[00:00:25] Speaker A: Well, good morning everybody and welcome back to the Camera Life podcast proudly brought to you by Lucky straps. It is the 2nd of October. October, September. Just poof, it's gone disappeared. Blink of an eye. This is episode 121 of the camera Life podcast. And as I said, proudly brought to you by Lucky Straps. We are Lucky Straps and we make premium handmade Aussie made leather camera straps in Bendigo, Victoria. And yeah, check it out. Head to Luckystraps.com we can send you a strap anywhere in the world. Almost small disclaimer.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Almost.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: But that's enough about that. This is the Camera Live podcast. It is Thursday morning here and of course that means we are interviewing another amazing photography guest. In this case, we are re interviewing Andrew Chapman. G' day Andrew. Welcome back to the show. It is an absolute pleasure and honor to have you back on.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: How you going, Greg? Justin, you good? I've got, I've got to say it's a bit of a hard act to follow after Michael Coyne last week.
[00:01:25] Speaker C: Oh, non crazy.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: That was it. That was a great episode.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Pretty phenomenal contribution to our, to our craft. But you know, you yourself have got some, got some pretty decent cred behind you, so.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: We're going to unpack more of that today, but how are you doing, Justin?
[00:01:44] Speaker C: I'm great. I've got me coffee, I'm ready to go. Everything's working this morning, so it's good. The chat's here. We're a couple of minutes late, but that's good. It gives the chat a chance to, to get amongst each other and throw rocks at us for being late.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Of course we had a podcast last night, so we're, we haven't left our seats.
[00:02:01] Speaker C: No, we're just back to back, back to back to back.
For those that, for the, those that sort of aren't familiar with Andrew Chapman, which will probably be in one person maybe for the one person that doesn't know who you are, Andrew. Should we give them a quick rundown before I go through the chat?
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it. Are you going to give the rundown, Justin?
[00:02:21] Speaker C: I think you should do it.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Yeah, gone.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: I'm a bloke who's been taking photos for 55 years. I've made a lot of mistakes to get where I am. How's that for short summation?
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Perfect. Absolutely perfect. You've just, you've just nailed it, Andrew.
Should we say good morning to the chat and then we're going to dig into some of Andrew's stories? And fear not everybody, Andrew has, you know, 55 years worth of props he can share with us, gear bits and pieces. And we're also here to talk about Andrew's latest book. Now this is book number 10 for you.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: I think it's around about that. I lose track around about that.
[00:02:59] Speaker C: Yeah, once you get double digits there's.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Quite a lot of.
In fact, October's a double, a double book month because I've done a number of joint photographic books on the Mallee Wimmera and now we're launching the Western District on the 24th of October. So I've got two book book launches this month. But Phil, the frame is the main one.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Just two. Just two. All right, let's say good morning to some people and then we're going to unpack a little bit more of and only probably a little bit in the time we had, but a bit more of Andrew's story.
[00:03:35] Speaker C: Philip Johnson, good morning. John Pickett is here. Lisa Leach, always.
David Mascara, good to see you.
Paul Noel Butcher, Rodney Nicholson, ltk and yeah, Philip Johnson. Only feels like yesterday. Wait, it was. Yeah. Half the people in the chat were here with us last night until about 10pm so good on you for, for rocking up again this morning.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Yeah. But if you, if you didn't join us last night and you're curious as to what we talked about, we're covering off basically we had a bright festival of photography which is coming up not this weekend but the one after. It's fast approaching and we're going to be there of course as the camera life and as lucky straps.
But yeah, last night we had a bit of a packing Q A party with Nick Fletcher and Matt Crummons talking about the Bright festival.
If you're going and you haven't seen that, jump on and watch it. And if you're curious to find out more about bfop, you can watch it as well. It's a lot of fun was had last night.
[00:04:30] Speaker C: It was great fun and that's what a great place.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: What a great place Bright is too.
[00:04:35] Speaker C: Oh, I know, it's beautiful.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, yeah.
[00:04:37] Speaker C: Perfect spot for me for you know, 550 photographers to get together and, and all rock around with their cameras and take pretty.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Should be able to find something to photograph up there.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Shouldn't be.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's actually turn to photographing our feet.
[00:04:52] Speaker C: But you know, it's, it's a shame because it's on the same weekend as your fill the frame book launch.
So otherwise we get there.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: What can I Say, what can I say?
[00:05:03] Speaker A: We'll be there with you in spirit, Andrew. Absolutely.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: That's. That's fine.
I'll cry myself to sleep for a week, but, you know, I will get over it. Okay.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: Okay, good. Good to hear. We're glad that you're emotionally stable.
All right, well, let's.
Let's unpack a little.
Where do we want to start? Let's.
What do you think, boss?
[00:05:27] Speaker C: Well, I was just going to say any as well. So. So Andrew's been on the podcast before in the lead up to an exhibition. It was a couple of months ago, but we mainly spoke about.
Yeah. The specifics around that exhibition and that work. So this is. This interview is really the chance for us to like to talk about everything, the entire journey and go every which way. So we should start from the beginning, I guess.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Greg.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: All right, let's roll back the clock, Andrew, if it isn't too much of a mental stretch for you, let's go back to the early, early days for you and talk about what.
What were the catalyst moments or the inspirations or the people that motivated you to take up photography?
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Well, it really goes back to high school days, to my days at Caulfield High School in the late 1960s.
You know, I wasn't an overly applied student. I wasn't. I wasn't a rat bag or I didn't get into trouble, but I just wasn't not saying. I wasn't academically brought. I wasn't academically interested. I was a little bit interested in history.
I was a little bit interested in art and, and to a degree, English, but I never applied myself. I wasn't good in anything. I wasn't good at playing sport.
I love music. I mean, the 60s was still happening and, you know, Hendrix and Cream, and I started to. I discovered my spiritual mentor, Bob Dylan in 1969, and. And all sorts of things that I told myself I wasn't going to ever smoke and then started smoking a year later. You know, that. That sort of period. But, well, back.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Back then, cigarettes were healthy.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: Sort of. Sort of healthy. Yeah.
But I had a friend at school. I still have this friend, Brian Paper. He's a painter and Melbourne artist now. Brian was good at everything. You know, he's good at painting, he was good at drawing, cartooning, architecture, all sorts of things. He could have done anything. But he was also good at photography and he had a camera and he let me take some photographs with it. And I took a couple of photographs and they came out. You know, I can't Even remember what I shot, to tell the truth. But it was something I could do. And it's something that just sort of what I call a light bulb moment.
That period of time when something happens to you that switches on the light bulb and there you go. And that's what happened to me.
You know, I've met people throughout life who've never found what fires them up, what burns inside. And I always kind of feel a little bit sad about that, but other people I know, you know, it's, it's a bit like that Carlton and United at. Oh, you know, you can get it milking a cow.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: Wow, that's a flashback.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: I've got it now.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: But, you know, it just comes upon people and, you know, you'd both know and, and you yourself are probably very passionate about photography. You wouldn't have started a podcast if you, you weren't passionate about it. And it fires your buttons. And it fires my buttons and, you know, 55 years later, it's still firing my buttons. Like, you know, I've met people who've, I've met lots of much more talented photographers than me who've, who've just been naturally good at it. And I go, oh, how come I can't be naturally that brilliant? You know, But a lot of them tend to sort of get burnt, boot out, like they leave it. And, you know, I jokingly said to Noel Butcher, who's listening in there, hello. No, that, you know, he, he suggested the title Fill the Frame to me. And I, I'd been playing around with a couple of others. I thought Slow Starter might have been a good title for the book. And then, then there's another, you know, not dead yet, which my, my, my designer Anna Wolf really likes. And I kind of pretty, pretty keen on that. But, you know, I aren't dead. I ain't dead yet, but I'm working on it, you know.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Oh, that's, that's fascinating. I just need to put, provide some clarity. I feel like we need a, like a ticker tape thing that explains Australian slang and colloquialisms for our international viewers. But a rat bag is someone who mucked around, someone who was always causing trouble, you know, giving the teacher grief in school or, or classmates. So that, that's what a rat bag is. In case you're wondering.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: I wasn't a rat bag like that.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: No, no, you weren't.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: I know also.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Damn, it's recorded.
But, and, and so do you recall, you know, that you talked about that light bulb moment I call it the Oprah aha moment.
But do you remember kind of what, what was next for you? Was it, was there this kind of urge to get your own camera?
[00:10:55] Speaker B: Well, yeah, there was an urge. I might mention that Brian also had a dark room.
And back in those days, learning photography, you know, doing the, the backside of it, the, the developing and processing was as important as the, the front end of taking the photos. So, you know, I learned to do some basic exposures and, and did some prints. And there's, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm assuming you guys have been into the dark room, done a bit of that work, but there's nothing like the first print you ever do, and you put it into the developer tray and you see an image appear out of nowhere.
And it's such a magic experience, you know.
And, you know, this is probably a terrible analogy, but it reminds me of somebody talking about being a heroin addict and taking a shot of heroin, and they're forever chasing that forever first hit.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: You know, they're forever trying to replicate that first experience. And you know, printing, printing up in a developing tray, it's just so magic. You know, you sit there and, you know, what can I say? Yeah, I've done a lot of that a lot of time. And most photographers did a lot of time. Most commercial photographers who had a business were doing a lot of darker in time because a lot of their income source came from the printing and the developing of negatives and films. Sure, you could get it done. But, you know, one of the reasons black and white photography was so dominant over color for so many years is that photographers had access to the control of the process via the dark room, selecting contrast, lightning and darkening prints, that sort of thing. Whereas the color process, you put the film in, you got the results back, whether that be prints or whether that be color slides. Yeah, you know, transparencies. What you what what what what? Your shot is what you got. And it was really only with the advent of photoshop in the 90s that you started to have some control over that process, I guess.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
Prop number one, guys. Here we go. Oh, please.
So I'd learned photography. You know, dad had a camera, and here it is.
That's a Zeiss Netax with a 4.5 lens, 75 mil. 4.5. And shutter speeds, I think a 25th to a 400th. It's, it's not, not even got slow shutter speeds. But that was the first camera I started taking photos with. And, you know, I did such Classics as a couple of the girls from school to impress them and things like that.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: That camera looks brand new. It looks like it's in such great condition.
[00:14:15] Speaker C: Is that the camera that is the camp, yeah. You haven't rebought one later on?
[00:14:20] Speaker B: No, no, no, that was similar. The actual camera, in fact. I gave it, I, I decided at one stage I didn't need it and I gave it to my, my nephew Angus who was kind of interested in very old things and it, you know, it's his granddad's camera, you know, so I thought, you know, and then I, I got a bit nostalgic for it and I got it back and I've, I've, I put a roll of 120 film through @ Christmas and there's another half roll and I lost interest in the half roll's been sitting there for six months, so.
Well, I didn't lose interest. I've been consumed by doing the book really. Full frame has taken up that time but I want to get back to that and just shooting with that. So, yeah, it's a lovely little machine. There's actually one photo in the book of a guy on a bicycle crossing.
It's a really old early 70s shot and he's, he, he's got an old felt hat and he's got his bike with the handlebars up, the racing bars up and he's standing in the, in the street in Ackland street in St Kilda and it's just got this other world feel about it. It's a beautiful camera.
So I'm hoping to do something significant with it this year.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Well, no doubt you will. I just want to, I just want to comment on, you know, that whole dark room process. I, I like you. I was trained in film and in, I went to art school after high school. I didn't do photography in high school. I don't think our high school even offered it, but went to an art school. It was more like a year 13 folio prep and, and like you, I had a mate who are, you know, bummed around with and we, we, we home brewed beer and we went out on the weekends with our cameras and, and I, I think a big part of that experience for me was, was having to try to control the unknown.
You know, you were always second guessing yourself that, oh gosh, I hope I haven't exposed this film while I'm loading it onto a canister. And you know, all the way through the process of shooting and then, you know, developing your images, there was so much Unknown. But that, that was the. That was the joy of film photography for me was working out how to control the unknown.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: You know, how to get, you know, every week, every day. Shooting as a commercial photographer, you had that problem, you know. Yeah, have I. You know, have I. Have I made any mistakes? Did I get this right? Is the light reading right?
You know, did I put the film in the camera right? And you develop, I guess you develop strategies as a photographer for that to, you know, for example, you know, you're loading your nick on and you put the roll of film and you get it. You wind it once and then you back up the. The rewind lever till it's. It's tensioned, put your finger on it, wind on a couple of frames, and you can feel the film traveling across. Because every photographer could tell you about the time they put a roll of film in the camera and it didn't take and they didn't get any photographs and those. So you develop those sort of strategies.
And then, you know, shooting color transparency or slide film, as a lot of people know, that was another thing where exposure had to be critical and you had to learn to shoot accurately and that. And when we moved. I'm probably jumping ahead a little bit here, but when we moved into doing magazine work, you know, I can remember shooting for Time magazine and shooting color transparency on news jobs, and then all the newspaper photographers be there and they're all shooting for Tri X 400, sometimes pushed to 800-1600.
The. The rule with color transparency is you very Rarely went beyond 100. You're often 200 and stuff. I remember age photographer, really wonderful photographer, Michael Rayner, who lives up at Castlemaine. And Michael was talking one day about shooting the new prime minister walking down a corridor and sword Parliament Hess and he's shooting 100 ISO and he said, all the other guys are fanging. He said he could hardly take a frame because he was. I don't know what he was on. He was probably down at a 15th or an eighth of a second.
And so you had to learn to survive in those sort of conditions as a transparency shooter on assignment, you know, develop techniques like, you know, you'd run a slow shutter speed, but you'd pop a flash on and fill the flash in at about half a stop underexposed. So you get this flash blur look and yeah, different things like that.
That was quite a learning curve. But as I should. I should hook back to the. The black and white. It was all black and white there. We. That we learned about you Know that. That we cut our teeth on. And I used to have a saying, you know, black and white is the essence of photography. It's like.
It's a photograph of that makeup on it.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: And that's. That's how I used to feel it. It still is.
[00:19:51] Speaker C: I like that.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: It's still my soulmate, black and white. And, you know, it's funny.
I just picked out my favorite photos and, you know, probably two thirds of the book's black and white, maybe three quarters, because it just.
It gets me right here, as the saying used to go. It does.
And, you know, they're the photos I want to be remembered by.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: Yep.
That's a fair call.
That's a fair call.
[00:20:24] Speaker C: There's definitely something about it.
I gravitate towards it, for sure.
And I'll often try.
Try the image in color and then go back to black and white. And I just.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:20:35] Speaker C: I just prefer. I've been printing stuff on my new. My new printer over the last week, and yet all of the photos, except one are in black and white. And I'm like, this printer's got 13 color inks in it. I should be, you know, seeing the most colorful photos that I can. I can find in my catalog. But all the ones I wanted to print, they're all black and white.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Well, it's weird. I think if you go over probably the famous photographs. Okay, sure. Color wasn't around in the early days, but still, so many of them are black and white, you know, and you watch any TV program, you know, situation comedy or series or whatever, and you look inside the people's apartments, what's on the walls? Black and white photographs. Yeah, you know, it's. I don't think people notice it, but.
Yeah, that's. That's what the designers. The visual designers for the sets and that tend to go for.
[00:21:30] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. Well, I'm surrounded. I. I can't really. I don't know. This might be dangerous on a video, but I'll. I'll do a loop here.
There's a beautiful. Oh, that's one of my photos. But that one there, that's a beautiful. That's. That's my. That's John Golling's photograph of Bob Dylan arriving at Essendon Airport, and. Oh, wow, love Bob Dylan so much. And that's a great photo of John's. And that brings me great happiness.
There's photos in the corner.
Black and white, Black and white. There are no color photos in this room. Yeah, I'm afraid to Say I've got a painting over in the back corner that's color, but that's another thing.
It's very messy in my office.
[00:22:22] Speaker C: It's better than mine.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: I get. Well, I get to the point where I go, do I clean up the office or do I turn on the. And play with some photographs? And playing with photographs always kind of wins.
[00:22:34] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can wait as long as you got a trail, a clear trail from the door to your chair. But at the moment I actually don't even have that. I've got boxes of podcast equipment that have been unboxed just all over the floor. So I can't even.
