EP27 Matt Krumins and the Bright Festival of Photography

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Good morning and welcome to the Camera Life podcast. This is episode 27. It's here in Victoria, Australia. It's 09:00 a.m. on Thursday the 22 August and the Camera Life podcast is brought to you by the team at lucky camera straps. Good morning, everyone. [00:00:22] Speaker B: Good morning and welcome. [00:00:23] Speaker C: Morning. [00:00:25] Speaker A: If you're following along at home or while you're out jogging or while you're at work, be sure to subscribe to our channels. Either the Camera Life YouTube channel or the lucky Camera straps YouTube channel. And don't forget that our back catalogue of all of the most recent podcasts and the ones from previous years are available on those channels and on audio podcasts, channels such as Apple, Spotify and Amazon. [00:00:52] Speaker B: That's right. I've heard some rumors they're hard to find on Apple podcasts, but it's there. Just keep searching. We are there. [00:00:59] Speaker A: We might put a link in the, in the comments. [00:01:01] Speaker C: Maybe better when you have to work for it. So. [00:01:05] Speaker B: That's right. We did it on purpose. [00:01:08] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. [00:01:09] Speaker A: Last week we were. We were joined by Greg Carrick, who has been on the show before, but he co hosted with us last week to talk about a topic that we've all been pondering about why we shoot, who we take photos for anymore, and what do we do with them. So that was a really interesting chat. And I think it's something that every photographer reaches a point where they go, what am I doing this for anymore? And, and what's happened to those hard drives or boxes full of prints? Why are they still in boxes? What am I doing with them? So that was a really great chat. Watch that on the channel. Now, today on the podcast, we have Justin and myself from Team Lucky Jim is still on holiday somewhere. We might try and get him on at some point. But I'm, you know, later in the show. [00:01:55] Speaker B: Later in the show, I'll show you why he can't make it to the podcast. I got a video, actually. We'll do it again. [00:02:00] Speaker A: Okay. Is that. Is that for the after Dark channel there? [00:02:03] Speaker C: It's. [00:02:03] Speaker B: It's for the very creepy things channel. I'll show you. [00:02:06] Speaker A: Okay. And today we're joined by Matt Crummons, who is a long time wildlife photographer, photography educator. I see that he does street photo workshops. He does all sorts of workshops. But he's also the director of the Bright Festival of Photography, which is coming up here in Victoria, Australia, very, very soon. And Matt's been good enough to spare some time from his hectic schedule to talk everything photography with us. So welcome Matt. [00:02:38] Speaker C: Morning. Thanks for having me along. I should also mention one of the directors there. There are two of us and we usually direct in completely opposite directions. [00:02:46] Speaker A: So you're referring to Nick? [00:02:48] Speaker C: Absolutely referring to Nick, yeah. Big shout out to Nick Fletcher. Yep. [00:02:52] Speaker A: Nice, nice. That. [00:02:56] Speaker B: That I'd love to know, like how. So I think I was on the website because I'm very excited about this festival and I think I saw Nick. Nick started it, like, founded this from an idea when he was drinking or something. Or an adair, basically. [00:03:13] Speaker C: Yeah. It's a really. I mean, it sort of sets the entire tone of the festival, to be perfectly honest. So Nick is. He's got a real life in the real corporate world. He's a. He does a lot of rally motorbike photography and sort of sports photography stuff, but. But his real world is a corporate world and. And he's quite heavily involved with the Monash Gallery of art. And I. And one of the years going back must be eight years now. The Monash gallery was putting on an event and they needed a beer sponsor or someone to sponsor the drinks for that particular event. And he happened to be friends from a corporate life with one of the managers of the bright brewery at the time. And so he approached the bright brewery and said, basically, look, do you want to sponsor this art kind of event? Because Bright brewery was still growing. It was not small, but it was a lot smaller than what it is now. And the deal they struck was, we'll sponsor the beer, but throw us a festival in October because it's a quiet period in the year. I mean, Bright's got almost back to back festivals. You know, there's the. Through winter you've got, obviously, the ski season. Through autumn you've got the most beautiful place in Australia. And across summer, a lot of mountain biking stuff. But there's this real weird gap at the end of spring that there just wasn't anything really happening. And so Nick said, oh, what sort of festival do you want me to put on? Because, you know, he's got ties into sports and all sorts of other things and. And they said, oh, we don't care, basically. But you like photography. We don't have a photography festival. And so, yeah, the deal was struck and the bright brewery hosted our first beef op. I was there as an instructor, not. Not organizing anything, saw just how much of a shit show it