else in here is just from straight out camera. [02:30:02] Speaker B: Just a. What's this camera strap? [02:30:07] Speaker C: So that's. That was my original film camera. That's the one that my dad. It's the first, first camera I shot on. It's an old Pentax. So I was going to say it. [02:30:15] Speaker B: Looks like one I've got on the wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy. So you just brought that along as a. As prop? [02:30:23] Speaker C: Yeah, yep. [02:30:25] Speaker B: Do you still shoot any film? [02:30:28] Speaker C: No, I was. I never really shot that much film. We learned quite a bit through TAFE and in school as well, year 12 and year 11. But yeah, I know there's. There's a lot of guys that love. Love shooting film and love to look and all that sort of stuff, but I feel like most of that can be achieved with digital nowadays. And I'm sort of. I guess. Yeah. Different in that way that I'm not. I don't Love the nostalgia, so much of that. And, you know, there's guys and yeah, some of the guys that work with us just love film, but I can't get excited about it. [02:31:03] Speaker A: What, what. Other than your commercial work, what. What do you get excited about with photography? Do you have personal projects that you pursue? Do you have a genre that's completely left of field compared to what you do professionally? Or is it just pure, pure work for you? [02:31:19] Speaker C: No, definitely. I still love shooting. If I'm going out, we're traveling somewhere with the family. I just love shooting the kids just as a keepsake for memories. I definitely don't do it enough and I wish I did it more. And it's always hard because work is treated as work. And all the cameras live here. And I always end up buying a camera, taking it home, and then thinking, I need it for that job next week I'll bring it in the office and then it gets left, you know, and you always wish it was back at home. But yeah, it's the personal projects that I'm trying to do more and more of. I mean, we're trying to at the moment put together like a YouTube little few episodes where myself, Dan and Lawrence, the three guys that work at Cube here, are gonna sort of have similar, I guess, rules and regulations. So, you know, the theme might be red. And we all go take that as our interpretation, whether it's talent or whether it's location or props, that sort of thing. And we show how each of us approach things differently and how creatively we think about things differently. I'm using that as a bit of a personal project. And then at the end, the idea is that we're going to have a big Christmas party and a showing of all the images. And then when we sell the images, each of us will have a choice of charity, where the money goes to. So I think it's. Yeah, there's definitely. I'd love shooting all the commercial stuff, but, yeah, I need to spend more time creating those personal projects. And this is sort of one. One way that we're trying to do it at the moment. [02:32:48] Speaker B: I love that. That's great. And someone. [02:32:51] Speaker C: I'll send you guys. Oh, I don't know if there'll be a winner. I think it'll just be, you know, everybody wins. Right. We'll invite you guys to the Christmas party and come along, have a big. [02:33:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And then we get to get the studio tour. Road trip. We're doing it. Tony said earlier on, he's like, yeah, get in. We're all going. So it's happening. We're going to come up there. You know what I was going to say, would it be great? Should we get a, the most. World's most professional critique of that car photo that you did that I helped you with? Probably not, no. Remember, Remember we put the, with the dog? Mm. Yeah. Have you got it handy? No. Do you have the photo? You took the photo. I mean, why would I have it? It's on our Justin and Jim website. It's on. It's under about me. Should I pull it up, Chris, or is this just. Is this silly? We took it. You know how I just got reminded of it because I was on your website and I was like, there's a curious lack of supercars on your website considering you are one of the world leading automotive photographers. Whereas if you, as you people are probably less and less successful in the industry, they've got more and more supercars in their portfolio. [02:34:05] Speaker C: Do you find that there's no money, there's no money in supercars. Right. [02:34:11] Speaker B: I just saw the, the Aventador on your, on your website and it reminded me of the. You. Yeah, I assumed that was probably the case that supercars, there's people lining up to take photos of them and there's not a lot of money in that side of things. [02:34:26] Speaker C: Yeah. If I could shoot supercars every day, I would. It'd be the dream, right? [02:34:30] Speaker B: Yeah. What's you got? Any particular. [02:34:32] Speaker C: Doesn't pay the bills, particular brands or. [02:34:35] Speaker B: Anything that you're, that you love? [02:34:39] Speaker C: I'm similar, similar with camera gear, with cars. Right. And the worst thing is with this industry is we get to see all the latest and greatest cars. So you become a terrible car snob really quickly. [02:34:53] Speaker B: Like Kia. I mean. No, Kia. Kia is amazing. I love Kia. [02:34:57] Speaker C: No, well, that's the thing. You'll jump in something and be like, oh, this is terrible. How much is it? Oh, it's $200,000. You know, you become, you become very picky with that sort of stuff. But look, there's so many cars out there from, you know, like a Toyota 86. That's just fun. You can slide around and it's semi affordable all the way up to, you know, dream