I can't even get in at the moment.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Oh, you'll need your landing to bring you another meal soon.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: I'm not a man collector. I remember, you know, people who collect things. And I remember a story about a bloke who once, he couldn't even throw out a newspaper. And he lived in the terrace house and the, the, the, the corridor, the Terrace house was lined with newspapers stacked to the ceiling of both sides because he could be. And one day he was walking down there and the newspapers collapsed and killed him. He buried him under the.
He died under a. You know, so I haven't got to that stage yet.
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. That's good.
[00:23:27] Speaker C: Stay one step back from that.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
Probably be very easy to slip into.
[00:23:32] Speaker C: That sort of thing, you know, especially with, with cameras. Imagine.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Well, well, talking about that. So we're going back to the early 70s and I have got another camera to show you from, from that period. And my brother Chris, my dear departed brother, who was also dad. Dad and my brother Chris were into photography before I was even interested, funnily enough.
But he was doing quite a bit of it in the early 70s. And he picked up this little classic Leica.
Oh, Trading Post.
It came with this two lens and a 135 mil lens. $40.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: Oh, that's crazy.
And just, just to clarify something. Sorry, angel, just jump in to clarify something. For those that aren't aware, the Trading Post was pre Internet. It was a newspaper, a print newspaper. It was the equivalent of ebay.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: But ebay or Facebook Marketplace.
[00:24:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, in paper form. And you know, you used to have to look at the ads, ring the person, or just go around to the property where they've listed and have a chat and hand over cash.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: You used to have to go to the news agents very early on a Thursday morning.
[00:24:52] Speaker C: Yes, yes, that's right.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: I used to do a paper Round and used to have to deliver it.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: I used to go and get it and then I would highlight all the potential motorbikes. You know, 80, 80cc motorbikes. Because I was a kid and I was like, oh, I'd love to go. Because I had a pee wee. I'd love to get an ADCC motorbike. So I'd highlight them all and then I'd show my dad and he'd look at him and he'd go, narrow. Warren, that's on the other side of the planet. We're not going down there.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: He didn't go. Tell him, tell him he's dreaming.
[00:25:25] Speaker C: We didn't get that far.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: Well, have a listen to this. Hang on. Listen in.
Hanging. Ever wounded on.
Still just fires beautifully.
Can you hear that sound? Is that coming through the mic? Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:41] Speaker C: Do it again.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: That camera was designed in 1936 and I could still go out. The lens is a little bit soft, I've got to say. It had a 50 mil collapsible linseed that you screw it and just push it back in. So that was the sort of shape of it in and then you pull the lens out, quarter turn and it's like that. And you know, very easy to use. Had a range finder. It's very simple. And that philosophy was really the basis of modern 35 mil photography. This, this model 3A, there was one before it, but that's what set 35 mil photography on its trajectory. And that's what created probably modern photojournalism, I think, that ability to photograph things in the moment.
Yep, it's pretty important camera.
[00:26:39] Speaker C: So have you looked up, have you looked up what that thing's worth these days?
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Funnily enough, if you've got that, they, they had screw mount lenses and most of the screw mount. You can buy a screw mount Leica like that for six or seven hundred dollars. It's not overly expensive and never lose value. It's a nice, it's a nice little thing to have. It's the M series which came out with the bayonet lenses in the 1950s that became very sought after. Very. You know, they go.
The price just jumps once you get into an M series Leica to a couple of thousand dollars for a basic, basic one these days.
And they're beautiful cameras and stuff.
[00:27:23] Speaker C: Yeah, but Glenn Lavender says. Yeah, but $40 in the 70s is like a small house in too rak now.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: Yeah, 40 bucks for a Leica in 1970 or so. It was still a pretty good buy. Yeah.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Indeed.
[00:27:42] Speaker C: I just want to, I just want.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: To.
[00:27:46] Speaker C: Zero in a little bit on, on a couple of things that you said before because there's a couple of comments that, that are relevant. Lisa Leach, who's a listener of the show and sends in her photos. She's only been shooting for 12 months. It was taking great images. And she says those of us learning in the digital era could be considered blessed, but the problem solving and experimentation of film must have provided immense learning and understanding of the craft. Yeah, and I, I wanted to ask you about that and, and what you think, because also Noel said he doesn't agree with you much, but you're right about the print coming up in the developing tray.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: I love the shade you throw at each other.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, we're old mates, I've got to say. You know, he's not just. Yeah, we, we, we hang a lot of. In each other.
Yeah, Mine's usually better than his mind.
[00:28:36] Speaker C: Having said that, Rodney Nicholson also says magic moment. So what I want to ask about, like what, what do you think today, people getting into the craft today, what are they missing? And is, is there a way that you can still get some of those, those feelings and that excitement in the digital era?
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Well, as I said, you used to have to shoot and hope you got it right, you know, so there was a bigger discipline in getting things right. I mean, today you can shoot and you can just review straight away. You can flip the camera down and go, oh, yeah, that's good, fine. You know, and you know, you've got it in the bag. I mean, it's pretty hard to make a mistake.
Having said that, mistakes still happen, but, you know, it's pretty hard to get something wrong or to know you haven't got it right.
Black and white or film, film things, you, you often could get it wrong. You could have, you could be shooting a job and you've forgotten to. You're shooting some flash and somehow you've bumped your shutter speed up too fast and you're getting half, half the frame exposed and half unexposed because your flash sync's not working. Or there's also a multitude of things could happen that you think you're getting right.
So there was a lot more pressure there, a lot more thinking it out.
But when digital came upon us, it was also a great time. And personally, this is how I found it, that you could review your mistakes very quickly. And there was an accelerated learning curve at that point, particularly in color and light and, and what light was doing to, to things.
And now that's gone a step further with mirrorless cameras, I guess. So, you know, you're seeing in the frame exactly what you should be seeing on your monitor. You kind of know it's all there. It's not like shooting on a, a Canon 5D Mark II or whatever and then looking at the back, it's just not the same. If mirrorless is a totally different.
And you can shoot pretty cleanly and pretty fast with knowing that you've, you've got it in the bag. Yeah, but, you know, I can remember photographing heroin dealers on Smith street in Melbourne. Smith street, for people who don't know was is in Melbourne. It was. Had a very heavy heroin use problem in the late 1990s and I was shooting, shooting for Time magazine. And you know, you go around behind shops and there were just a sea of needles on the ground and, you know, you couldn't even walk in there. And it was so epidemic. But I got into a car with.
I met a guy who was a heroin dealer.
I knew he was. I could work it out.
Anyway, he said, he said, do you want to, do you want to come scoring with me? He said, you know, pay me 40 bucks, you can come scoring with me and that. And I said, no, mate. I said, we can't ethically pay to do that. And so we let it go at that. And the next morning I'm down on Smith street and he comes up and says, ah, come on, come on with us. We're going to go and score some smack from our mate up in, in Richmond and then go and cut it up and shoot up into our nec.
So, yeah, okay, I'll be in that.
I jumped in the back of the car, had a young, young female journalist with me at the time and we went off to Richmond. We weren't allowed to photograph the guy who's scoring from. But then we went to Abbotsford and he's holding up, I'm in the back of the car, he's holding up this little balloon of heroin and he's holding it up and he goes, oh.
And I said, what's the problem? He said, there's a police car behind us.
Oh, unfortunately, fortunately, the police obviously worrying about their morning cup of coffee and where they're going to buy it from, they didn't bother us. But it would have been kind of an interesting scenario to get busted for heroin use. And Abbott. Anyway, we went around to the, the back of a block of flats in Collingwood. They, these guys were, you know, they're subsistence users. You know, they're dealing. They were heroin dealers, so they would buy some, they would sell enough to pay for the deal and they'd use the rest. And they were shooting up. I can't remember exactly. It's like three or four times the normal street dose. And they were injecting into their necks.
And I sat in the back of this car.
The light was perfect and I just had to lift the camera and take the photo. It was amazing. And I got this quite, quite dramatic shot.
And I can remember going back to the dark room. Ah, that's from the series. You've got it there. And I can remember going back to the. The. That's the shot I'm talking about there. I mean, just look at the. I mean, from a light perspective, it's just perfect lighting.
[00:34:14] Speaker C: It's just beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Really, really well. And this time I did. But I can remember shooting that and I knew damn well I had the shot that was a killer shot.
And I can remember going back to.
I used to work, do some use the dark room at my friends. Three photographers, Punch Hawks, Melbourne legend David Johns and Michael Silver, who now runs Magnet Galleries. And they had a dark room in Fitzroy at this studio. And I could remember going around there and processing the film and just sweating on whether I got it right and then pulling, pulling the negatives out and looking at them and knowing I had it right. And I was so. I was under so much pressure with this shoot. I did a little jig in the dark room. I was so happy to get it and I got that shot and I thought that was going to be a great cover of Time magazine. But unfortunately it didn't run as the COVID I think it was too confrontational.
But, you know, to me it was the shot, you know, and still is the shot. You know, even going back to the very early days of photography, when a shot's a real keeper, I've always.
I've almost always immediately known that a shot is, is. Is a real keeper.
Other times you're not so sure. But, but there are certain shots you just know, and that's, that's one in one vacation point.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: And I think that, you know, that comes back to that, that magic that we talked about earlier when, you know, you talked about developing your first print and just seeing it appear and it's detail and emotion and, you know, light and shadow and all of these things that, you know, now we get the instant result and that's fine. It's just how technology has pushed us into newer and faster ways of doing the craft.
But I, I do recall that, that kind of moment of, I think that's the shot. But then you still didn't know because you could have rolled the film onto the cartridge poorly, you. There could have been light leak because, you know, we're using school cameras. I didn't know how good they were. It was so much unknown still.
But you had to trust in your skills, you had to trust in your process, that you did keep the, the negative in the dark, that you, you know, you know the film is loaded correctly. You know, you go through these mental checklists as you're doing it.
That, and I don't know that it's a shame that we can't do that today. It's just different.
And obviously people can go back and, you know, pick up cameras and shoot film. It's just an interesting change of observation of how our craft has changed so much in a relatively short time.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: I remember.
I remember my mentor and photographer, great photographer, John Cato. I don't know if you've known about John, but John's father, Jack, was one of the. He was the. The Collins street photographer in Melbourne in the 1930s. And John learned from his father and he worked in a studio with the famous fashion photographer Apple Smith.
And John was a great landscape photographer. And towards the end of his life, I was. I was making a documentary on him with David Callow. And, you know, John said, you know, I think the best of photography finished in about 1989.
That was his opinion. He just felt that everything that had been done had been done. Now, he didn't. He didn't.
Well, he did get to see. He did get to see digital come in, but, you know, that was his feeling. Everything had been done had been done.
I don't think that's necessarily true and I don't think that's a reason not to take photographs, particularly documentary photographs, because the nature of documentary photographs is to record history, record the way we are. I mean, you know, you look at a photo of a person walking around with the new mobile phone, the Motorola Brick, in the. In the late 1980s, and you look at it today and you go, holy, holy moly. You know? Yeah.
And, you know, history changes. History starts from the moment you take the photograph.
[00:38:52] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: The very second.
And, you know, it's. It's the past drifting away.
Yeah, it's just. It's just moving slowly away from. From you the second you take that photo. And, you know, it's kind of interesting to photograph all sorts of things.
You know, there Are so many different photographers. You know, why not bring to mind. I haven't met Warren, but Warren Kirk. Do you know the westographer Warren Kirk? No. You should look up this guy. He's amazing. A Melbourne photographer. He's done a couple of books, Westography, and I think he's doing one on, you know, country towns and stuff, but he just photographs the.
He photographs houses, he photographs people. He photographs. He'll do sets of photos, like three photos in a row of a speedboat with a tarpon. A tarp over outside of here. Different. Different speedboats or three combies, three red cars, letterboxes. He. And then he does interiors and he does portraits. Go and have a look at his work. It's very simple is not the right word because it's very complex, his work, and he's very, very good at it.
But there's lots of people doing lots of great projects like that in documentary photography.
I personally think reality is as good as it gets. You kind of don't need to go any further than reality.
It's just. It's. It's so interesting. It's hyper interesting.
[00:40:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:35] Speaker C: What do you think?
In my mind, and I could be wrong. So I'd like you to. To explain to me, because you've got a lot broader knowledge base on photography than me is. But it feels like the further and further we go back, the more that it was relied on the photographer, the professional or amateur photographer to document history, the further you go back.
No one had cameras other than the professional or the, you know, the passionate hobbyist.
You know, you go further and then. And then, you know, the vox brownie came out and leicas come out, and more and more 35 millimeter cameras became available to the public to take happy snaps.
And so as technology developed, the photographer's role to document history became more. It was less solely on them and more they became the artists that documented history. But. But there was also just random public documenting history as well, because they were there at the time and they had a camera with them. And then that's. That's accelerated like this with phones to the point where now everyone, everyone on the planet basically has a camera with them all the time to document history when something happens.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: So.
[00:42:03] Speaker C: So I'm often thinking like, what is the role of the photographer now and into the future when it comes to documenting history?
[00:42:14] Speaker A: It's a good question.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: Well, what's the role? The role is to keep doing it and to keep, you know, photographing what they're interested in doing it in as well. As they can.
Yes. I mean, I don't know how historian will cut through the visual clutter and, and how they'll cut through that visual clutter in 100 years time.
If we're all still here, I won't be.
You guys will probably be here in 100 years.
[00:42:47] Speaker C: Our heads will be floating in, you.
[00:42:49] Speaker B: Know, what are they going to. Yeah, what are they going to find that's interesting? You know, there is so much to photograph.
It's up to individuals to, I guess, who are interested in being documentary photographers to find the subjects that turn them on and, and, and, and to chase them down and to do not just one good photograph, but a series. I remember photographer Carolyn John saying to me once that you needed to have a series of photos, you know, and, and there's a lot of truth in that. Now everybody can take a good photograph, but go and take 20 good photos on the same subject and, and all of a sudden you, you know, you're taxing yourself. And I think, you know, I guess the early, early projects I fell into was Australian politics. Most people stick their hand down their throat at these days, but Australian politics because I was born of that generation, that, that Vietnam War generation. We didn't want to go to Vietnam. We protested on the streets and, and then Whitlam came in and then Whitlam was thrown out by the Liberals and the governor general in 75.
And it was a very political generation.
So I was naturally interested in politics from a very early age.
I had a girlfriend at college, I went to Perrine College, I studied photography there in the 70s. And my girlfriend at the time had a, her parents had a property and we went up to photograph sharing. One day I walked into a shed, I took some photos and you know, here I am 55 years later, still walking into sheds, not 50 years later, still taking photographs. You know, you think I would have got it right by now, but I haven't.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: I don't think any of us ever get it truly 100% right. And I think that's the joy of the process is that we're always pursuing that little bit of difference, that little edge.
[00:44:56] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's important to have more than one project going if you're a documentary photographer.
You know, I've been doing power stations and I've been doing transplants, organ transplants. I mean, the day's going to come when, when deceased organ donor transplants don't happen, for example. And you know, you're going to show a photo graph to a kid. And you're going to say, oh, back in the day, we used to take, take, take organs from dead bodies and put them into other people. And the kid will go, oh, yeah, you know, because, you know, they'll be, they'll be, they'll be growing from cell structures. They're already doing scientific work to grow from cell, cell structures. There's work going on now with injecting stem cells into the liver and pancreas to, to stop diabetics having diabetes. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff. We're living in a medical revolution. I think I might have said that in the last podcast when we're talking about kidney transference. But we're living in almost. There's a documentary project, the Medical Revolution. It's a very hard one to do because everything's happening at a cellular level. But to photograph the people and the process, I think that's an interesting project.
Climate change is an interesting project.
Hyper partisan politics is an interesting thing.
You know, what, what's, what's been going on.
There's, there's you. You know, what the traditional media covers isn't what's necessarily happening in life. That's why documentary photography is so important. Important.