was and put my hand up to help kind of corral it into something different. And, yeah, ever since, Nick and I have worked pretty closely together to build it into what it is now. And obviously, all the people that come along, our instructors and brands and stuff like that, have shaped it into what it is now, which is a pretty amazing community festival. [00:05:15] Speaker B: What was the year that first year? [00:05:18] Speaker C: It's a good question. I want to say it was 2017. I believe it was 2017. Yeah. I think this is our 7th year, but every time it gets closer to festival time and everyone says, oh, how many years is this? We still have the same argument where we can't work out whether a six, seven or eight. I'm pretty sure we're on year seven. [00:05:38] Speaker A: Covid. [00:05:39] Speaker C: All the COVID years. [00:05:40] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Since. Since we are right at the start of the show and there'll probably be more people watching at the moment, we probably should really quickly say it is. It's 50 days, 2 hours, 49 minutes and 41 seconds until. Until the kickoff of the Bright festival of photography. There are still tickets available. I think I'm gonna hopefully get mine after this episode, if they're still available, Matt, because you want to just give everyone that's listening that may not know about this festival, like, a real quick rundown of what it is, and then we're gonna dig deeper into all that sort of stuff and what you do. [00:06:18] Speaker C: But elevator pitch. [00:06:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:21] Speaker C: So the festival is really something that has been designed over the years to get you out of your comfort zone and to, I guess, give you an opportunity to explore things you wouldn't have normally explored in photography. And that's kind of how we encourage people to do it. So we essentially have. I think this is. There's 36 instructors from all walks of life. You know, we've got some of Australia's top instructors. We've got some of the brands bringing people. I've just loaded up some of these newbies this morning. So we've got canon, Sony, and Fuji bringing up some new people this year. KL's got a new ambassador up there this year as well. But basically, our instructors run workshops throughout the weekend. So this year we've got. We're still counting. We're ticking up at the moment, but I think it's at 120 something workshops at the moment run across the three days. And the idea of them is they're not your typical workshop where you would have, you know, six people or eight people. And it's a really thorough, in depth thing. These workshops are, you know, 20 people. You know, they're relatively short and sharp. You know, an hour and a half. You know, some of them are quite long, but most of them about the hour and a half mark. And the idea is really to walk away with two or three, you know, new techniques, tips, tricks, you know, some great photos and to really just get exposure to all these photographers that you would just never see in the same place at the same time. And to be honest, a lot of our photography instructors up there, they don't actually run workshops, so you can't access them outside of a festival like this. So we've got the workshop side of things and then we have our befop HQ where we host, you know, some really quite major brands. You know, call it a trade show because that's sort of a horrible term, but, you know, we've got all the sort of touch and try gear there, we've got talks on stage, we've got some special events happening through the evenings and we have a bar sponsored by Bright Brewery, which is an important part of the festival, but it's really about just meeting people, getting your camera out, having some fun, exploring new things. Our workshops range from like landscapes, which are, you know, pretty well done all the way through things like nude projection art and stuff. So you've got like anything under the sun, which is pretty, pretty awesome. [00:08:31] Speaker A: Wow, that's amazing. [00:08:33] Speaker B: So kind of like almost like going to a beer festival versus going to a specific brewery for the night of go to a beer festival, you're going to taste everything from all over the place. Bits and pieces. [00:08:44] Speaker C: Exactly, yeah. And like, you can imagine most people get like four or five workshops in over the weekend and, you know, you'll always get people who say, oh, but I'm a landscape photographer, so I'm going to go on the landscape workshops. But, but the vast majority of people go, oh, I'm a landscape photographer, so I'm going to do this really wacky portrait workshop or food photography. And it's like, that's just your little taste tester to go, hey, you reinvigorate yourself, you learn something. And also you just meet a whole lot of cool people all trying new things. So it's almost like an adults, an adults opportunity to be a kid and just explore again, which is. Which is the vibe we try and kind of give out. [00:09:22] Speaker B: Love it. [00:09:23] Speaker A: Very nice. Yeah, very nice. [00:09:26] Speaker B: How so that. Sorry, sorry, Greg. I'm just find out, yeah, the tickets. So I buy a ticket and then, and then I use that ticket to, like, book into workshops. Is there a limit to how many I can go