car would be a nice Porsche 911 or something along those lines. [02:35:19] Speaker B: Do you, do you have a fancy car yourself or is it because you've got so much exposure to all these cars, you're kind of like, I don't need one of those at home. [02:35:27] Speaker C: You know, I still have, I still have fancy cars. Yeah, I can't. I can't help myself. I waste all my money on that. And camera gear, I mean. [02:35:37] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the love of it showing through. I assume someone that isn't in love with cars or in love with camera gear is going to have a tough time doing what you've done in your career because you got to love it to get to there to push that hard. [02:35:50] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [02:35:52] Speaker B: All right, critique us. Is the dog real? [02:35:58] Speaker C: Well, the dog's definitely real. This is pre AI, isn't it? [02:36:01] Speaker B: Yeah, pre AI. When did you do this? 2014. 20. I don't know. When. When did the Ventadors come out? It was pretty much brand new. Yeah. [02:36:12] Speaker C: Still such an epic looking car. [02:36:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [02:36:16] Speaker C: And one of the best sounding engines of all time. [02:36:20] Speaker B: Sounded cool when he was moving around in that because it was just an empty shed. Empty warehouse. It's just there air coming. Anyway that I was Jim's assistant and that's about the best. [02:36:31] Speaker C: An epic show luck. [02:36:33] Speaker B: Thank you. One frame, I think too. Well, yeah, we weren't. We're not very good stuff. No, yeah, no, just. Just trying to move. Move lights around so we didn't have any reflections, which is easier on a white car. [02:36:50] Speaker C: Hanging. Hanging expensive lights over a very expensive car is always nerve wracking too. [02:36:56] Speaker B: Yeah, true. And then trying to make that dog stay put. Yeah. Schnitzel. Anyway, let's talk about the highlight of our automotive career. [02:37:06] Speaker A: Nice. [02:37:07] Speaker B: Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, thanks. If you need any help with your, with your shoots, just yell out, you. [02:37:16] Speaker C: Know, always, always come. As I said, come drop us, guys. [02:37:21] Speaker B: Yeah, Downloading is it. We call it quick and dirty. It is quick and dirty. Yeah. We're definitely not finesses. No. What else? Anything else that we want to talk about? [02:37:33] Speaker A: No, I think. Chris, what. What have you got on the horizon? What's coming up for you? [02:37:40] Speaker C: As I mentioned, we've got that little YouTube thing and I'm just trying to shoot more behind the scenes in terms of projects coming up. We haven't really got anything. We're still talking about more personal projects that we want to do. There's nothing too exciting happening right now. We've just done a heap of commercial work. We've just done about three months of back to back work which has been absolutely hectic. But yeah, I'm excited for a week of nothing, to be honest. [02:38:07] Speaker B: Nothing. How does. So how does a year usually sort of work out for you guys within in terms of like. Yeah. How many big projects are there and then how Many, many smaller projects are there. How often is it that you just non stop, like you just said, for months and then have these big gaps and is that tough trying to balance out the financials of a business having. Having sort of huge gaps in between large projects? [02:38:35] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. The stress never stops. It's tricky. Like pre, pre Covid, I could have told you down to the month when we would be quiet, when we'd be busy and forecast it. Whereas now since, since COVID it's very difficult for us. You know, January used to be our quiet, quiet month except for every four years which seemed to line up with the cycles of launches with cars. So yeah, it's difficult, difficult now I find to, to track things down and then with spending and stuff, obviously you know, the cost of living so high at the moment that everybody's trying to pull back budgets wherever they can. So the work isn't as consistent as it, as it isn't. Especially once you get to the bigger commercial stuff, the bigger, big high end stuff isn't happening as often. So it's a hard answer to question. Sorry, hard question to answer. But yeah, it can be tricky when you know, it rains at pause, everything comes in all at once and you're getting pulled in three directions and but yeah, and it's. [02:39:32] Speaker B: Does it, does it feel like you need to say yes to all of those because you don't know what's going to happen, you know, for the six months after that. So you're like, well this is, this is going to be tough but we kind of need to take this work while we can get it. [02:39:43] Speaker C: And yeah, that's been the advantage of having Cube and expanding the team a bit is we're able to say yes to more things. Whereas back in the day I learned pretty quickly when you say yes to everything, you burn yourself out. [02:39:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:39:59] Speaker C: And yeah, that doesn't help anybody at the end of the day. [02:40:03] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And, and what about, so personal projects? What about long term plans for Cube? You know, have you got a sort of a bit of a vision for what you want to happen over the next three or five years? Different industries that you want to try and push into or different types of projects? [02:40:23] Speaker C: Yeah, look, I'm, I'm really enjoying the commercial stuff. It's