[00:46:42] Speaker A: And I wonder. Andrew, Sorry, I just wanted to ask whether you think, you know, we've often talked about AI on the show and how that's changing the face of, the face of creativity, really, that, you know, instead of going out and taking a photo, now you can just put in a text prompt and refine what the machine chooses to give you. Is that in that world that we're moving into, where more and more AI is used for, you know, creating images, for example, is that where the role of traditional photography is even more important, that we do have to showcase what is real?
[00:47:24] Speaker B: My brother used to say, had this saying, believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see. And of course, these days it's believed nothing of what you hear and nothing of what you see. And Facebook is full of shit at the moment of historical photos colorized.
But more, more likely you'll see, oh, here's a photograph of the painter de Guy Degas moving his studio in Paris in, in and, and loading paintings onto a dray. And people go, you know, it's just made up by an AI generator and there's this diffusion of the truth.
Yeah, I think we, I think we need, I think from a documentary and from a reportage point of view, governments need to protect us. They need to, to say to AI, to AI generators and Facebook And Instagram, we can't have this on unless it's labeled because people are just sitting there looking at these videos of plane train crashes and plane crashes and you know, whatever and going, going oh, this is the truth. I mean, Charlie Kirk's unfortunate assassination. Assassination.
You know, I'm not going to get involved in who he was and what he was, but I think people have kind of grabbed hold of that issue for their own purposes and political left or right.
But you're starting to see posts on Facebook.
Facebook with Bob Dylan's and you know, talking about how sad it was about Charlie Kirk or Mick Jagger or. Yeah, it is all and people. Exactly.
[00:49:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:49:16] Speaker B: Just reading it used to say news is entertainment and it is becoming entertainment. And if, if people are so zombied out watching this crap and they're not actually looking at what is being done to them by their governments and everything else, you know, I think, you know, beware, beware. I mean governments should be protecting people. They should be protecting people from bad messaging and, and from fake, fake posting. Certainly from face.
There's. There's never been more need to have documentary and truthful photography out there.
[00:50:04] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:50:05] Speaker C: That's what I was about to say is, I guess to the role of the documentary photographer going forward is, is to I guess be truth tellers.
Record history and be truth tellers. Because you're right, you know, governments could legislate to protect and do all that kind of thing. But you can also try to combat with, with the truth with your own. If you have a passion in a certain area and you're seeing just getting posted. That's untrue.
[00:50:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:39] Speaker C: And you've got work that can, you know, push back against that.
That helps. That's good. That's a, it's a, A worthy project to take up.
[00:50:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it's worthy, but it'll never pay any bills. No, probably not.
I'm just going to be about that. If there's any, any young guys and girls out there who are thinking of, of doing it, do it. Don't. I'm not saying don't do it, but don't expect to get rich from it. I mean, it was always difficult. I mean, you know, I had to do corporate photography and all sorts of other things to get by over the years.
But you've got to do it because you believe in it.
[00:51:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:51:21] Speaker B: And if you believe in it, you just go out, get your, get your ass out of bed early and get out on the road. Go out of the city, get out of Brunswick and Carlton and Head out in the country, head out into the suburbs.
Go out of your comfort zone and start looking at what's going on. That's where you're going to find the real Australia. Talk to people who, you know, might have the same political sensibilities as all your friends that you drink coffee with every morning. Go and talk to if you're in the inner suburbs. Go and talk to some farmers. Most of them are voting National Country Party, but, you know, they're all very nice people.
They've all got opinions and they're. They're all, you know, they all see things from their own perspective. You know, they see, you know, they talk to other farmers, they talk to other people and, you know, and there's your story. Start photographing them. Start and, and make a story you don't have to have. You know, I'm doing a lot of stuff on the coal industry, for example. Well, I, I think, personally, I think Cole's coming to an end and I think it's time to move on.
But that's not a reason not to photograph it.
[00:52:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:39] Speaker B: You know.
[00:52:39] Speaker A: Yep. Because if it does come to an end, we want. We want a record of how it ended.
[00:52:45] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Yeah.
And that's. Yeah.
[00:52:50] Speaker C: And so you're not. Your work when you, when you're documenting coal, you're not going there trying to make it look bad, you know, like you're not going there with a purpose thing. Well, you know, coal's probably coming to an end. We probably need to move towards a more greener solution. So I'm going to go there and I'm going to try and document this in a way that makes it look terrible and, and dirty and, you know what I mean, you're going there documenting it for what it is, people.
[00:53:19] Speaker B: I'm photographing it how it is. And look, you know, brown coal in the Latrobe Valley, it is, look, you know, it's fine and dusty and it gets on everything and it does look grimy and dirty, but that is the way it is. I'm not, you know, and, and, you know, on cold mornings there's a hell of a lot of steam coming out of the turbines and all that sort of thing.
But I mean, I think there's visual beauty in that, all that, that grime. I think they look fantastic, you know.
[00:53:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:48] Speaker B: I like actually engineering and engineering design and the structure and the form and it's a little bit like architectural photography. A lot of the work I've done.
I'll just say that if anyone wants to see any of that work.
I know you've put some links up, but. Andrew Chapman photography dot com. No AU Andrew Chapman photography dot com. And go to photos, photographs. And there's.
You'll see the slow inevitable death of coal.
There we go. That's there.
[00:54:22] Speaker C: And you can.
[00:54:23] Speaker B: We've got, we got different Cole. Yeah, and there you go. So, you know, I mean, I think some of those photos are kind of, kind of interesting.
That's the old Hazel. Now that that plant's been gone now.
Oh, I'm trying to get, get it right about 29, 2018, I think it came down.
So that's seven years, seven years ago. It doesn't exist. If you go there now, all this. Look at that.
[00:54:47] Speaker C: I love that shot. That looks like Russian nuclear.
[00:54:52] Speaker B: It is the nuclear plant from the Simpsons a lot. It really is.
[00:54:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it is too.
[00:54:59] Speaker B: Oh, and it was just so beautiful. Just.
[00:55:02] Speaker C: That is beautiful.
[00:55:03] Speaker B: And you know, I didn't move the notebook, I didn't touch anything. I just went in and I photographed it like it is. I love the lights at the top, actually. I reckon a steel. You could have that in your studio, guys. I think that'd be a really nice lighting setup.
[00:55:19] Speaker C: That would be my ultimate podcast studio. I would never leave that if that was my backdrop. I just sat in that chair and had a microphone.
[00:55:27] Speaker B: That would be amazing.
I don't know.
This is the actual. This is a simul. A power station simulator.
And I did suggest to them when they were about to demolish the plant that they ring up Science Works and offer it to them because, you know, not. Not only is it a cool looking display, but they had breadboard circuitry and they could actually make design modifications and put them on these circuits and you know, for people into electronics it would have been really fascinating.
But I got dragged through. I, I was very lucky. I remember we talked right at the beginning about passionate people.
Well, I had a guy called Mark Richards who was one of the union delegates from the Mining Energy Union and he was just passionate about the plant. He'd done his apprenticeship there and been brought up with all that stuff. And he dragged me. I mean my, my feet aren't very good and I can't walk very fast. And he dragged me for five days around this plant.
Come on, come on, you've got to hurry up. You've got to get this, you got to get that. And we went at breakneck speed. We did about two and a half thousand shots and I loved it. It just about wiped me out physically. But you know, I was waiting for a kidney transplant at the time.
But, you know, look at this stuff. That's very dark. That photo.
Sorry, where I took it was incredibly dark. It's about a 20 or 30 second exposure. And that's the old Moor World Power power station. But, you know, it's all going. It's all. It's either going or gone.
[00:57:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:14] Speaker B: And you know, it's a great visual record. You know, I love that photo.
[00:57:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:21] Speaker B: But.
And it's like these nautilus shells and uh, the big, huge, huge pumps. So for every ton of coal they pump out of the open cut, they've got to pump out of a ton of water. So pumps are very, very important things in power stations. And that next shot, I think, is that the, that's the old Hazelwood station. That's about 13 stories high. And you see the orange, the orange walls there, they're made of what they call S6 asbestos.
It's like corrugated asbestos sheeting. And you know, it had been installed in the 1960s, built in the 1960s when asbestos wasn't seen as an issue and it would, it was basically decaying. And if you got up close to it, there's tiny little holes and stuff and you know, there's bits of, bits of dust would come off these sheets of asbestos. And the, the power station had been, I think it had been slated to close in about 2010 and it was 2016 when I was photographing it, I think, or 2017.
And you know, there were some conservative politicians going, oh, well, I think we can keep this going for another, you know, 10 years and something. It's like, well, so you're happy for workers to be working in a environment where there's bits of asbestos flying around and getting in your lungs, are you?
You know, and it's, you know, you get the political rhetoric and then there's the reality, you know.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:07] Speaker B: That photos, that photo is also using light. You know, I said about using the light.
I. I'm always looking for what the clouds are doing in any photo. I'm always looking at what the clouds are doing and I'm looking at what the light's doing. And you know, if you went there in the middle of the day, it'd be enough in photo.
[00:59:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it's very true.
[00:59:29] Speaker C: Yeah. You got to work for it. This doesn't just happen. It wasn't. You weren't just strolling past and went, oh, there's one click.
[00:59:36] Speaker B: I'm always at a location at the beginning of the day. Start with the beginning of the day. And often before the sun's up.
Yeah.
Lesson number one for young photographers who like to sleep in, learn to get out of bed early.
[00:59:54] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:59:55] Speaker B: Discipline. Get out of bed early. Because great photos happen in great light. The beginning of the day is often the quiet time.
I love this photo here. Can we go back one?
[01:00:07] Speaker C: This one?
[01:00:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So these are the generators and they're so clapped out, they've got a couple of fans.
[01:00:15] Speaker A: A bit of emergency tape.
[01:00:18] Speaker C: Don't worry, though, the tape is there so that you don't trip over the cord that's linking the two hands. That's.
[01:00:24] Speaker B: And like I said, you know, I mean, I find these photos visually beautiful. Yeah.
Is it a negative view of the parents? No, it's just. It's an honest view of the pear industry. It's not negative.
I don't think there's a worker there would say that's not what it was like, because it is. It is what it's like.
And. And the places are kind of devoid of a lot of people.
There's no people in the gen. The odd one or two. One or two people walking around, but, you know, there's not a lot of people there.
So, you know, it was a great opportunity to photograph all that stuff. And having that guy, Mark Richards, so passionate, you know.
[01:01:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:05] Speaker B: I gotta say something about. Look, I'll go back one. Back one.
This one? Yeah, that one. That one there. That shot at like 2000, no, two 2000 ISO.
And it said F4 on a 10 to 24 Fuji lens on my X Pro 2.
And it is so sharp. I can't believe how sharp that image is. I've blown it up a meter wide. Wide. And, you know, if you were shooting in the.
In the 90s with a 5,4 camera and got that quality, you'd be pretty bloody happy, you know? Yeah. What modern digital can deliver. And, you know, I'm. I'm talking about Fuji here. Fine. But, you know, you could do it on a Canon or a Nikon or a Sony or whatever, you know, I'm not.
[01:01:54] Speaker A: But that, that 10, that 10 to 24 is known for its sharpness.
The original.
[01:01:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I know. Well, the. The aforementioned. No butcher. But also my recently departed good friend, Jamie Messiah. You know, we all love that lens. We used to shoot a lot of work with that 10 to 24. I still do.
I've got total confidence, if I'm sure, a lot of the transplant work shot in that lens. Yeah. And it's. It's just. You just know you can put it at F4 wide open and it'll just deliver.
Yeah. Amazing results.
[01:02:33] Speaker A: Beautiful.
[01:02:34] Speaker C: It's. Yeah, I, I love this work.
[01:02:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I love this one here.
It's such working class humor, you know?
[01:02:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah.
[01:02:46] Speaker B: And it's also about the light. You know, there was a window to the left and there's a. One of those old blue tarps, plastic tarps.
And it's just blued up the whole image as it comes in and you know, it's just a very simple photo. It's a very quiet photograph the way I look at it. And yeah, I'd be happy with that grungy dirty photo on my wall.
I haven't got it, having said that. But yeah, I've done a few prints of it. It looks really beautiful.
[01:03:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:03:21] Speaker C: The, the no smoking sign, particularly pops with the. And then everything else being blue. It's really got that cinematic orange. Orange. Yeah. Yeah, it works. Definitely works.
[01:03:34] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:03:35] Speaker C: Yeah. So cool.
[01:03:38] Speaker B: So, you know, that's, that's just one of the documentary series I've done.
I'd probably like to do a little bit more, but I have an issue with my legs. I got into Luoyang Power station this, this year and did some photographs.
But I think it's coming to a, a conclusion. Just because my legs won't carry me around the plants that easy. I'll see if I can manage one more one, one more crack at it, you know?
You know, it's, it's, it's coming to a conclusion.
My projects on transplants of.
I've got the potential to do a heart transplant and a lung transplant later this year, early next year. That's being worked on with a major hospital in Melbourne.
And then I'm going to do stem cell transplants into the pancreas that we're talking about to show the modern face of transplantation. And I think that will kind of come to a conclusion as well.
I've got another project on headshots and close ups and portraits which I've been doing that just started out of COVID and I'll find something new to do. I'll find another project to do.
[01:05:08] Speaker C: I want. I've got two questions.
Which one first, first of all, how. What advice do you have for people? You said find it. Get out of your comfort zone. Just find something that lights you up and follow that.
Do you have any advice, any practical advice for other than just going to a different suburb or something like that to find a subject that lights you up that you can dig into the way that you do with these projects.
[01:05:45] Speaker B: Well, what interests any individual is it could be dressmaking, it could be photographs of insects with pins through them in a collection, in a museum.
Find what turns you on for a start. And then I think the advice would be when you, you know, when you go somewhere, I think it's really good, particularly if a young photographer to say a couple of things, who you are, what you're doing and what you want.
Hi, my name is Andrew Chapman.
I'm a documentary photographer. I'm photographing power stations. So I like to get in and photograph your lawn power station or whatever.
And, and people are either, you know, people are kind of more relaxed than, than if you just turn up with a camera.
I know it sounds very basic, but just let people know what you're doing. Most people, if you, if you're interested, you can be. Hi, I'm a, you know, I'm, I'm a third year student at rmit.
I want to photograph commercial fishing off lobster fishing down of Port Campbell. Is there any chance I can come out on the boat with you guys?
Most people will say, sure, come on out. You know, it's good. You don't get seasick, do you? You know, or you, you know, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden you're a third year student and you're out on the, a fishing trawler out off the coast under, you know, you're floating around underneath the twelve apostles looking for, for lobsters or whatever, and they're pulling up big lobsters and you're getting that the sun's coming up and it's coming across and you're getting photos. Oh, I wish I was there already. Look.
[01:07:39] Speaker C: Maybe I could document lobster.
[01:07:41] Speaker B: You know, some people will tell you, sorry, can't do it, it's not possible, or we don't want you. But there's always someone who'll say, yeah, that's fine, come along.
And you know, it doesn't have to be something as elaborate as that, but I've always said that as a photographer and as a ERA news or a documentary photographer, you get the front row seat to what's going on.
You know, if you, if you love footy, you know, you can be sitting, if you're good enough and you work up to it, you can be sitting on the ground at the mcg.
You know, you're probably not even watching the game because you're working your ass off so hard, of course, mind you, but, but you can be there, you know.
You know, if you're interested in sharing sheds, you can be in amongst the action. If you're interested in the fashion shows or whatever it is, whatever it is, you can be there. You can go onto people's properties, they'll invite you onto their properties, they will help you, they'll show you around. People are incredibly generous, you know.
You know, occasionally someone will say, piss off.
Now I've got to say that it's harder when you're younger now these days, like, like going into a wool shed or somewhere. I just, I just say I'm the photographer who did woolshits. And they all go, I come in.
So it's, it's getting a little bit easier. And you know, if you're going to go and photograph, say, the cattle auctions, you really need to go and speak to someone there these days because there are so many protests and people taking photos of animal cruelty. They're all hyper worried about it. But if you say, look, you know, I'm interested in just photographing this because I'm interested in the industry, blah, blah, blah. And you know, I'm not, I'm not here to supply photos to Peter or whatever the organization is. I'm not, you know, if, if, if protest photography is your thing, that. I'm not saying don't do that either, but I'm just, I'm just talking. You've got to be rational about how you go about doing it, you know.