to? Or. And do they book out really early? Like, is it, is it. Am I going to find that I wanted to go that one that's already booked out. Yeah. How does it all work? [00:09:52] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll say. Almost certainly you'll want to go on one that's fully booked. [00:09:55] Speaker B: So is that part of the fun? It's like you want to try and get in and you miss out and you chat to people that went to it and you go, damn it. [00:10:03] Speaker A: Justin's asking purely for selfish reasons right now. Nothing to do with anyone else. [00:10:07] Speaker C: Special access at the beginning. Love it. Yeah. So the way the structure of it is probably best to explain how the ticketing works, because that'll kind of help to shape the next bit. But. So your tickets are 235 or something like that this year. And with your ticket, you get $350 or be fop dollars worth of credit to spend on workshops. And so we have a go live date, which is yet to be decided, but it'll be in the week of the 25 September. I think we're possibly looking at doing on the grand final Friday, you know, the day before the grand final, that public holiday that's looking like maybe a good option because less people will be tied up doing, you know, other bits, but we'll see. I'm not confirmed just for anyone who's watching in a fact check me, that we. It's a. It's a chaotic mess. When it goes live, we typically crash the website two or three times. It takes way longer than it should, and people are scrambling to get the workshops that they want because obviously, in a schedule as well, you need to have backup plans. And that's kind of the fun, because what it does as well is it forces you to probably miss out on some of the really, you know, the one you really wanted to go to, but then it makes you go, well, I better try this other thing. And all of a sudden, you're doing a workshop that wasn't the obvious one for you. And that kind of fulfills the philosophy as well, where you just, you. You're out there trying something new. So we actually have a lot of space on the workshops. So even after everyone's used all their credit, we're still only, like 60% full. And that means that, you know, it's not as though you're gonna not get to use your credit or not be able to book on workshops. It's really that there's always gonna be some. I'll call it the hot items. There's always hot ticket items. I'm sure we'll talk about some of those later, but they'll book out very quickly. But there's tons of stuff available and once everyone's had their opportunity to use the credit about a week or thereabouts, then people can go on and book more workshops with cash payments, credit card payments on the website. So you can jam pack your weekend and spend the fortune if you want, right? [00:12:07] Speaker B: So you can book more than what your ticket gives you befop dollars for. Then you have to use real dollars after that. [00:12:14] Speaker C: So on that first wave where you book your workshops with credit, you can't go over the credit limit. And that means that everyone gets a good opportunity to book stuff and you can't just get a couple of greedy people going in and booking everything. And so it's designed to kind of ration it out in a way that makes it really fair. And coming back to that philosophy of the festival, Nick's really passionate about this part especially, and that is that it's meant to be a community event where it's accessible for dollar 235. You should be able to turn up and have an incredible weekend with no extra asks for you. But you want to go to there and you want to go and book on everything and you want to do more and you want to do all the special items and stuff like that. You can also go and turn it into something else. And so it allows us to provide this festival experience to everyone at a really low entry rate. And you can still have a wicked time. It's not like you're going to turn up and go, oh, my gosh, actually, now I've got to pay extra for the sauce and cheese. You know, you. You can actually enjoy the whole thing with your ticket, but, yeah, of course, you can go to town afterwards, but only once everyone's had a fair go at actually getting their stuff in. [00:13:18] Speaker A: That's really cool. That's. Yeah, and I like that. That's one of the goals, is that it's community focused. It's. It's about everyone having a great time and having equal access and it being accessible. I think that's really important. [00:13:30] Speaker C: Yeah, that's it. And I think you can see that, like, these days, you know, I run workshops for a living and I, you know, workshops can be very expensive to go on and photography gear can be expensive to buy and experiences and travel and all that stuff. And I guess this is a real. Yeah, it tries to be a bit of a leveler. So it doesn't, you know, it doesn't sort of separate people out by what gear you've got. I mean, even our sponsors, when they turn up, if Canon or Nikon or, you know, Olympus or Om systems, I should say, and. Or Fuji running a workshop. It's not a, it's not a workshop on their brand. Everyone's welcome. They happen to be putting it on and so it creates, you know, that universal kind of community vibe. It's not people vying for attention, you know? [00:14:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:14:15] Speaker