just, it's good fun, it's creative. I love the process and I love. The biggest thing, like I mentioned before, is working with a good team. So being able to hand pick the team and have a team that you love working with day in, day out has Been. Yeah, it's like having a little family and just being able to hang out every day and talk about the stuff you love and enjoy. But, yeah, it's. It's interesting because, I mean, there's so many things that I want to do and I can actually do. I mean, we're building a roof, a rooftop studio at the moment, so we've got a nice, Nice car park above the. The studio here. And I think it'll. You know, technically it might be Australia's first outdoor studio where we can shoot cars and people and things like that. We can paint the ground and the walls, which would be exciting. So I'm excited to do that. But in terms of scale of the business, I'm loving, loving where it is now, because it feels like a family. It feels like we can give every client enough time and enough love that it doesn't feel just like another number. And, yeah, I think I enjoy that part the most. I don't. Yeah, there's no goals of becoming the biggest production company in the world or anything like that. It's just producing work that we're really proud of and keep doing what we love because at the end of the day, I think that shows in the work and I think it shows on set when you're with the client. And, yeah, the end goal really is just keep doing what we're doing and enjoy it. I mean, we're so lucky to be in this industry and doing what we're doing as it's. It's epic. [02:41:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think luck has much to do with it. I think it's hard work and a lot of years of. Of. Of pushing and driving yourself forward. But maybe a tiny. [02:42:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm only actually 20 years old, but I just look like this. [02:42:10] Speaker B: It's that kind of industry. Epic. I think that's probably a good note to leave it on. Oh, you guys got any other questions? [02:42:18] Speaker A: No, I'm good. I think we've covered everything. [02:42:21] Speaker C: Thanks, guys. Appreciate you having me on. [02:42:23] Speaker B: Thank you. A couple of you were worried about a live podcast. [02:42:27] Speaker A: Nailed it. Absolutely nailed it. But look, on that note, we will wrap. First and foremost, thank you, Chris, for your time and your insight and, yeah, drawing back the curtain on what goes on in this sort of industry, in this genre, I think that the more people, creative people, see what's possible, the more that they aspire to create, which is amazing, which is part of the reason why we do what we do. And on that note, this is the Camera Life podcast. So if you're watching along and you're new to the channel, please give us a like it helps out. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and make sure you tickle the bell icon so that you get notifications. We do two shows a week week every Thursday morning, 9am Australian Eastern Standard time and every can't remember what it is now Monday, Monday evening, 7.30pm Australian time but if you subscribe and hit the bell you'll get notifications in your time zone. But yeah, once again Chris, thank you so much for your time today, very generous time and for sharing your story with us. It's been incredibly inspirational. [02:43:35] Speaker C: Hey, thanks, thanks for having us on and thanks for doing this sort of stuff. I like like I said, I think this, this is the sort of stuff when I was younger and coming into this industry that was, was exciting being able to, you know, hear how everyone else got into the industry, hear insights. That sort of stuff is exciting. So yeah, thanks for having us on and Shameless plug. If you guys want to see more of our behind the scenes, come follow us on socials and yeah and shoot us a message if you ever have questions. More than happy to give you insights. [02:44:01] Speaker B: Or go to Cube Productions which is Q U B e Productions on YouTube and subscribe. First of all, subscribe and then watch the, the behind the scenes episodes of the Red Bull shoot because they're hilarious and also awesome. [02:44:17] Speaker A: Amazing. [02:44:18] Speaker B: And then wait for the, wait for this new series to come out of you guys competing, I mean collaborating on different themes, seeing who's the best photographer. Yeah, get over there and check it out. It's very, very cool. [02:44:31] Speaker A: So we'll also put the links down in the comments. Yeah, we'll throw them down in the, in the description so everyone can check it out there. I think we'll wrap. Chris, thank you once again, absolute delight to meet you and greater delight to hear your journey. Thanks Jim, for joining. Justin, thanks. Always good to see you. [02:44:51] Speaker C: Thanks guys. [02:44:52] Speaker A: And we might just say goodbye to some people in the chat and roll the music and go from there, boss. [02:44:57] Speaker B: Done. Thank you. Philip Johnson. Thank you. He says thanks Chris and thanks guys. Tony, thanks for hanging out. Hope you've been saving the lives of some fridges today while listening. And shots by Jack. Hopefully you got something out of it. You'll probably, I'm sure get in touch with Chris and hassle him, see if he can assist on a shoot. Stuart Lyle, Robert Varner, Roy Bixby. Oh, Samantha, Samantha Olson was here. She says don't forget to hit the like button. I agree. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, everyone. We'll catch you guys in the next one. Cheers. Thanks, guys. [02:45:29] Speaker C: Thanks, guys. See, guys, You.