[01:09:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:55] Speaker B: Sorry, Justin, but back in the day, you know, you wanted to get up on top of a building in Melbourne. This is pre 9 11.
You just used to ring up the building management and they'd let you get up on the roof and they'd leave you up there for an air. At sunrise or sunset, you, you'd shoot it and come down and say, thanks, that was great. It did change a bit with 911.
You know, things are possible.
Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:21] Speaker C: It opens doors and, and can enrich your life. I guess like you say, those, those experience. I'm thinking back while you were saying about, you know, that fishing, fishing for lobsters sounds beautiful the way that you described it. And I was thinking back about some of the experiences that I've had. Taking photos are some of the best experiences of my life. And they wouldn't have happened if I didn't follow that thread that led me to that situation where you look around, you're like, wow, this is pretty crazy.
[01:10:56] Speaker B: I guess the other bit of advice is do a road trip.
Yeah. Get out of your comfort zone. Go somewhere you haven't been Go to some country towns, go outback. Outback, sorry, the back of New South Wales.
You know, there's a myriad of towns up there that it's just brilliant to travel through. Queensland's the same up up to Bacoldon and Longreach and Hughenden. There's all sorts of places that are great. Most of them are on sealed roads, you know, from Melbourne, a couple of days, reasonable driving and being the Flinders Ranges. Go with a couple of mates, you know, you've got a couple of mates who are photographers, get in the car and, and, and go for a road trip. Yeah. And you know the beautiful thing, look, when you're married, you go on a road trip and you're going along and you say, I've just got to stop at, take a photo of that tree over there.
You stop and take the photo of the tree about 5 km up the road. Oh, I've just got a photograph, a rock, you know. Okay. Yeah. Okay. If you don't do that by about the third or fourth time, the eyes are rolling pretty heavily and, and you got to negotiate some difficult spaces when you travel with a, a fellow photographer. I mean you can travel by yourself of course, if you want, but when you travel a fellow photographer, the golden rule is if, if that photographer wants to stop for a shot, you stop for the shot.
And if they're going to take half an hour of it, you let them take half an hour of it. No pressure because that's, that's the beauty of it. And you know, I travel a lot with no butcher.
And you know, we, we've, we've been to Western Australia and back.
You know, he won't let me play Bob Dylan in the car. That's the only problem.
But look, we, we have some great, great, you know, we, we still talking to each other after driving the Western Australia back, you know.
You know, and we get some great shots along the road, you know, you know, out at dawn and you're on the Nullarbor and the mist is missed across the Nullarbor at sun, you know, at just pre dawn, you know, and then there's, there's a giant wedgetail sitting there eating, eating roadkill first thing in the morning and, and all these magic things, you know, you just got to be, you just got to be there.
[01:13:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:13:27] Speaker B: What's the, what's the saying?
90 of a good photo is being there.
[01:13:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yep.
[01:13:35] Speaker C: I just got to check in with the chat because they're loving it.
No butcher says, unbelievable. Second time today that I agree with Andrew Just ask about photographing stuff. Worst case scenario, they say no. Yeah, great, great advice. Matt Palmer. Matt talks photography from Alpine Light Gallery in Bright says if you show genuine interest and approach things professionally with gratitude, the answer is more often yes.
[01:14:02] Speaker B: Yeah. And I might, I might add to that, Matt, that, you know, donate to somebody's property without asking for permission.
[01:14:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:14:11] Speaker B: Don't think because there's a fence there you can just climb it and walk in. Yeah, I can't say I've always adhered to that, but use that as the golden rule. I had to, I had to jump a fence once when there was a rainbow behind a shearing shed down in the Western District and the only angle was to jump the fence.
And if I went and got permission, there would be no rainbow there by the time I got permission. And it was an exceptional circumstances. But, you know, people don't like you. You know, you probably don't like people coming, you know, waltzing in and doing a photo shoot in your front yard and, and you know, it doesn't matter if it's a 6,000 acre property, you know, it's still somebody's property. They're generally really happy to let you in or look around or whatever. Yeah, yeah.
[01:15:06] Speaker C: Glenn Lavender, Creative Photo Workshop says, almost makes me want to be a photographer. I think you should give it a go, Glenn.
[01:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:15:13] Speaker C: You might let me know if you need a camera.
[01:15:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I know.
[01:15:17] Speaker C: LTK photo says this is great advice. Rodney Nicholson. Loving this. And finally, Bruce Moyle. Traveling with other photographers is only the only way to go.
[01:15:26] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:15:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, traveling with other or doing projects with other photographers is interesting because many years ago I started a group in Melbourne called the Map Group and which is many Australian photographers. And we've done a lot of big group projects where we'd bring 30 photographers to a country town and we'd photograph it. We did the town of Hay in New South Wales a couple of times. Sonar.
We did a little project at Ballarat Wong and then we did, we did, did a project in Melbourne called Little Big Town.
So a lot of photographers can cover an area quite well.
That morphed into doing a series of books with my publisher, the 10 Bag Press. If you have a
[email protected] you can see some of the books.
Adam McNichol, the proprietor there, we've, we've done, we started with a book on the Mallee and we brought five photographers to that book because we needed to cover it in a reasonable short period of time.
And five photographers just went up on their Own time in their own way, sometimes traveling together.
The first, the first trip we did, I went with the recently departed photographer Jamie Messiah and we went up to Rainbow and we just spent a couple of days going around and we got some great shots.
And you know the, the, the Mallee book had been Adam's thought bubble for, for a couple of years and you know we, we, we were busting to do a project at the time and, and I said to Jamie, or Jamie might have said to me, said, oh stuff this weight, let's just go and start it and. And off we went and we just got in the car, we drove and we had a great, you know, Jamie didn't mind Bob Dylan, you know, in the car.
So you know, we, we couple of days we, we had, you know, great music and you know we gas bag, we meet people and it was great. And we had five photographers on this. So we had Jamie Messiah, Noel Butcher, myself, Melanie Faith Dove who's a great, a great photographer.
She came on board for that and who am I leaving out?
I'm leaving someone out. I'll get, oh God, someone's going to kill me later.
I'll come back to that. And then we went to the Wimmera book and we brought David Callow in on that and Aaron Jonison who'd been the chief photographer for the Fin Review back in the day.
What I did is I put together teams of photographers who I knew would deliver.
Yeah, and we're self motivated to go out because a lot of people, they chew the fat and they, you know, someone I knew, the photographer named Liz Healy, she once said, you've got to burn to want to be a photographer.
And that fire is still burning in me and I try to look for the photographers who are burning to want to be a photographer.
I'll bring that book over so I'll get the name off. Don't go away, we'll stay here.
[01:19:10] Speaker C: Well he's, we're always here. Hang on, while he's over there we'll just bring this up.
Hang on.
These are some of the Mallee.
[01:19:19] Speaker B: I'm coming, I'm coming.
[01:19:21] Speaker C: Take your time. We're looking at your photos.
I love this stuff.
[01:19:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:19:28] Speaker C: Oh, from Menangitang.
[01:19:30] Speaker A: That sounds like a man.
[01:19:35] Speaker B: There we go.
Okay, so firstly, who did I, who did I leave out? Who did I leave out?
I must have left, I left, left Aaron out on that. Now Aaron had been burnt out at the time from working in city newspapers and she'd gone up to New South Wales and was growing Organic sultanas at a place called Goodnight.
And I said, yeah. Adam had run into her, the publisher, and I said, yeah, join the team, come down, take some photographs. And she said, oh, I'm only going to do landscapes, I'm not doing any people.
I said, well, you do what you want, that's fine. So she came along, took some photos the first weekend, went up to the Witcherproof cup, met all these people who took her out on the. You know, on the car with the trotting horses following and all sorts of things that came back with a swag of people shots. So it was kind of fun. It was kind of fun. And relaunched her photographic work too. She started doing freelance work for the Guardian and the Age, and she hadn't taken photos for quite a few years. So that's the Mallee and that's the Wimmera and I'd like to show you. I'm just. I'm just looking to make sure I haven't forgotten anyone there?
No.
Phil Campbell also, who's the designer, he took a few photos as well.
But their books that we're able to put together fairly quickly, we've just got the Western District due to launch on the 24th of October, so that will be the last of them because we're kind of all running out of energy and some of us have got other things to do.
Health issues, unfortunately. Jamie passed away during the Wimmera project two years ago, who was a. He was a passionate, committed photographer.
He. He'd. We talk about projects and documentary projects. He'd walk the Camino and he'd also. So he'd photograph the Camino beginning to end, and then he'd gone back and photographed a section of it during winter, during snow, walking it in the snow, too. And he got some beautiful photographs, hoping to do a book. Unfortunately, the book never, never got off the ground. It was a real shame. But he did do a book called Little Big Town on all the laneways and small streets of Melbourne. And that was a lovely book.
A great photographer. And, you know, when.
When you see somebody who's got so much burn to be that photographer and to get out and do it and I get cancer and, you know, it's, It's. It's very difficult watching such a creative soul, you know, fade away, really, there's not a word for it, you know, because this person had so much to contribute and had so much burn to do it, you know, and talent.
[01:22:58] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:22:59] Speaker A: It is a tragic loss and obviously we're sorry for your loss.
Of a friend, someone who. You've created. You know, you've created records of historic history and areas of Australia that most of us don't even think about. So it's a. It's a wonderful legacy. It's just a pity it has to come at such a cost.
[01:23:22] Speaker B: Well, you know, I think that sort of thing happens to most of us, doesn't it?
[01:23:26] Speaker A: Yeah, apparently.
[01:23:26] Speaker B: I've heard. Yeah, I've heard, You know, death and taxes, you know, I mean, I. I feel it very acutely at my age and with my health record, I've got to say, you know, which is probably part of the drive to finish off projects, to do the. The book, fill the frame, you know, to leave a record. You know, I don't. You know, some photographers die and they leave a tub of hard drives, you know.
[01:23:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:23:59] Speaker B: Boxes of prints. And the family, you know, they're not archivers. They don't know what to do with them.
And it's. With Jamie, we did a beautiful little book on.
And you. You could. We professionally designed it and probably did 100, 200 copies.
And there was something for people to have, you know, there was a record of his existence, you know. Yeah. And that's kind of important, you know, I was here sort of thing. I mean, why else you're doing it?
[01:24:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's a very good point. You know, and often we. We see.
We see stories, news stories and, you know, social media stuff about how there were often these photographers who were prolific in their period of time and in the socioeconomic space that they occupied. And then we come across these archives of images and discover that actually, you know, they. They created the most comprehensive record of what was going on in that time and place. But no one knew about them because someone's found a box of old film.
[01:25:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:25:07] Speaker A: You know, or whatever it may be. And.
Yeah, it is, you know, and I think it comes back to that whole thing of printing, too, and obviously books, because you're right, we do keep all of our images electronically on hard drives. And at some point in time, they're going to fail or they're going to disappear or someone's going to chuck them out on your behalf after you're gone. It's. Yeah, it's.
[01:25:31] Speaker B: Well, it is a conundrum, you know, I think that certainly professional photographers, you know, but any photographer can apply to. I think they ought to have a think about their archive and what they've got and put together their best hundred photographs and say to someone, look, if I go, this is, you know, can you give this to the State Library or National Gallery or whatever sort of work you're doing, you know, that they can have it, but not, not only pick your top 100 photographs, but it's really, really important. And this is where a lot of photographers incredibly lazy to put the, the file, the metadata on the photograph.
[01:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:26:23] Speaker B: Who, what, why? When? You know, yeah, you know, you can, you can see an important photograph, but. But if it's just a photograph in 20 years time you go, I wonder where that was, I wonder who that person was.
But then you can say it was Rodney Smith tending a paddock of melons in the Wimmera at Horsham in 1997.
All of a sudden there's much more of a story and you can in fact put a poor of a story than that.
A lot of photographers don't want to put, strip that information in. And at the very least, when you're importing some images into your computer, you should have a copyright and a date. Well, the date will be on the metadata of a digital photograph, of course, but if it's film, you've got to add that. But you know, put your copyright and your address so at least your details there. Now you can have a metadata template on import and it's so easy at import to just put that in, but then add, you know, photographs of Hazelwood power Station, you know, three months before it's due to be demolished.
[01:27:47] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:27:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:27:49] Speaker A: Last week we had obviously Michael Coyne on the show and as part of every interview I write a short form blog and Michael supplied us with a number of his image JPEG files. But he also provided a list of what each photo was, what the number of each photo was, and the caption for each photo. And it just elevated the storytelling experience of viewing his images so much. I mean, they were, you know, they're remarkable images to begin with. We're seeing glimpses into, you know, a time and a place that most Westerners don't know about.
And then to have a short like Michael's interpretation of what, what this story is, it just added so much. Whereas, you know, in the future without that, we, we lose a big chunk of context.
[01:28:36] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, I would say to anyone who's a documentary photographer, get into the habit of doing it. I mean, I've got a couple of photos of very early photographs of.
There's one particularly of an old guy in a car on Anzac Day. And it's a beautiful image, but I kind of always wish I knew who the guy Was. But I was too lazy to get out a notebook and say, oh, can I get your name?
And, you know, it wasn't until I'd started working with newspapers a year or two later that I started realizing the importance of getting names and details.
And, you know, you can have some wonderful chats to the people you photograph. And everybody's got a story.
Yeah, everybody's got a story, you know, and some, some. You find out some of the most amazing things.
[01:29:33] Speaker A: Indeed.
[01:29:35] Speaker C: I can't stop soaking this stuff in. All right, I have a question.
[01:29:38] Speaker B: This is.
[01:29:39] Speaker C: This is like a masterclass on documentary photography.
I have a question. So you. You mentioned before always have multiple projects on the go.
[01:29:48] Speaker B: Yep. Why, oh, holy. Do you ask me a question I can't readily think of an answer for?
I just always says, look, I guess. Well, you know, I wasn't going to just stick to. I wasn't going to just stick to photographing wool sheds and shearers, which was probably one of my early projects, because I wasn't in the country every week as a city person and I was interested in politics.
So, you know, I just. I just turn up and take photographs, that sort of thing. So I'd make sure I was doing that. I was always just taking general shots and experimenting. I mean, you know, I mentioned in one of the essays, you know, the Paul Kelly song. I've done all the dumb things. I was always shooting and making mistakes.
[01:30:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:30:47] Speaker B: And. And sometimes I just photograph because I like the look of something, because I like the light, the way the light felt on it. And, you know, when I say slow starter, I am a slow starter. I just learned very slowly. You know, a child touches a hot flame, it learns not to touch the hot flame again, you know, and, you know, of. I've just learned from mistakes. I've learned from things.
Sorry, I'm not really answering your question here, Justin, but that's okay.
[01:31:24] Speaker C: I was just curious as to.
[01:31:26] Speaker B: As to why I learned to do projects as an idea, as a concept, a while ago. And I'm always looking, you know, it's very hard as a photographer to go, okay, I'm going to photograph FJ Holden's one day. Okay, so I'm going to photograph FJ Holden's. One of this goes on and on and on, and eventually you see an F.J. holden and the light is just perfect. And it's.
It's decrepit. It's sitting in a paddock.
And you go and take a photo and you get one photo. Oh, there you go. There you go.
And then I'm going to photograph F.J. holden's. One day I'm going to, you know, and nothing happens because you don't make it happen. And then you go out and you get a second one. You just come across the second one and you get another good photo. And then all of a sudden you're starting to get a collection. You know, by the third time you're getting a collection and. And then you're actively looking for it, you're getting a bit more excited. You're going out and saying, you know, anyone who's got F.J. holden sitting around, you know, and whatever the subject is.
Most photographers are afraid to start projects. They're scared of failure.
Australia.
Australia, the land of epic failure.
That's a Rod Quantock saying, I think.
It's not my saying, but I love it.