A: And who are some of the biggest supporters of the, of the festival? Matt, what are some of the big names from brands, the big names or do you have to be careful which ones you, which ones you leave in. [00:14:27] Speaker B: And forget who's your favorite sponsor? [00:14:30] Speaker A: Yeah, come on. [00:14:31] Speaker C: I know. I've definitely got favorites, that's for sure. Like you'd have to have a massive shout out for the team at Nikon. Julie Kimpton from Nikon is just an angel. And that's not because they specifically do everything or do a heap more than some of our other sponsors. One of the big things with Nikon is they've been there from the start when we were small and insignificant and it wasn't probably worth turning up. They turned up with everything, as did KL, KL Australia who do all the sort of lighting and stuff like that. They've always been a massive supporter of the festival. OM systems have been there from the start as well. I used to work for Olympus before I was involved in the festival, so I had some ties in there. You've got camera house, specifically Croydon Camera house. Nigel there organizes a lot of the retail partners and things and has done a lot of work with me to, to make those introductions and to get that ball rolling. Yeah. This year we've got a whole bunch of new sponsors coming on. We've got cannons joining us for the first time in seven years, despite our conversations every year. So that'll be a bit of fun. We've got Sony joining us as well. We've got the boys at Pixel one who do nissi filters and all that sort of stuff. Um, they've always, uh, over the last couple of years they've helped us out with sponsorship, prizes and things, but they're actually coming down, which is pretty awesome. We've got the guys from blonde robot who do Tamron. Um, they're there this year. Um, we have got. I'm just thinking through my little list. I actually wrote my little stuff yesterday. Um, obviously we've got Fuji, we got, um, you know, they've been obviously consistently throwing more and more at the festival, which is amazing as well. You know, om systems. I'm sure I've forgotten someone. I'm sure of it because we have so many of these conversations. And in fact, yesterday I had three phone calls about. About sponsorship opportunities. So it's growing. It's growing fast. [00:16:30] Speaker A: But I put you on the spot. You did? Well. [00:16:33] Speaker C: Yeah, look, I tried to get them all in there. I really just read the Internet of names and who's who and just sort of said it. There we go. I've got to hear camera house, Nikon, Fuji, Om systems, Kl, Sony, Canon, blonde robot and pixel one. They're all up there doing their thing this year. And again, I've probably forgotten someone because that's amazing. [00:16:48] Speaker A: That's huge support, isn't it? [00:16:50] Speaker B: And so will they or most of them or whatever. Will they be set up, did you say, in one location, like kind of a hall or something like that, where they've got equipment and people to talk? Yeah. Like, how does that work? [00:17:03] Speaker C: Yeah, so we've got. We call it Beefop HQ. It's just a fancy name for the bright community center, but we set that up. It's almost like, you know, we used to have trade shows in photography for those who maybe haven't been in photography for that long, you probably never experienced it, but we used to have these massive trade shows in, like, jeff's shed and things like that. And when they disappeared, it was kind of sad because you didn't ever have that opportunity to look around a room and sort of see all these different brands in one place and actually sort of sample the wares and pick things up and whatnot. So we've created a space in the community center there where we have all the brands on tables set up like a trade show, I guess. And the cool thing about that is that they all offer lone lenses for the weekend. So you're going off on a landscape workshop. You've always wanted to try a twelve to 24 mil Nikon 2.8. You just go up to Julie, sign a piece of paper, she'll throw a lens at you and you just bring it back when you're finished. You want to borrow a 600 mil f 420 grands worth of lens for a sports workshop. No issues, just take it and bring it back later. So it's a really cool vibe that we've got and. And it's an awesome opportunity to pick up gear you would never normally get to touch in a real world environment. You know, maybe the camera shop, but not actually pick it up and ask the questions and actually take it on a workshop. [00:18:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:24] Speaker C: Yeah, that's it. [00:18:25] Speaker A: That's massive. [00:18:26] Speaker C: Yeah, it's pretty cool. And you can see, like, in people's faces when they're, like, holding this golden lens they've never been able to get their hands on. It's just like the excitement, as I said, it's like it's that childlike, you know, moment again. [00:18:38] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, we all love it. Yeah, we all love it. We've all got gas and fomo. [00:18:42] Speaker C: That's right. [00:18:43] Speaker A: And so with the people that you draw in to present workshops, how does that relationship form? Is it, do you reach out to people that you think would fit? It will fill a