But we are. Aren't you scared when you go to start a project, it might work out and you'll just put it on the shelf? I bet you most photographers listening out there have been in that boat, you know, and, you know, we're all scared of failure. But once you get one or two photos together and you start hooking it and then you can start feeling more, you know, and it might just, you know, I say to people, you, you know, you're walking along and you see a nice photograph of a butterfly of light coming through it, so it swings, are translucent.
You get the photograph, you know, and then two weeks later, you see another butterfly and it's sitting up on a tree and you take a photo and it looks great. And then you're looking for butterflies after that, aren't you?
[01:33:43] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:33:44] Speaker B: You're a collector, and we're all collectors as photographers, and it's finding those collections and. And those collections become the series. So, you know, if. If I'd walked into that first sharing shed and I didn't get anything, I probably wouldn't. I probably wouldn't be here now, you know, probably, probably. It's probably that simple.
But I. I walked in and the lot was great. I got a couple of great photos. And, you know, if you go, okay, let's have a look there now I'm just looking this one there, the two guys right in the middle. There's two guys sitting on the floor. One's got his hand up.
[01:34:25] Speaker C: This one.
[01:34:25] Speaker B: Okay, first sharing, share. I ever went into 1975 or 6 at Pyong in Central Victoria, and I got this photo, and it's quite a lovely photo. I got two or three others that day, and that's what got me going.
And then somebody, if you go back to the main body of work there, somebody had a sharing shed down in the Western District.
And where's the one of the windmill, can we go, go up or down a bit? Yeah, the top, top left the blades. I went to this, this shearing shed, Mount Hess stand, their windshield seat.
And I went down, you know, like I said about getting places early. We went to get there at dawn and we left with the designer. I was with a designer who, who's, whose family owned the property. And we drove in the dark in, in winter down to Winchelsea from Melbourne and it was foggy and a bit of rain. I thought, why am I going? Why am I doing this? It's going to be terrible. It's going to be terrible.
And we got down there and the fog lifted and the sun was out. This is just right on sunrise. And I saw the windmill and I thought, oh, I'll climb the windmill. Something I can't do today, I might add.
Climbed up the windmill, held on with my left hand and leaned back over, leaned back over with the camera in one hand and took the shot and it just fell into place.
You know, it's such an iconic Australian photograph, I think.
[01:36:10] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[01:36:11] Speaker B: You know, and I was just, I wasn't lucky to get it. I, you know, I worked it out and did it.
There's other shots there. If you go back to the.
There's the. One of the shearers backside, which is where, where, where, where, where. Yeah, that's the one again, you know, I'm just photographing everything I saw. That's a shearer called Neil Dunston down at Foster in, in Gippsland and he's wearing the old traditional bag boots, you see, they're made of hessian bags. And you know, he's got the scorniest frame and he's just. It's just a back breaking job, but it's kind of a really iconic shearing shot. And the lights. Right. I'm fortunate that the light's right. Sharing sheds are really interesting places for light. You know, you get a lot of really nice things happening in there.
[01:37:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:37:07] Speaker C: How, where is it?
Speaking of light, how many, how many attempts did it take to get this shot?
[01:37:17] Speaker B: Only a couple of attempts. It's a funny, you know, a funny thing. I just, I just fluked it. I think I just fluked it. And a lot of sharers, the people in the wool industry, they love that shot.
I've tried to replicate it and failed a lot of times.
But yeah, sometimes it just, you know. What did I say? Sometimes photographs just come to you.
You don't have to do anything. Well, you do have to do some things, but they just land in your lap.
And other times you bust your ass and you get nothing, you know, and that's the way photography is. You know, most, most photographers get stressed out.
Most of them are anxious.
And, you know, it's like that, that, that story, That's a nice photo. It's like that story of the, you know, the duck, the duck on the water and it looks so calm, but underneath its legs are paddling like crap, you know?
Yeah. And you know what, what I do like about working for myself is I don't. When, when you're working commercially, you've got that expectation, you know, you're only as good as your last job and you've got to make every job work. When you're shooting for yourself, doesn't matter so much. And, you know, my life's been a lot better since around about 2000, when I got hemochromatosis, which is an iron overload, conditioned to my health trajectory. But when, you know, when I got that, I realized I probably only had a few years to live, which was nearly true.
And I just went, you know, I'm not going to photograph shit. I don't like photographing. I'm not going to photograph corporate headshots. I'm not, you know, I paid off the mortgage, the kids were through school, just about. I said, I'm going to just photograph what I want to do.
And that was the, you know, the curve of pain financially.
But I was a lot happier. Yeah, I was a hell of a lot happier. And I would say to any commercial photographer out there, remember why you probably got into it, which was because you're passionate about it. Some get into it and then it just becomes a job. And if, if that is, you start looking for a personal project that you are doing for you, for nobody else.
And it will, it will make you a lot happier.
Your clients will look at you and go, oh, he's the sort of guy who's just doing it anyway where he's not getting paid. He's, he's out there, he's really keen. And I think it has a rub off on your commercial work anyway.
And, you know, just stay passionate.
[01:40:13] Speaker A: Great advice, solid advice. Absolutely.
[01:40:15] Speaker C: I know. I find, Yeah, I think, I think.
[01:40:20] Speaker B: At this stage I need to show you another camera.
[01:40:22] Speaker C: Yes, please.
[01:40:23] Speaker B: Rambling on. This is this, this is one for my film project next year.
This is I've got to remember how to operate this. My grandfather bought this in 1913 before he went to the North African desert as a gold mining engineer.
Probably part of the British stealing the assets of all the third world countries in the world, but we won't go there.
But the beauty about those cameras, a lot of these cameras you buy, they take the old 620 film which is no longer manufactured, but this one takes 120film which you can still commercially buy.
So I am, when I get my, my film making going, my, my. Sorry, my film project going, I'm going to use that and as one of the cameras. So I've got that and it's over in the drawer. I haven't actually pulled it out to show but I've got a little, a Kodak retainer that belonged to my other grandfather. So I've got my two grandfather's cameras but that one's an absolute cracker. So he went, he went gold mining and that. And about a year after the First World War started, it took so long for the information to get to him. He's so remote.
Many I think it was a year but might have been not quite that long. They found out the war was on so they scurried back to London and the war office said, oh, you've got experience in North Africa, we're sending you back. So they went back to London and got on the ship and went back to, went back to North Africa during the, the First World War.
So that's, that's a lovely little piece, piece of technology.
I mean Kodak really revolutionized photography for so many people. You know, they had that, you know, you take it, we'll do the rest sort of philosophy where you know, that take the film and, and sometimes I think they took the camera as well and it, you know, everything came back and they were beautiful size negatives. So you had really good photos. Well, you know, one of the beautiful thing about an old photograph is you can enlarge it up and you know it will go as far as you want. You can enlarge it up to the old parlor, 16 by 20 inches, which is bigger than a 3 and it'll still maintain that. Now you can't do that necessarily with a digital photo because it'll pixelate as it goes up.
So unless you've got the original file, you're kind of stuck. That's the, that's one of the beauties of old photographs.
[01:43:19] Speaker A: Yep, most definitely.
Let's just. Did you ask a question, Justin? I was going to Jump to some comments. But it.
[01:43:29] Speaker C: Let's do some comments.
[01:43:30] Speaker A: All right, let's. Do you want to drive or you want me to drive?
[01:43:34] Speaker B: You do it. You guys.
[01:43:35] Speaker A: All right, cool.
[01:43:36] Speaker C: I think you're ready.
[01:43:37] Speaker A: Thanks, mate. I've been. I'm not. I'm not ready to control the audio, but we'll, we'll get to that.
Where are we?
We heard from.
I'm just trying to chat where we are.
Oh, that's so rude. You bastard.
Let's go back to Noel Butcher. You were talking a little bit earlier about the, the Mallee project and Noel's comment how.
How much he loved it and that he has allowed Bob Dylan in the car once, but once was enough.
[01:44:10] Speaker B: Well, there you go. What, what can you say about a haven like that?
[01:44:17] Speaker A: Yeah, Bruce balls in the, in the chat. G', day, Bruce. He's talking about. That's massive. About some of the work you've been doing.
And most recently, Lucinda Goodwin has joined us.
[01:44:29] Speaker C: Hey, Lucinda.
[01:44:30] Speaker A: The personal project is something I needed to be reminded of. Yeah, I think we all need that reminder.
[01:44:35] Speaker B: Absolutely. Lucinda, you need to, you know, don't delay, start, and don't be scared of failure. Just start, start, start.
[01:44:44] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:44:45] Speaker B: And if it doesn't work, get back on the horse. Yep. You know, get back on the horse and start another project. You know, discipline.
I hate to say it sounds. I sound like an old conservative. I'm certainly not conservative, but, you know, get out of bed early, get out there and do it. If it fails and I've done shitloads of failure, get back out and keep going. Okay.
[01:45:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:45:16] Speaker C: We do. At some point we've done show and tell of a few of your cameras. At some point we need to go through your Fujifilm kit, your modern kit, just because that's what we do on this podcast is pump up Fujifilm. It's just part of it. So at some point we need to go through that. So I don't want to forget that.
I did want to ask you, you know, we haven't, we haven't spoken about much we spoke about on the last podcast. We haven't spoken much about your, you know, giving life, transplant photography sort of project, but if people want to hear more about that in depth, loop back to the last episode that we did with you, because we sort of dug into that work, looked at some of the images and talked about the origins of it and that kind of thing. Actually, that reminds me.
So while we're on the, on the podcast last time talking about that, we discussed if you're in Australia particularly, or whatever country, and I'm sure there's different things how to register to be an organ donor. And, and just if you, if it's something that you want to, if you, you know, if you have no issue with it, you. Yeah, you have to opt in. It's not an opt out.
[01:46:21] Speaker B: You do need to opt in. And, and it's very simple. Everybody got their pins ready. You can put a link to it maybe with the program.
[01:46:30] Speaker C: I think we've already got it right here.
[01:46:38] Speaker B: And follow to register.
[01:46:40] Speaker A: Sorry, can you shut that other frame you've got up?
[01:46:43] Speaker C: Yep, yep. Add that, add that. Yeah.
[01:46:47] Speaker B: Thank you.
Oh, look at that. How good is that?
[01:46:50] Speaker C: So I'll tell you a little, I'll tell you a little secret that I found out because I. So I wasn't registered, but you can check pretty easily on this website.
But if you actually have the, in Australia, the Medicare app, and you go in there, you can see your status. And also it's like, if you, if you want to register, it's like two boxes, you'd like, tick this box, put your license number in, tick another box, hit register and you're done.
15 seconds.
[01:47:21] Speaker B: And the beat writer on this is, make sure you tell your nearest and dearest what your intentions are, that you've done it.
So if, you know, Andrew Chapman's on his last legs on the floor and they come up to Mrs. Chapman and say, we'd like to transplant him, he's a registered Trent, you know, registered donor. And she goes, well, I don't know anything about that.
I'm not quite sure at the last hurdle. You do not want that sort of confusion there. You want a clear pathway to transplantation.
And look, you know, on the example of somebody, somebody, somebody died of liver failure just coming up for 15 years in February, and he was a donor. I, I know nothing about him. I've never heard from the family or anything, although I've written to them. But, you know, I, I've had 50, nearly 15 wonderful years, you know, of, of seeing my kids grow up and settle down. I've seen four beautiful granddaughters born.
I've seen Donald Trump, I mean, imagine that, elected president twice. You wouldn't even know.
[01:48:47] Speaker A: I couldn't write a, couldn't write about it.
[01:48:49] Speaker B: I never want to die because I always want to know what's going to happen next.
Yeah, I love life. And, you know, this gentleman who died back in, in, in 2011 has, has given me the gift of life that has allowed me to do all Those things that I've done, you know, all those books, I mean, I published a couple of books before I had the transplant, but you know, all the wool sheds, the, you know, everything else since wool sheds has been down to this per, this person and that, you know, a few years ago I photographed that project on the pathway to transplantation. I photographed a quite young lady dying at 38 years of age and her organs were used in five life saving transplants.
She was, you know, sadly her life had, had come to an end, but her functional organs were used to allow a lot of other people to get out and have a reasonable life and not just, it's not just being able to live in. Kidney donors are one of the big ones. There's a lot of people on the kidney list at the moment waiting for a kidney transplant, but you know, it just allows people to, to have a functional, beautiful life. Leanne Bruin, who I photographed last year getting a kidney from a daisy, the daisy chain that we talked about in the last project, she's out there doing things, she's enjoying her life. She's not tied to a dialysis machine anymore.
She's not governed by her living room being full of boxes of medical supplies to, to maintain her dialysis, not being able to get away, you know, not being able to leave home for more than a couple of days.
Her loss revolutionized. But it could also be as simple as.
Have you got the, the transplant photos there, Greg? Can you.
Justin?
There's one now. Where are we?
Yeah. Okay, the row where the lady's holding her hand. Go to the middle to the little bottle.
I call that vision in a bottle.
That's, that's, that's a cornea that's awaiting transplantation.
That's going to restore sight to a person.
Now we all know as photographers how important sight is and, and it's, it's an amazing thing that they can do that and to watch that happen, you know, they, they stitch it into the eye. We can, we can maybe the next photos. Is that too graphic for, for people, but you can go along to the next image.
[01:51:51] Speaker C: Avert your eyes.
[01:51:52] Speaker B: If you avert your eyes, if you're squeamish, that's fine.
And you know, they put that in and then they just put, they, they insert that, that, that thing in the, the cornea in the bottle. Put it in, put one stitch on and then the eye pressure holds it in place.
And when the operations finish, a couple of hours later, the person's good to go.
And it's an amazing process to watch. Amazing.
That is sharp, that photo.
That shot. That shot of my little Fuji 60 mil 2.8 macro, which is a humdinger of a lens. It's one of the original holy trinity of lenses with Fuji. And it's not the fastest auto focuser, but hell, when it lands on it, it's as sharp, as sharp as it's. They say, yeah, it is a beautiful shot.
[01:52:45] Speaker C: Obviously it's hard over YouTube people probably can't see, but you can just go to andrewchatmanphotography.com and you'll find these images under the Giving Life menu. So you just go to photographs. I actually love the way you've laid this website out. So you go to photographs, you've got all of the different projects and themes. But then the other thing that I love that you've done is here, you've just got like best of 2023, best of 2024, and then 2025 so far.
[01:53:10] Speaker B: Oh, hit on 2025. Let's have a look what I'm doing.
[01:53:14] Speaker C: I just love that you've got a spot just for. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what particular project it's for. You just plop it on there.
[01:53:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:53:21] Speaker C: And it's like what I'm up to. I. I want to do that. I think that's great.
[01:53:24] Speaker B: Well, you know, I'm 71. 71, yeah, 71.
And, you know, I want to tell people I'm still relevant. I can still take a photo and, you know, I think I've taken some. There's some nice portraits there.
The balloon shots are beautiful. We haven't even talked about ballooning yet.
I've been ballooning too many things. I've done too many. Like I said, you've got so many projects. You do.
I do quite a lot of. Well, over the years, I've done quite a lot of ballooning with Global ballooning with Balloon man down in Melbourne, and occasionally a picture this ballooning. And I just love it. It's a great platform if. If you want to get a different view with your camera, get in a balloon, do a flight. It's not cheap, I've got to say, but, well, it doesn't cost me anything. I'm very lucky they let me fly for nothing, but I've been doing it so long with them. But it's worth it. It's worth it for the experience. It's. It's a. It's a great thing if you get the perfect day and you don't always get a Perfect day. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, but quite often there, there's, there's always something to photograph when, whenever you go.
[01:54:48] Speaker C: Yeah, gosh, they, they're just beautiful subjects too, the balloons having them in there like because just the way they, they light up the colors and the, it's just.
[01:54:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a beautiful industry. It's visually beautiful. It's usually over. Interesting. I mean, you know, the other thing, there's, there's no shots over Melbourne in this particular one. But you know, you can fly over the cbd, which is I think the only major city in the world that you can fly a balloon over the cbd.
And do we have that photo?
Can we go to ballooning? And, and oh, here, I've got this.
[01:55:28] Speaker C: One because this is from, this is a page from your book.
[01:55:31] Speaker B: You know, we came through the buildings, you know, and you know, this is pre dawn, as you can see, and, and bang, light lit it up and, and there you go. That's the old Roomba balloon. And it's magic moments.
[01:55:48] Speaker A: Yeah, indeed.
[01:55:50] Speaker B: Do I get shots on every balloon flight that are really, really great?
Probably not, but you know, every few flights it's just fantastic. And Chris shorten, one of the pilots, he always sends me little videos of his trips and he says, oh, you should have been there just to stir me, you know. Yeah, I love it. I, I have trouble climbing into the basket these days that they have to put, have to put steps there for me to get in that. It was very nice in that, that photo from 2025, those two balloons. I, I rang up, I was, it was my 75th, 71st birthday weekend. I was up at Healesville and I rang young Patterson Saunders who I've known since he was knee high to a grasshopper.
And he, he grew up in a ballooning family. He's now a pilot himself.
And I just, I wanted to take my three of my granddaughters down to just watch the balloons inflate and take off.
And he said, oh, we're a bit, we're a bit light on passengers tomorrow morning. Just said that I want to come for a fly.
And I thought, oh gee, there's five, seven and nine. I thought, well, if they're going to be a bit scared of hide or not, you know, I thought, yeah, I said, yeah, that's fine. And their dad came with them and that was a real joy to be able to take my granddaughters ballooning with me. Yeah, that, that was my birthday this year. So that Was kind of lucky. Yeah. But, but getting back to that web page of 2025, you know, those are the things I'm still doing.
I've bought a drone.
Oh, cool.
[01:57:32] Speaker C: What'd you get?
[01:57:34] Speaker B: I bought.
Well, that's an interesting story that I had a, I'll try to think of the brand name of it now. The, the, the, the Non DJI drone, the orange ones. And it was a great, great drone.
A great drone. And then the autofocus just failed. I'll think of its name in a minute.
The autofocus started intermittently failing and I was taking images and then, you know, sort of nine out of ten were out of focus and anyway, I, I decided once the DJI Mavic Pro Pro came out, had the three lenses that I would get that. And that shot that you're looking at there, that's. So that's a stitch panoramic of about five images.
And that is the beauty of that drone, that you can put it on telephoto and do wide shots and it's pretty good. There's no, I can't, I can't find mistakes in them. So I'm pretty, I'm pretty happy like that, you know, and you get that beautiful look at the sky, look at the, the wave that shot it down near One Sagi just, just north of Wanstagi in January this year.
I could get up early, go for a drive. You know, great photos happen in great light.
If you're going to go out at midday, well, you'll get the photo, but it won't be half the photo it could be if you're shooting it earlier.
[01:59:09] Speaker C: Comment, Comment here. I think from Mitchell Mackey, Tasmania. I can attest Andrew was fantastic at the commercial work. He could put almost any corporate individual at ease as we're experiencing. He can talk as well as he can shoot.
[01:59:26] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
Yeah, there's a. If you go. Oh, well, look, have. Go back.
No, I'm just. Oh, hang on, hang on.
There's one shot underneath the portrait of my granddaughter. There is a little vertical one of the power station.
[01:59:49] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:59:50] Speaker B: Shot on our side.
Oh, shots on iPhone, on RAW.
[01:59:55] Speaker C: You know, why just. Did you not have a camera with you or did you want.
[02:00:01] Speaker B: I had a work experience student with me and I was just helping her take photographs. In fact, Mitchell's daughter.
And you know, I just, I didn't. I'd taken this shot so many times before and I just thought, oh, well, you know, pull the camera out, bang. And it's so good. I mean, so it's so dark. You know, it's. It's really light and it just. It just worked. It worked beautifully. Shot it on raw. I mean if you'd shot that in the. On color transparency in the 1990s, you'd be pretty. Pretty happy with it really.
[02:00:41] Speaker C: Yeah. Oh yeah.
[02:00:43] Speaker B: You know, you got to remember where we've come from. Yeah. Hop back and go back a year or maybe two years, I think 2024. Can we have a look there's. Because this is.
Yeah, back to 2024.
Okay. So the. The top left one there.
This has allowed me to do the power stations again. Stitch panoramic.
You can't get great views of your lawn power station because they. They try to look environmental and they stick all these trees in front of them and the drone just lifts you above the drudgery and you can get those sort of shots. So that. That's pretty good.
And there's another. That one again. I mean that's just as it is. You know, that's sunrise. I mean I get there like I say, get out of bed early. Really, you're not going to get that much drama later on and admit. And I was going for drama. Okay, back to the proof. Back to the. Yeah, that's again sunrise.
[02:01:46] Speaker C: I love that shot.
[02:01:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that's Knowles actually. He's quite a good printer and he's done me a wide print of that which is so wide I haven't worked out how to frame it yet. But it looks fantastic. The open cuts actually on the left there.
And. And now there's a shot there. Okay. If you go down the rooftop on about the fourth row on the left. Very left.
And in fact too. But this is what a drone can do with sharing sheds.
And I mean look at the intricate roof line there.
It just. It just. It's just a beautiful line. And then there's a couple others if you go back and down.
Up, up. Sorry. Up. Next line.
Sorry. Keep.
Yeah, that's it. And then. Then the following one. It's just gives you that little bit of height which.
Sorry, I thought there was an aerial. That one there. Yes. That. That shed in particular is almost impossible to shoot from the ground. It's got like a three layer wedding cake kind of piece at the back. And then the. The original red brick was built earlier.
It's probably one of the prettiest sheds in Australia.
And the drone is just perfect for it. Now there's a. Also that shot.
Noel and I were traveling up near Yooralla in New South Wales, Northern New South Wales.
And you know, we get up air before sunrise, look out the window, it's foggy, it's rainy, it's drizzling. And we go, you think we should go out?
And you know, ultimately we always go, well, if we don't go out, we'll never know.
And we drive down there, it's cloudy, it's terrible, it's cold.
We get out there and within about 15 minutes the sun starts breaking through the cloud and the cloud starts breaking up and just look how beautiful the light is.
[02:03:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[02:03:57] Speaker B: And, you know, 90 of a good photo is being there. You know, it gets, it gets back to that. So I think David Callow, the photographer, great photographer friend of mine, you know, he, he had that saying and it's such a true, such a true statement, you know, and, you know, we're there and so 90 of a good photo is being there and the other 10 is having a drone.
I felt a bit guilty spending all the money on a drone, but as you can see, I've landed some pretty strong images with it and I think I've justified the expense.
[02:04:37] Speaker C: Well, not only that, but if it, if it sparks a new, you know, a little bit of that not, not beginner mindset, but like a new, a new road trip, explore and yeah, a new reason to go to maybe the same location again, but explore it with the drone or whatever. Like it's. If it gets you out and about and shooting, it's worth every cent.
[02:05:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
I've got no regrets.
Held myself back from buying the Mavic 4 same.
[02:05:13] Speaker C: So I've got the 3 classic.
So it doesn't have the 3 lenses.
I mainly use it for action, sports stuff. And as it is, I crash into trees a lot.
So the idea of trying to frame up with the telephoto lens because I do a lot of moving shots for video and I just end up crashing into trees.
So I decided that I didn't need to spend the extra on the three lens version of the Mavic 3, but it does, looking at those panoramas, that, that certainly appeals to me. The idea of being able to stitch with that.
[02:05:47] Speaker B: Well, that, that middle lens, the middle length lens, which I think equivalent to about a 70 mil on 35 mil format. That, that's pretty good lens to stitch with. It's. I believe the tally's a little bit soft, but you know, you know, the, the new one, it's, it's improved. Every model's improved. Everything just right gets better and better and better.
And the little, you know, the ears and the Minis, the Mini Pros apparently very good.
[02:06:17] Speaker C: That, yeah, that new Mini Pro that just come out that you could do tons with that and they're a lot smaller and lighter and.
[02:06:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And the, the, the ability to shoot portrait or vertical on it on the new ones is also a game changer as far. I would love to do stitch panoramics in, in that and I'd use a lot more of them.
Yeah, there's nothing, nothing worse than doing a stitch bow and it not quite fitting, not quite working, you know, and it misses somewhere and I just go, it's just immediately I'm not going to use it once it fails.
I've done, I've done one with my.
Probably be my Fuji XT4 or 5 and my, my 70, my 50 to 140 zoom of Melbourne. It's actually on that, that zoom page I think that, that 2023 page.
And I'm in a hot air balloon.
Is it this one? That is.
I sync the one. Yeah. So I'm in a hot air balloon over Richmond and balloons can rotate and I'm trying to do a stitch, handheld stitch, vertical left to right. Okay. I'm coming across from the left, going across to the right. And Chris the pilot, he's, he's rotating the balloon anti clockwise as I'm trying to go clockwise.
Oh God. You know, it's, it's like trying to walk up the downhill escalator, you know?
[02:07:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[02:07:52] Speaker B: Doesn't feel natural, but I got it and, and it, it stitched together so well. I use capture one software and there's a, there's a, probably a two to a three meter print sitting in, at, at the CEO's office at the City of Melbourne and they're very pleased with it, you know. Yeah. Oh, wow.
[02:08:17] Speaker C: How does that happen? Did you just take it there and say here, have this 3 meter print or did they like.
[02:08:21] Speaker B: Oh no, I, I get in, I get in contact and say I've got a photo I think you might be interested in. Okay.
They have, they have some of my images in their collection and I'm very, I'm very lucky like that.
They've got a lot of my old work into the Central City Library. They've used it, they've used it in the streets around Elizabeth Street.
They had them there as a kind of like classic installation.
They're great people in, at the cultural center there at the City of Melbourne. So, you know, that's, that's usually where I start with something like that. Well, if probably From a historic point of view, because I've been ballooning over Melbourne since the mid-90s, I've got a lot of low altitude aerial stuff of Melbourne that nobody else. You know, occasionally someone's done a ride in a helicopter, but, but in a helicopter you've usually got a ceiling of a thousand feet and you can't go below that.
A hot air balloon can go as low as it. It's like a yacht. You know what they say, the right of sale to, you know, powerboats got to give away to its yacht because the needs the wind and if they need to navigate at a various height, they've got to be there. And there's layers of wind in the morning. So you might have a northerly blowing really strong at 2 or 3,000ft and then you've got a southerly sitting underneath it or, and then you get down really low and in the morning there's the, the wind that the cool ear drains into Port Phillip Bay.
So they can come from say, Northcote, north of Melbourne there, come straight over the top of the city, slow down, get over Government House and then they drop, drop the balloon to under about, you know, under 300 meters, probably less, probably 150 meters and it'll just turn right and it'll head down to Albert Park.
[02:10:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:10:26] Speaker B: And that's how, you know, ballooning over Melbourne is some of the most difficult ballooning in the world because you only got a certain amount of places to, to land and you generally, a pilot will have a primary, secondary tertiary landing area picked out.
If that fails, they're in trouble.
But that, you know, you know, so often you read, oh, balloon almost crashes. They're not crashing, you know, that, you know, they'll come in low and slow and, you know, occasionally you'll come in and there's an ambulance waiting for you.
What are you doing? Oh, someone called and said there's a balloon crashing. Oh, we're just playing, you know. And you know.
[02:11:12] Speaker A: Yep.
[02:11:13] Speaker C: Wow. I've never done it. It's on the list for sure though. It sounds amazing.
[02:11:17] Speaker B: Oh, look, do it. If you're a photographer, it's great. And you know, if you like the city, you know, depending on the, you know, different tracks, you don't always go right over Melbourne. I'm not going to sugarcoat it and say do, but quite often you come close to Melbourne or occasionally you get a great track where you go over it and you look down on the tops of the buildings, you can, you know, photo look in people's backyards.
Quite Voyeuristic. Quite voyeuristic.
So, yeah, it's. It's good fun. So, okay, book a flight. They're all great operators, the Melbourne guys.
You know, I've done most of my work with Balloon man and Global Ballooning and their owners, Chris and Kif are very good friends of mine, you know.
You know, I flew with these guys. I went up once with these guys in 94 and I've been friends with them ever since. You know, it's just.
Yeah, it's been a wonderful thing.
[02:12:26] Speaker C: Let's talk Fujifilm. Just.
[02:12:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:12:30] Speaker C: To keep Greg happy.
What are you shooting with these days?
[02:12:36] Speaker B: Okay.
Got quite a bit of Fuji gear.
I'll tell you my Fuji story. Okay.
So in around about. I must have been 2012, 2013, Noel went overseas, no butcher, and he bought an X Pro one and that holy trinity of lenses. The 18 mil F2, the 35, 1.4 and the 60 mil 2.8. 2.8, 2.2.4, 2.4. Thank you.
And I looked at the work he bought. He did one of those cruises across Alaska and amongst other things. And I looked at the work and the photos just look so beautiful. And I thought, I'm going to get one of these and try it out. So I, I think I bought the three lenses and the camera.
And the X Pro one's a bit of a frustrating beast. The sensor is just sensational. What it can do. Yeah. When it, once it makes up its mind what to focus on, it's good.
Okay. I'm going to be honest about it, you know, but it's capable of taking great photos, you know, really, really good photos.
So as soon as the X Pro 2 came out, I think I got an XT1 which was marginally better, but not really that much better.
And then the X Pro 2 came out and the XT2 and all of a sudden the autofocus was locking in a lot easier. And that was it for me. You know, I've never seen a better set of lenses on a camera.
I'm not getting paid by Fuji. They, they've done, you know, they haven't, haven't. Haven't given me any camera skills. I've got to stress that.
[02:14:22] Speaker A: Not yet.
[02:14:24] Speaker B: Well, it would. They owe me a couple. I'll tell you what, I've sold a lot of cameras for them over the years just by recommending them.
But anyway, you know, I did all that power station work was done on, on the X Pro 2 and the XT2. And you know, as I was Saying you know meter wide prints they are just sensational. And since then I've owned the XT3, the XT4 4 XT. I've got two XT5s now and I've got a little X100T which I'd love to have upgraded to the current one but they're just so damn expensive for a fixed lens camera in my opinion and great for. It's fantastic for Fuji. I mean you know if someone wants to pay up near you know three grand for a fixed lens camera that's fine. And, and you know they brought out this 100 megapixel Goliath. Now that's a fixed lens camera for I don't know what is it Greg? You'd probably know what it's worth. It's probably seven grand or something. Yeah, 7:20 and I'm sorry you know I've been.
I'm sure there's a lot of mining engineers who really love it you know who've got that money to splash but most working photographers don't have that money to splash on a fixed lens camera. Why would you buy that as a working photographer when you can. Don't go away when I'm coming back.
[02:15:49] Speaker C: The suspense show and tell to make that bigger.
[02:15:54] Speaker B: Oh hang on. Are you okay unzipping a couple of cases?
[02:15:58] Speaker C: Okay.
[02:16:02] Speaker B: I love show so you know you can probably buy the Fuji 50s GFX 50s S2 with, with, with a zoom for virtually the same amount of money.
[02:16:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:16:20] Speaker B: Or not much change, not much difference. And you got a you know a great camera. It's pretty, I mean it's pretty compact for a medium format camera.
You know I find it's good it all that portrait work that you see there, the close up head shots in some of those galleries is done with that camera and a 100 mil 110 mil f2 lens which is all the lenses are so incredibly sharp.
I've never seen a better set of lenses. You know when I had Canon gear you know most of the lenses are pretty sharp, pretty good but they just weren't crisp like this I think I believe they've done some, some new models which are better these days.
[02:17:08] Speaker A: But no, not really.
[02:17:11] Speaker B: You know I'm just really happy now. Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect camera. None of them are perfect. Is it slow? You know I was talking to David Callow and he's he, he's done some beautiful photos. Absolutely ripper portraits on, on his 50s too and he was saying I just hate the way it won't decide where to focus. And this guy's, this guy's a, you know, world press photo winner for sports photography. You know, he knows what quick photograph, quick focus is all about.
Is, is, is, is the GFX 50s two that. No, it's not. But I mean, you know what, you want to go and get a Hasselblad 500 centimeters, you know, and, and pretend it's a sports camera, it's a medium format camera. It's not meant, it's not meant to be the things a lot of people criticize it for being.