gap, or do people express interest? How does that all play out? [00:18:58] Speaker C: It's kind of a combination. I mean, initially it was Nick, you know, he called. Within the very first year, I actually got a phone call from this british bloke, and I just quit my job and started my business, and out of the blue, this guy called me with a british accent and goes, do you want to meet for coffee in the city? I've got this thing to talk about. And I'm like, who are you? And what's going on? And so he went around and basically called a whole bunch of people who he knew through different contacts or heard about or whatnot and really just sort of begged them to come along. Over the years, we've retained everyone we've kept with the exception of a couple of people here and there. We've sort of just built on this group of instructors. And so we've got some veterans that have been a lot of veterans who have been there since year one. New photographers usually come along, generally speaking, with the brands, we try to be quite selective about going, look, we don't want to present a festival where it's just someone who's pretty good at photography but maybe doesn't have the workshop experience. It's a different thing to teach it in a simple way that makes sense with really valuable information versus just doing it. So we try and kind of make sure we vet that pretty heavily. And part of the way we do it is to go out to the brands and say, look, you know, we don't want to. We don't want to be the place that charges per square foot for a trade show. That's. That's not us. Instead, what we go is, how can you add value to the entire festival where everyone benefits, and then that kind of, you know, pays your way, I guess. And so, you know, Nikon, they've got Christopher Hopkins coming up again this year. In the past, you know, they've brought up Mark Watson to do sports photography. They've brought up a whole range of people. And this year Fuji's got Ian Tan. He's coming along for the first time. [00:20:37] Speaker A: Ian's a Camera life podcast alumni. [00:20:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I saw that. We've got some. Yeah, some of the canon guys are coming up this year. They're running some workshops, but a lot of our instructors are prior relationships and it's kind of word of mouth or introducing, you know, a photography colleague or something. And then we vet it pretty heavily from there, so. Yeah, but at the same time, we get people contacting us all the time. And as I said, we have those conversations. We usually try and take people out for a beer and do like, the speed dating pub test and see how they go. [00:21:11] Speaker A: Classy. Love it. [00:21:13] Speaker C: Exactly. But we're always open to hearing from new people, that's for sure. Some of the gems out there are the ones that aren't the big names who have already been seen by everyone. [00:21:24] Speaker A: Yep. And talking about the workshops, Matt, what are some of the more obscure you talked about? You know, there's these big ticket items that everyone loves to jump at. Yeah. What are some of the most popular workshops and what are some of the more obscure ones that you've got running in 2024 for befop? [00:21:40] Speaker C: Oh, God, there's so many of them. Let me pull up my. I'm gonna pull up my notes because this is where I glazed over a bit because I've got so many. I've been looking at this for so long. So, like, in terms of big ticket items, I always look at these and go that the classics are a lot of landscape workshops. They're really popular. You know, we've got people like Tom Putt, who's very well known for his workshops. Cam Blake from the Down south photo show, very, very popular with his workshops and has a great following there. We've got Keren Dobia doing portraiture. She does the most insane portraiture setups. And every year it's like the very, very funny story about this one, but hot ticket item. Last year, I accidentally, I thought she sold out in like 3 seconds flat. And I was like, wow, that was incredible. We got to the night before the festival and I realized that when I put the quantity in, I'd put two rather than 20. So. Sorry, kez, we've already had. Yeah, we've hugged and made up on that one, but, yeah, those cars, you know, there's a of them, but they're like the really sought after workshops that said, we have so many weird, obscure things and we really try to encourage that I mean, the festival is about trying new stuff. And so Louise Sedgman, she does some pretty amazing stuff with equine photography. So last year she had a unicorn warrior where it was this kid dressed up as this, like creepy unicorn kind of, you know, forest child with, you know, a horse that was all dressed up. And they went out to the forest and studio lit it and it was. That was super amazing. You know, this year she's got some pretty incredible stuff with being done in the arena with smoke and lights and horses and, you know, that dog moody kind of stuff. Yeah. You know, Kim, she does Shibari workshop. For those who don't know what Shibari is, it's a. It's an ancient japanese rope arthem that if you translate it maybe into modern terms, you'd say it's, um, it's bondage, um, but very artistic, consent driven, um, art. [00:23:47] Speaker A: Well, you're speaking to the right