[02:18:04] Speaker A: It's amazing.
[02:18:05] Speaker C: Only the only argument I'd say against that is Fujifilm. And this is, I would, I don't blame them. I do exactly the same thing is they do push the abilities of that system for sports and things like that in their marketing and they, and they get sports photographers to use it to, you know, and, and have images at the launch saying, oh, this was shot on the, the GFX or whatever. And obviously you can take great sports photos with a gfx. Absolutely you can. But it's probably like you say, it's not the tool for the job for someone that wants the most speed, the most reliability, you know, but, but they, they market it as like, hey, it could, it can do this and it can do that, that, but it's not, it's probably not the perfect tool for it, depending on what you're trying to do.
[02:18:53] Speaker B: My old boss, Stuart Pemberthy used to shoot sport on a speed graphic.
Okay, so he had a speed m, a speed graphic 5x4 plate camera.
He'd pre focus on an area of the ground and he'd wait for the sports people to run into it and take the photo when, when they got to the spot where it was in focus.
And he had a Graphmatic and the speed graphic had the capability of the focal plane shutter. It had a focal plane shutter and a leaf shutter. And he would take one shot with the focal plane shutter which would be at say a 250th of a second.
The second time you could shoot it again, but it would halve the shutter speed. So the second shot would be at a 1 25th of a second and he'd rack the plates in and out and then he'd cock the leaf shutter and take a third shutter. That was the equivalent of motor drive. Back in the day you could take photos with anything and that's right, but that's what was there back in the day. Now, you know, then we moved to, you know, medium format and then pretty quickly they went from Amiya Press into Nikons and things like that and motor drives and. But you're still manually focusing, you know. You know and you had to get pretty good at that. But to tell the truth, I've, I've had a play with the top line Sony. What's that? The A1?
[02:20:25] Speaker C: Is it one? Yeah, yeah.
[02:20:27] Speaker B: I mean holy, that thing can focus.
I mean it's just mind blowingly quick. And Fuji is, the XT5 is a lovely camera and you know, I'm not but Fuji need to do some serious improvement in the autofocus algorithms as far as I'm concerned. You know. And you know, because I'm not sponsored to them or any, I can say that with entire honesty, you know, do I need those fast autofocus algorithms? No, I don't need them. I'm photographing people and things and it's, the XT5 is totally fast. The, the GFX is totally fast enough for what I'm doing and I'm okay with that. But you know, let's not pretend it's something that it's not. I don't know what Fuji have done because they have always been behind the, you know, the autofocus speed has always been a little bit behind the eight ball in my opinion.
And they need to, they, they need to spend a little bit of extra time and effort into speeding that up. A lot of other things they've really improved majorly. The battery life on the original XTS and X Pros was, was woeful and that new battery they put in is great. And I'll say something for the new battery, the two, what is the 24250 or 260, whatever the number it is of that WP battery, it fits both the, the XX XTS and it fits the, the GFX.
So if you're running two systems it's great.
[02:22:05] Speaker C: You know, that's nice.
[02:22:07] Speaker B: I'm not sure.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
Well, it just makes sense you know, if you're working pro and you just need to run one set of batteries.
[02:22:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[02:22:16] Speaker B: You know, not sure if the X100, what is it? V1 or whatever it is. I'm not sure if they're running the new battery yet. And if they aren't, shame on Fuji for not having done it. If they are good on them because you know there'd be a lot of photographers who just run say an XT5, XT4 and, and, and, and have a X100 alongside it. As a second body.
[02:22:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[02:22:43] Speaker B: Which would make a lot of sense.
So if it's not running the same battery system, do you know that just.
[02:22:50] Speaker A: Greg, from memory, it's not. I think it's still using the original WP126 or the newer one, the 126S.
[02:22:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:22:58] Speaker A: But it has a higher capacity and supports Boost mode.
[02:23:01] Speaker B: But, but it's, it's, it's nowhere near as good as that new.
[02:23:05] Speaker A: The new high capacity battery is pretty.
[02:23:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So that, that would be an extra. You know, if they brought that in, I'd consider one. I think it'd be great. But you know, it's really.
[02:23:18] Speaker C: I have a question for you.
I asked this to Michael Coyne last week, but I'm going to ask you because I think your answer will be great.
What would they need to put into an a Fujifilm X Pro 4?
What changes would they need to make? What sort of camera would that X Pro 4 be for you to, to run out and buy one when it hits the shelves?
[02:23:42] Speaker B: Pretty simple, actually.
I love the X Pro 2 still. I'm actually, I still get it out and I still use it regularly. It's, it's, it's. I've just, I know it's quite a few years old now, but I just kind of got an emotional attachment to it, funnily enough. So what we were just talking about faster autofocus.
I'm actually pretty happy with it. You know, it. The, the new battery, I think, I think is the X Pro 3 of the new battery. If, if it doesn't have the new battery. Put the new battery in. Yeah. And, and, and auto focus, you know, if they put in the, the 40 megapixel sensor, so be it. But you know what? There's nothing wrong with a 28 megapixel sensor. And there's nothing wrong with the 16 megapixel sensors.
They're all incredibly good.
I mean, Fuji just make great lenses. Great color science. That's their strength.
[02:24:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:24:43] Speaker B: You know, I saw a video on them once where they're talking like, like Fuji, you know, where they make their money. They use their color science to make cosmetics.
[02:24:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, that's how they survived the death of film.
[02:24:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:24:54] Speaker A: They already had the, they already had the chemistry lab set up. They just, they just flipped it and went from developing chemicals and products for film to. Yeah, cosmetics. They, A new CEO came on when that happened and he said, look, let's just retool.
[02:25:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:25:13] Speaker A: And they survived, you know.
[02:25:15] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I, I can't Believe that a company's got such a range of cameras.
Yeah, I come to the day where you had the nickel Neff and the, the FM, FM2 or what, whatever, yeah, that's all you needed. And you know, I get lost with, you know, I think what they've just announced, the X2 X30, what's that one? The 33 or something's coming out, is the X70. The, you know, we need an X70.
[02:25:48] Speaker A: Successor, that's for sure.
[02:25:50] Speaker B: That's my favorite camera.
[02:25:53] Speaker A: But yeah, they do have quite a range and, and we see that.
[02:25:59] Speaker B: They'Re not the biggest camera company in the world, but the, you know, everything they make works. Everything works and everything's pretty good now.
You know, I'm sure if I, if I think if I was going to buy another camera other than Fuji and go back into 35 mil, I'd probably go to a Nikon. That would probably be my immediate thought. But I think they've done great strides in the last few years.
But the thing about the xt, I think that the series that slows Fuji down is. And I used to get this when I was working commercially in the 80s. So you know, you'd roll up and the client say, can you shoot this on medium format? We don't want 35 mil.
And there was a real hangover that, that stems from the birth of Leica, you know, that, that 35 mil wasn't real, real photography, wasn't real film and the image quality wasn't good enough. And I think there's still a lot of hangover there that the image quality isn't, isn't strong enough, isn't. And it's just crap. I mean the Fuji image quality is incredible, incredibly strong. You know, there's plenty of, plenty of pros using it and liking it and, and you know, nobody's, nobody's looking at the final image saying, oh, do you shoot that? You must have shot that in a full frame. 35 mil camera.
That's just rubbish these days. And it's kind of APSC is just.
It's apsc, isn't it? The format. But yes, it, it's, it's just fantastic. You know, it's, it's incredible. All cameras are great these days.
You know, there's hardly a camera made that doesn't take a brilliant photo, including the iPhone.
[02:27:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[02:27:56] Speaker B: You know, I've got a saying to photographers. This is the camera, this, you know, camera, whatever you got, it's just a piece of, it's a, it's a dumb piece of technology until you apply this to it, you know, and great photos can happen on any piece of technology.
Yeah, you know.
[02:28:18] Speaker A: Yep. It's very true. Amazing.
[02:28:21] Speaker B: Keep talking. I've got a low blood sugar. I'm a diabetic, so, you know, you don't want me falling down in front of the.
[02:28:31] Speaker C: Look, we are two and a half hours in. I'll actually. For the.
For the people that still remain or the people listening to this later on. Don't forget, if you're not subscribed. Oh, nice lollies.
If you're not subscribed to the Camera Life podcast, please subscribe and give us a. Like, hit the notifications, because the notifications will mean when we go live, you'll get a little notification saying, hey, they're live. We want to jump on, jump in the live chat, ask questions, do all that sort of stuff. And otherwise.
Yeah, listen to this. Later on, if you prefer audio listening afterwards, we are on Spotify, Apple podcasts, all that kind of stuff. So get around it. We're trying to grow this so that we can get more people on, like Andrew Chapman to tell their stories.
[02:29:16] Speaker B: I'm doing things.
Okay, these are some of the page proofs from Phil Frame.
[02:29:23] Speaker A: Yes.
[02:29:24] Speaker B: You can see it's going to be a big book.
Okay. That's at my head, and I'm not using the wide angle to make it look bigger.
[02:29:32] Speaker C: Head for scale.
It's about a head and a half. Roughly.
[02:29:36] Speaker B: When we. When we. We did this book, I. I wanted it for photographers. These are some of the proofs.
We've made a few changes since then, but we're using a glossier stock than this.
But, you know, look at the double pages.
[02:29:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:29:53] Speaker B: Another drone photo.
You know, it's.
I'm just. I'm just really excited about seeing this book land next week. Yeah.
[02:30:12] Speaker C: So. So tell us. Tell us about.
When did you make the decision to start putting the book together? Tell us about it.
[02:30:19] Speaker B: Tell.
[02:30:19] Speaker C: Tell us everything.
[02:30:21] Speaker B: Well, as you know, I've already done a lot of books, but look, getting old. Knowing that you get to 70, you're getting to the pointy end of your life.
And as I was saying earlier, you know, if you want to leave a legacy, I mean, I'm not the world's best photographer. I don't. I don't.
You know, but I'm. I'm a solid photographer. I'm a good photographer. I know that. And I've done some good images. I've done some solid images over in my life. And, you know, do you Want to leave a visual legacy for people to see and maybe it's ego, I don't know, but I do.
And I decided I wanted to do that. I had a little bit of help, some seed funding from a friend of mine, Barry Novi, to get the project rolling and in the end, you know, I've put the money up for the Print Runner and it's an expensive print run, it's an expensive book, you know, it's, it's not a cheap book. It's $185 which you know, a lot of photographers go off. I think I'll keep that money for lens, thanks. But you know, and I understand that, you know, that's fine but that's what it costs to do a book, you know, to do it properly. If I'm lucky I'll get my money back.
I've done, we've done a, we've started with a 250 edition run and if there's demand on it we, we, you know it takes us about a month to do another run and get them done, get them, get them delivered.
[02:31:55] Speaker C: Is that kind of the smallest run that you can do? That, that works 250. Is that like. So if you had to do another.
[02:32:01] Speaker B: No, it's not. We can do 250. The beautiful thing about digital printing, we're using a press in Melbourne called Bamber Press.
We had a choice between them. There was another, a great, great digital printer called Adam's Print down at Geelong but unfortunately dissolved into some, another company now. But Adam Bamber has been great to me and you can print one book if you want. It cost you a lot of money to do a book like that as a single book. But you can do one book, you can do 10.
The more you do, the cheaper the unit price is. That's, that's, that's the truth about it.
Yeah. And you know we went down there, we looked at that set of proofs that I was just picking up and showing you a minute ago. I went down there.
No butcher's pretty anal about print production and print quality and he says thorough. I say his own channel but I think, but he went over and we, we tweaked a few files. We didn't like the matte stock.
The printer said this match stock, a lot of photographers going for it but it's like a vacuum cleaner of contrast and flatten the prints out something shocking. So we went to a semi gloss stock and I pumped a, I pumped quite a few of the Images with another 5, 10% contrast effectively, but it's still a nervous wait waiting to see the first copy and hoping you get it now.
[02:33:38] Speaker A: You're cutting it pretty close, Andrew. So the book launch for Fill the frame is Saturday the 11th of October.
[02:33:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:33:44] Speaker A: And that's. That's in conjunction with the Ballarat International Photo Biennial.
[02:33:53] Speaker B: Thank you.
[02:33:54] Speaker A: No one knows how to say that word. It's a stupid word.
Oh, yeah. Wonderful festival. Yeah, we love it. We're all for it.
So, you know, in sort of less than two weeks you've got your book launch. So that's.
Tell us about what that's going to involve.
[02:34:09] Speaker B: Deadlines.
[02:34:12] Speaker A: Deadlines and nervous energy.
[02:34:15] Speaker B: The books are going to be ready Wednesday next week. Hopefully they know the book launches on. So I'm just hoping they come through for me.
I'll be sweating until then.
Not just that they arrive, but that they look good.
Yeah.
So it's part of book week down there at the biennale at 101 Lydiard Street, North Ballarat.
Come down if you want to come down 101 Lydiard Street. I think if you go onto the Ballarat Biennale website, there'll be a link to it.
[02:34:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I got it. Oh, you got it.
[02:34:58] Speaker B: I'm meeting a lollip, by the way.
[02:35:01] Speaker C: It's okay. Yeah.
[02:35:02] Speaker B: So there you go.
[02:35:03] Speaker C: Yeah. If you go to the website, you can go find the book launch.
You can book for it and at. The cost is included. Included with the festival pass.
[02:35:10] Speaker B: It's. Yeah, I think it's. I think it's actually a free event, that particular one. But if you want to see other events and there's a great show on Catherine Leroy, who was a French photojournalist who was in Vietnam 1966-1968, and she got in really close.
So that's. I think that her book launch follows mine.
Unfortunately, there's not an exhibition with it. I'd love to have had an exhibition, but that. That wasn't happened. So it's just a book launch, but come down and say hello.
Michael Coyne is going to just do a quick introduction. He'll be there if you want to see. Say hi to Michael as well.
There'll be quite a lot of photographers down there, I suspect.
And Alan Atwood, journalist, veteran journalist from the age, who's the keen photographer himself. He's going to be there.
It'll be fun. It'll be fun.
[02:36:19] Speaker A: Our only regret is that we'll be at. At BFOP that weekend.
[02:36:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:36:23] Speaker C: Right.
[02:36:23] Speaker B: First. Yeah. I mean, you know, why didn't you call me before? You made that arrangement.
[02:36:28] Speaker A: I blame the BFOP people for that.
[02:36:30] Speaker C: I think we consider it, we locked it in last year.
[02:36:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well that was probably before I decided on this. Having said that, I probably shouldn't say this yet but I'm also hoping to do an event in Melbourne later on maybe November 1st at Magnet Galleries that day and just on book production and, and putting books together and we'll have Anna Wolf, my great book designer along with Phil Campbell who designed the Mallee and the Wimmera and has, has just putting out launching on the 24th a book on Melbourne interiors. All shot, well, all the contemporary shots shot on his Fuji and I loaned him my 8 to 16 mil wide angle just to do some of the, the very tight interiors.
He had an issue with his wide angle lens.
So there's, it's, it's kind of book month October. There's lots of happening but, but Noel will be there. Michael Silver who's, you know, been around in photography in Melbourne for a long time.
I'm sure a couple other people will rock up a couple of other photographers on the day. So that's, I haven't even put anything out about it yet but I'm telling you, you're first to know.
[02:37:53] Speaker C: You heard it here, heard it, you.
[02:37:55] Speaker B: Heard it here first. Yeah, yeah.
And you know, like I said, I'm just hoping I, I hoping, hoping enough people want to put their hands in the pocket and I'll get my money back. That's that's all. You know, it's not a profit making business publishing book, I can tell you. But yeah, it's a little bit egocentric, I'm not going to deny that. But you know, hopefully it'll be a beautiful work and, and people will enjoy the images. You know, that's what it's about.
[02:38:23] Speaker A: Yeah, no doubt.
And so the book is also available on 10 bag press which is the, you have used for a number of your books.
So that's already up for pre order on that website.
[02:38:38] Speaker B: Yes. So grab it from there as well. Delivery will only be a week away or so now. So that's 10bagpress.com Adam McNicholl is the proprietor, He's a Ballarat based publisher and we've done, you know, we've done some great, you know, I met him, I talked about designer Phil Campbell before and Phil got me to come and work on a project on a book on Menangitang, a social history of manangutang and Adam wanted to do this book and he gone to Phil and then Phil Suggested I come up and do it. And we all hit it off pretty well. We had a ball doing it, made no money. You know, they gave me a thousand bucks, which probably barely covered anything, but, you know, it wasn't about the money. You know, it's not always about the money. I wanted to do something in the country, and I got a stack of great shots up there. And then, you know, we used to sit around and have a bit of a chat to the fact.
And, you know, he said, I want to do a book on the Mallee. And that's, that's how the whole Mallee concept came. And I said, I can put a team of photographers together to do this book.
[02:39:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:39:47] Speaker B: And, you know, we managed. And that way we managed to do it in a very short time. And then we did the Wimmera and then the Western District. And, you know, I would have kept going, you know, if I was 10 years younger. We'd be doing, you know, we actually mapped out the central gold fields, Northeast, the east, east, eastern, west, eastern, southwest. Gippsland is two different books. You know, I would have done them all, but, you know, time and tide, you know, I can't do it at the moment.
[02:40:22] Speaker A: Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough, indeed.
[02:40:25] Speaker C: Maybe some other photographers will take up the mantle.
[02:40:29] Speaker B: Well, you know, there's lots of young, keen photographers out there. You know, you've got to make these things happen. You know, be energetic, get out there, get out there with you. You, you know, help each other. You know, photography is not about. I know this, and you're not going to know it. I'm not going to tell you what I know. Tell people what you know. You know, they're not gonna.
Then, you know, people still know. You had the person, the person with the idea or whatever. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm. I believe in sharing. Not, not, not, not, not keeping things away from people. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's my motto, you know, and helping other photographers climb the ladder. You know, it's like a family out there.
And, you know, if people are interested in photography, that's a wonderful thing, you know?
[02:41:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's. It's exactly why we do what we do here on the podcast.
[02:41:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Absolute.
[02:41:23] Speaker A: Yep. To remove all those barriers and make it accessible for anyone to learn.
[02:41:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:41:29] Speaker A: Or to ask, you know, there's no shame in asking for help. And the, the greatest thing that we can do, photographers, is to answer those calls for help, you know, share.
[02:41:40] Speaker B: Absolutely.
Talking about answering calls for help if I could. So you probably want to go.
Go anyway. We're fine.
I showed you earlier.
Greg. I think Justin.
[02:41:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[02:41:53] Speaker B: I've got to hook it into the frame there.
That's my copy box for photographing.
Can you see that? Yeah, that's an old Bowens Illumitran Copies copy scan with my gear with my XT5 Fuji on it. And I was having trouble getting images edge to edge sharp and with. With the conventional Fuji 60 mil and. And most lenses fail because they can focus towards the center but they can't keep to the edge.
But there's a. I bought this rodent stock 75 mil APO Radagon F4 lens from China of all places for 200. I'd seen them advertised for 400, $500 on eBay.
Anyway, came in, it's in perfect condition and it's working good and it is virtually flat field. It'll virtually get edge to edge sharpness on slides.
So I'm able to shoot them all on raw and get. Get pretty good control over it. I've got over in the corner of the room. Let's see if you can see. See those two filing cabinets? They're full of slides and.
[02:43:09] Speaker C: Oh wow.
[02:43:10] Speaker B: They're not my greatest shots. They're just shots that I took. You know, they're record shots of a lot of stuff. But I'm kind of, you know, I'm going to just digitize the whole lot very quickly and then maybe if I need to I can. I don't know if I'll get rid of them. I'm two minds with it.
[02:43:27] Speaker C: You can't do that.
[02:43:31] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, what's the family going to do with them in.
You know, I'll probably be gone in 10 years. So what's the family?
[02:43:40] Speaker A: That's their problem.
[02:43:42] Speaker B: It is their problem. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I think now.
[02:43:46] Speaker A: The kids will sort that out. Whatever.
[02:43:49] Speaker C: They can have a slide night.
[02:43:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, slide nights. I can remember slide nights.
Netax. My. My father bought it.
I think he bought it in Japan funnily enough of a German camera. Anyway, he was with the Australian Wheat Board and stationed up in Japan for 10 months in 1963. And he shot all these ectochromes, two and a quarters inch. And we used to have slide nights. And I can still remember getting the old slide projector as I must have been 10 and shining it through the back window down the ground.
We used to love having slide dots. They were a great feature. Of things, you know. Yeah, it's a simple life back then.
[02:44:33] Speaker C: It's. It's a shame that that has kind of disappeared because everything's so shared so rapidly person to person. You don't gather around something anymore to view images. People just see them on their, on their social media feeds or, or whatever separately.
[02:44:52] Speaker B: Well, there's a, there's a, there's a podcast for you. You set up a slide projector night with two or three photographers and, and get, get their best. Best get. Tell them to put their 10 best photos in but 10 best slides and talk about them.
[02:45:11] Speaker C: So a live slide night where we have the projector, the camera is pointed at a projector and we have another camera point pointed at the, you know, the three or four photographers gathered around the microphones and stuff. And it's just, it's literally a lot. Okay, I'm gonna do that.
I love that live slide.
[02:45:29] Speaker A: Well, I mean, on Monday evenings when we have our random photography show, we already do image review so people can send us their images and we talk.
[02:45:36] Speaker C: Live and kind of is a slide night, isn't it? But this is like digital.
[02:45:40] Speaker A: Taking it the next level.
[02:45:42] Speaker B: I'm not giving you my images to review. I might cry myself to sleep.
[02:45:47] Speaker C: We don't, we don't really review them. Yeah, no, we don't even. We barely even critique them. Everything was basically like, that's very cool. And then we talk about the.
[02:46:01] Speaker B: Yeah, you don't say, I think you should take up Tapestry.
[02:46:04] Speaker A: No, no, no, no, no.
[02:46:06] Speaker C: I would, I would love to do a.
I'd have to pre warn people though, but I'd love to do a comedy version of it where we just, we roast every photo that comes up, no matter how good it is and say how terrible it is.
Yeah, but we need to be, we need to prepare people for that.
But yeah, we basically just look at the photos and talk about how, how much fun it is taking. Taking photos and what gear they've used and stuff like that. It's not really a critique or anything like that.
[02:46:31] Speaker A: And like you said earlier, we check out their EXIF data, if it's there. We talk about the shooting conditions and the settings and, you know, it's breaking it down.
We love.
[02:46:41] Speaker C: Sometimes they've got questions about, you know, how they could have done it better or whatever, but most of the time it's just. I mean, some of the shots that David Leporardi sent in of. He's an ex RAAF photographer, he's got shots of jets flying over Sydney Harbour that He shot with medium format film hanging out the back of a, you know, a big jet prop plane.
[02:47:05] Speaker B: I think those RAAF photographers I know Brian Carr who lives down in Wonthaggi these days, who worked for up at Sale for the raaf. He's got some great stories about, you know, going into them. They give you a set of gear and you get this Linhoff master technique and a set of lenses and you know. Yeah.
And is developing technique for doing, you know, 510, eight prints at once in a tray, you know, so you got, you know, prints that big and you, and you, you're doing 500 at a time.
[02:47:44] Speaker A: Wow.
[02:47:44] Speaker B: They actually taught them pretty well. They taught them a lot of pretty interesting technique and that.
[02:47:49] Speaker A: Yeah, well, we still have to get. To get some people on that, that do, you know, defense force photography. But there's a lot of red tape for them to go through to get current.
[02:48:03] Speaker B: You're just talking about. I reckon Brian, Brian, Brian Carr would be a good chat with you. He, he's just done a book on called Music City. He's been photographing bands in, in fringe pubs around Melbourne for 40 years, 50 years and.
But you know, he can talk about all those early days in the R.
Don't, don't get ones. They're all sworn to secrecy. You know, they'll tell you what's going on.
[02:48:32] Speaker C: Lucinda says she's got trauma from having prints ripped up in front of her.
Imagine that. You're so proud of this image and they're just junk.
[02:48:41] Speaker B: Just hang on, just hang on one second. No, come up here.
Noel's just arrived for a bowl of soup, so hopefully he's going to come and show his face. Here he is, here's the man himself. There you go.
[02:48:59] Speaker C: What do you got there?
[02:49:00] Speaker A: Oh, just some prints for him.
[02:49:01] Speaker B: But you're not allowed to keep him.
[02:49:02] Speaker A: Too long because he promised to make me lunch.
[02:49:07] Speaker C: We'll let him go and make you some soup.
[02:49:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:49:11] Speaker A: What's your specialty, Andrew? What's your specialty? Soup. What's your favorite?
[02:49:14] Speaker B: We got Thai pumpkin soup today.
Take you guys to get up here and I'll say, sorry, it's all gone, I'm afraid. But yeah, no, he's just been doing some.
That's the. Sorry, the back. It's in plastic wrap.
[02:49:35] Speaker A: Oh, that's one of the, one of the sheds.
[02:49:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the back cover photo of the book too.
[02:49:40] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[02:49:42] Speaker B: Yeah, guy called Peter Stewart who's unfortunately passed away now. But there's a real intensity to the gaze. Yeah, yeah, yeah, looking, looking into the camera.
[02:49:53] Speaker C: You know, every time I scroll past that photo on the website, it just, it instantly grabs you.
[02:50:00] Speaker A: It does grab you.
[02:50:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[02:50:02] Speaker C: Instantly.
[02:50:03] Speaker B: Well, yeah, yeah.
[02:50:07] Speaker C: I'll have to get myself a copy when it's, when it's available. I can't wait. I'm on a book buying spree at the moment. It's, it's a, it's a heavy investment but I'm trying to build a little bit of, a little bit of a library. Just trying to slowly. Basically anyone that comes on the podcast that's got a book, I'm buying it.
And I figure at some point that'll all come together. Of a collection of interviews and books and things that I've. I don't know. I don't know what it's going to be, but it's something.
[02:50:31] Speaker A: Yeah. So building your own legacy.
[02:50:34] Speaker C: Exactly. Documenting this.
[02:50:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I did. I didn't even get around to talking about printing photos and all the swagger. 10 by 8 prints and the boxes and boxes of prints we've got from the dark room.
[02:50:50] Speaker A: We might have to get you back for a part three.
[02:50:52] Speaker B: Well, it might have to do. Well, I listened to your black and white one with my good friend Brent Lukey and a couple other photographers talking about black and white. I think I had this conversation with you, Greg, privately, but they all knew lots about black and white that. But they hadn't lived back in the day when we were shunting through 40, 50 rolls a week and doing things like that. My boss, you know, he used to tell me back in the day everyone was smoking, right? And they'd have these square, big deep Kodak tanks full of whatever D76 usually Kodak D76. So you go in with, with, with the, the plate, those 5 by 4 inch plate negatives, right. And lower sensitivity film. So probably 50 ISO something like that.
You, you get in, unload, turn off the light, unload the five by four sheets. Put them in the, in the, the holders, drop them in the tank and wiggle them a bit. Put the lid on, turn the light back and light a fag.
You know, you do this, you know.
Ah, thanks. Nearly gone. Okay, turn off the light, lift the lid, pull the, pull the images up by the back. Puff up the cigarette.
If you could see the image through the back of the negative, you whacked it straight in the fixer. If you couldn't see it, you put it back in for another minute or two. And that's called developed by inspection.
It's true story. That's what they used to do the other quick one for getting negatives drawing into the enlarger. I think, Noel, you might be able to confirm this is using methylated spirits to quick dry. So you, you develop the dick fix.
Half a minute wash, stick it into, stick it into methylated spirits, pull it out squeegee or wipe it with your fingers and the methylated spirits would virtually dry straight away. And then you can whack the negative into the. Into the enlarger and print it straight away.
Probably wasn't overly great for archival purposes, but when you had a deadline, it was the way. So that was. That was the fast way to. To get stuff through.
Yeah. Anyway.
[02:53:16] Speaker A: Amazing.
[02:53:17] Speaker C: I love it.
[02:53:17] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll have to do.
[02:53:18] Speaker C: Yeah, we might have to do a show.
A show of sort of. I don't know what the topic would be. Yeah, just like old school, working photography. You know, what, what it was really like.
[02:53:30] Speaker B: Yeah, Noel would definitely be good for that.
I'm much younger than him. But, but you know, there's some great stories from some of those old days. Some of the great old photographers around, you know, Bruce Postle, John Casamenno, people like that, they've got great old stories, you know. Know.
[02:54:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[02:54:04] Speaker A: Yep. We want to capture them.
[02:54:06] Speaker C: Exactly. We're going to get through everybody. That's the plan.
[02:54:08] Speaker A: Yep. Yep. Every single person.
I think that might be a good place to park this episode for now, but I feel like they're. To be continued. Should be, you know, flashing across the screen at any moment. Justin can just make that happen.
But I, I think we'll wrap there for the day.
Look, Andrew, as always, it has been an absolute honor and delight to catch up with you once again and to hear of your ongoing body of work. It, you know, it feels like it's never stopped, it's never finished.
And I think that's, that's one of your superpowers, is that there's always an opportunity to take another shot.
So let's just go and do it. Get up early, get yourself out, take the shot.
But, but on behalf of us here, just thank you so much for your time today once again.
And just to remind everyone who's watching or listening along that at the Ballarat photo.
Ballarat International photo.
[02:55:05] Speaker B: Bien Ali.
[02:55:06] Speaker A: Thank you. Andrew's having his book launch. Fill the frame. It's on the 11th of October.
[02:55:12] Speaker B: Midday.
[02:55:12] Speaker A: At the 11th of October 12 to.
[02:55:14] Speaker B: 1101 Whittier Street North. Ballarat Street North. Yep.
[02:55:19] Speaker A: But if you head to either, if you head to the. The Bauer International Photo Biennale.
Thank you. I still can't get it right. Still the. All the details for the book launcher there. If you're in town or if you're in the area, drop on by. Say good day to Andrew and, and throw some support in his direction. But we wish you all the best at the launch. We're sorry we can't be there, but we're looking forward to having you back on in the future and chatting more about how that went and how. How your other projects are going.
[02:55:52] Speaker B: Good. Well, hopefully I've got some other ones to tell you about next time, but I can certainly tell you about the past.
Yeah. And, you know, hopefully I'll have something new to tell you.
[02:56:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And we look forward to it.
[02:56:05] Speaker B: Like you said, the black and white one, I think that's a great idea. And the slide.
[02:56:09] Speaker C: Let's do it. I think the slide night. I want to do the slide night with you. And we need a couple other photographers that have some. Some images and we'll. I think that'd be a great time. So let's. Let's make that happen.
[02:56:19] Speaker B: Yep. Okay.
[02:56:20] Speaker A: But we will let you get to your Thai pumpkin soup.
And we envy Noel of that opportunity.
[02:56:30] Speaker B: Just encourages you. Yeah.
Oh, dear.
[02:56:34] Speaker A: But, yeah, on that note, I think we'll roll the music and say our farewells.
[02:56:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll play some music and we'll. We'll talk to some people in the chat, bring up some comments, because Philip Johnson says until Monday. Until Monday. Philip, good to see you as always.
Matt Palmer, Photography Judge says anyone that would rip up a print in front of you is a worse teacher or judge than you could ever be a photographer.
[02:56:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:56:56] Speaker B: True story.
[02:56:58] Speaker C: See you, Matt. Rodney Nicholson, good to have you. Roy, good to see you.
Who else have we got? I think there was a few. Lisa Leach said, another incredible episode. Thanks, guys, and Andrew, for sharing your amazing stories. Ian Thompson says, as a former hot air balloon pilot, there is nothing more serene than an early morning flight. That's beautiful. And who else we got? I don't know. There was a ton of people. Bruce Moyle had to leave early. Thanks, Bruce. Thanks, Lucinda. Thanks, everybody.
We'll catch you guys on the next one.
[02:57:27] Speaker A: Be safe. Bye, everyone.
[02:57:28] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Thank you.
[02:57:30] Speaker A: You're very welcome.