people. We are lucky straps, after all. [00:23:51] Speaker C: Well, maybe we can tee up something. I reckon Kim could sort out. [00:23:54] Speaker B: You need some leather straps. [00:23:55] Speaker C: That's it. [00:23:56] Speaker B: But. [00:23:56] Speaker C: But it's really interesting because, you know, here you go. You've got our main demographic. You know, it's. You're talking about a demographic that you largely retired. You know, we don't do the whole, like, young content creator thing. There's a lot of that going around and there's. There's a lot of events that suit that perfectly. We tend to be more of the camera club type crowd. And so I would never really have picked, you know, camera club crowd to be going, hey, let's sign up for a japanese bondage workshop. You know, that feels kind of left the center to me. But you know what? The way that it's done, the way that it's presented, everyone came out of that workshop crying because of the emotional connection of this whole thing. You know, it's. It's done in a different way. So that's pretty, pretty obscure. We have Craig Wechin. He does environmental portraiture. He has got founder Bright's one and only gold mine. And so they're doing an environmental portrait at the gold mine with this old guy called Pod, who is like the most quintessential I own a gold mine kind of guy. We've always got some whatever else we got this year that's kind of more obscure. You are. We've obviously got the cosplay stuff. We're actually. We have a special event that I can probably talk a little bit about this year, and that has brought us interesting models for our workshops. And so we have got quite a few workshops involving, like, I don't want to say ICM, but kind of like intentional movement and portraiture with that kind of weird abstract spin on it. So Bruce Moyle does a lot of that stuff, which is amazing. We have. What else we got in there in that, in that realm? It is. There was one in particular I was trying to, like, bring my brain to it. It is. Oh, I'm Aaron Walker. He's doing like a fire twirling in the forest kind of workshop, which is pretty cool. [00:25:50] Speaker B: Cool. [00:25:51] Speaker C: We got food. Dennis Smith, he's doing, um, Formula one light painting of cars. It won't be all that kind of close. [00:25:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. [00:26:00] Speaker C: And he just come back from Dubai. Is it Dubai or somewhere? Abu Dhabi or Dubai where they had the Formula one recently? Not Dubai. It's one of those, the middle eastern cities. And, and he was actually contracted to come over there and light paint the Formula one cars and the most insane work. And you get a chance to, to sit down with him and actually learn these techniques, you know, it's pretty cool. [00:26:23] Speaker A: Yep. [00:26:23] Speaker B: That's amazing. [00:26:24] Speaker A: Very cool. Matt, with, with the, the festival workshops, obviously there's a social element to that. But what other social activities are there for attendance at befop? [00:26:36] Speaker B: That's what I wanted to find out. What night. [00:26:38] Speaker C: Yeah, there's obviously the bar. [00:26:41] Speaker A: Yes. [00:26:41] Speaker C: Yes. [00:26:42] Speaker A: That leads to all sorts of adventures. [00:26:44] Speaker B: Tell us, tell us, where is the bar? [00:26:46] Speaker C: The bar is in the main community center. We put it as close to the Fuji table as we can because Matt went, he funds a huge portion of the festival through that bar. Now we've got a lot of events that happen. We call them sort of on top of the workshops. We haven't released the program for this year because it's the last piece of the puzzle for us. We collate all this stuff and we release it as we get the whole picture. Hence why there's no schedule up. Schedule sitting there in draft. [00:27:14] Speaker B: What sort of things happened last year then, in terms of, like, evening events? Was there specific things or is it just each night? You know, everyone can be found in a number of places just chatting and having a good time. Like what happened? [00:27:27] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll look now. It is pretty, it's pretty organized. Well, it's organized chaos. So during the days, we have a main stage with presentations. So you've got the trade stands with all the brands and things, but you've also got our instructors doing on stage presentations. So they're not workshops, but, but more of what you get, like camera club style presentations. So that's always a really good one to fill up those gaps between your workshops. The two evenings, we've recently kind of added a bit of structure. So on our Friday night we have a special event. And last year that was a fireworks show. And cool. The cool thing was we didn't just do a fireworks show and this was all sponsored and supported by our brands, by the way. So big shout out to those guys. But we actually put on a show where we firstly we got to press the buttons, which was kind of cool. All the sponsors got to press the buttons, but we tried to time it out. So, you know, typically when you photograph things, you've got a fireworks show and it all goes off and if you weren't ready, you sort of lost it. So we actually got our pyrotechnician to create a show for us where we could set them off in really small bursts. And so we stretched out what should have been a seven minute show into a 40 minutes show and we could count everyone in and time it so everyone was ready. And, you know, it's an awesome opportunity to get actual photographs where you weren't kind of relying on just that first couple of fireworks. We let the smoke clear, you know, all the things to get the best shots. [00:28:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:52] Speaker C: So that was last. I can let you in on a little secret of what's happening this year. We've sort of alluded to, we won't. [00:28:58] Speaker A: Tell it a couple places, but we. [00:28:59] Speaker C: Haven'T properly announced it, although we'll go out this week. And so the. This year we have got ten flow artists who basically they do like led hula hoop work, light whips, fire twirling, like all those kind of, you know, movement, you know, silk flags and silk fans and things like that. And we've got those guys performing in five stations with a bit of a dark evening event. So befop after dark this year will be food trucks, fire pits, and have all of our performers, and each of those performers is sponsored by a brand and we'll have some tips and tricks on how to actually shoot interesting shots of that particular moment or that particular kind of performer. And so that's going to be a really cool thing on the Friday night and that'll actually be a bit more of a social thing as well. So we'll have, you know, chance to grab a drink, grab some food, hang out, chat, grab your camera, walk around, take some shots, come back, have a chat. It'll be a really nice kind of ease into it. A really good opportunity to catch up with old friends, meet new friends, chat to the brands, chat to the instructors. And then on our Saturday nights we always have a thing called the Shenanigans Night. And the Shenanigans night is quite well known at befop. It often involves several drinks, a hey, hey. It's Saturday style stage production where we have competitions for our audience challenging our instructors. It's been known to involve some forms of nudity. It's a really good fun, let your hair down night just to kind of let loose and have a good time and see the real human side of these brands as well as all your fellow photographers. When we all run podcasts and we run, you know, video channels and stuff, you see the not serious side, but you see a professional side and you see someone running around in their underpants on stage covered in spaghetti. Totally different side of people, you know, nice. [00:31:02] Speaker A: Are cameras allowed at that particular event or is it absolutely no recording allowed? [00:31:08] Speaker C: No, we encourage the recording of it. We have to remember it somehow. So it's, look, it's all in good fun and that's the whole, the spirit of it, you know, everyone's just being a bit of a dag and it's that community, that's what helps to build communities. Everyone being a bit vulnerable and silly with each other. [00:31:26] Speaker A: So, yeah, dag, that's a very Aussie word, isn't it? Love it. [00:31:33] Speaker C: I probably get crucified for using that word. My wife will kill me. I love my bonzes, my ace and my dag and things like that. She sounds really old. Yeah. [00:31:44] Speaker B: We do get the odd us listener. So if you're listening, uh, comment in the live chat if you have no idea what a dag is. [00:31:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Or have a guess it is. [00:31:53] Speaker C: Yeah. If you're coming from the States as well, you'd fly into Melbourne and then drive up to bright as well for the festival. Just, you know. [00:31:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Just in and out for the weekend. [00:32:02] Speaker A: Quick trip. [00:32:03] Speaker C: That's it. [00:32:06] Speaker A: A question for you about the festival being in bright. How. How have the community and local retail and trades and how have they responded over the years and where is that relationship? Is it a good vibe? Is it supportive of bright as a community? [00:32:22] Speaker C: Yeah, look, bright is a tourist mecca, you know, year round. There's stuff going on. The funny thing is we actually don't really get registered as a festival in bright because from what I understand, a festival needs to be 5000 people. So we're really tiny. And I think that that's a really good thing for the town in a way, because we don't kind of come in and take over the town. But, you know, we do have a lot of people there who are out to explore. A lot of people come in a few days early, stay a few days later, because it can be a big trip. We get people from all over Australia. Yeah, we've got relationships with some of the brands in town, you know, a good relationship with the council there and things. Bright brewery is an example. They, they come along for the ride. We use local food trucks and stuff. But yeah, it's a town that's used to having a huge transient population coming in and out for weekend events and things like that. Yeah, I mean, I'd like to think that the town of Bright supports all this stuff in a big way. We see that support, I guess, through the council's support, they're the representation of the town. But, yeah, it can't be a bad thing, I guess. [00:33:33] Speaker A: You haven't been run out of town yet, have you? [00:33:35] Speaker C: We haven't been run out of town yet, no, that's it. Oh, look, I think when we had the. We used to put up these huge marquees and at the brewery and I think whilst that was great, one year we built a skate ramp out the front of it and we're sort of sitting on the park area and people kind of looking, walking past, looking a bit quizzical because they had this big festival of photography sign and there's a skate ramp going with music going, and then there's another little thing off the back there and it was already tacked together. It looked like a tented community had just moved in. But these days we're a little more. A little more contained and a little more professional. So, yeah, it's a good thing. [00:34:13] Speaker A: Cool. Just stop for a quick second, have a look at some comments. Digifrog. Dave Clark. He's correct. Dag is located on a sheep's bottom. That's one definition of it. But we're looking more for the colloquial definition of Dag. If anyone knows what that one might. [00:34:29] Speaker C: Be, feel free to check that mic. Not that unaccurate, though. No, it's not running around like something attached to a sheep's bottom. That sounds like what I've seen. [00:34:39] Speaker A: And also another alumni of the Camera life podcast who's been on twice now, Greg Carrick. I might just pop his comment up, Justin. He said food. You could make a bunch of cocktails based on the film stocks that they use on their cameras. [00:34:54] Speaker B: Any other classic chrome. Yeah. What would a classic chrome be? [00:34:59] Speaker C: I thought you like an old fashioned, like, the dark room chemicals to make cocktails. [00:35:03] Speaker A: Oh, no. [00:35:03] Speaker C: You're a heavy hitter there, Greg. [00:35:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, Greg is a heavy hitter, but, um. But, uh, yeah, we could have, like, a classic, classic chrome martini. [00:35:13] Speaker C: I think a velvet sounds like a, um. That just sounds like a cocktail. [00:35:18] Speaker A: It does. Across the goths. [00:35:22] Speaker C: There you go. [00:35:23] Speaker A: That's an interesting velvea. [00:35:24] Speaker B: Sledgehammer. [00:35:26] Speaker C: Sledgehammer. [00:35:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's. I'm gonna. I'm gonna come up with that. I'll do some experimenting tonight. [00:35:32] Speaker C: Maybe that's something. Maybe we need to go out to some of these booze brands and see if we can get them to come on board with that. We could. We could create, like, a whole master style cocktail lineup. [00:35:42] Speaker A: Yep. [00:35:43] Speaker C: Get them in coles and woolies. [00:35:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Get some, like, a looks happening at the hole. For those of you listening at home or for those of you watching later on, feel free to jump in the comments and ask questions of either Justin or myself or of Matt relating to the bright festival of photography. It sounds like an amazing, amazing opportunity, amazing experience, and this year is selling out very fast. And I know that Justin's feeling itchy to get back on the website. [00:36:16] Speaker B: I'm on the website now. I'm trying to decide, like, do I. Do I check out now or do I wait till after the show? I haven't decided yet. [00:36:24] Speaker A: Right. [00:36:24] Speaker C: I can tell you, I believe there is about 20 tickets left, I think, which the scheme of it is not. Not a great deal. [00:36:36] Speaker B: Hang on. What have I done? Yeah, I've still got one. Because it says here very clearly, know, don't purchase tickets on behalf of another person. So I can only get one. One per transaction. So I'm doing that. [00:36:50] Speaker C: That's a very funny one, actually, because the way that we set this up, this is my. I'm not a digital genius by any stretch of the imagination. You saw me kerfuffle around with the mic at the beginning, but the three mics. [00:37:02] Speaker A: Three mics. [00:37:02] Speaker C: Three mics. But it still doesn't work properly. But this website ticketing system is a very fragile little thing. And so if you book two tickets under the same person, even with different names, it's sort of a. Your account has the ticket. And so when you go to book workshops, you'll very quickly realize that you actually have no credit on your email address. So it's. It is important to make sure you're logged in as yourself buying your ticket. If you buy one for another person, you log out, log in and create an account for that person. Otherwise you'll, um, you run into some serious strife and, um, you'll be on the phone to me. Whilst we're all panicking as the website melts into a hot little puddle of goo on the ground, I keep pressing that. [00:37:41] Speaker B: I need to. Well, okay, here we go to check out. So I've got one in. Go to checkout. Please ensure you're logged in. Yep. Boom. So all I have to do. Hang on, I'm not logged in. [00:37:55] Speaker C: I think you just got to publicly punch your credit card details in there online. [00:37:58] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll do that. For anyone that's keen to max out. Anyone that's going to get a new five reals mark. Two reals. Mine's supposedly shipping today. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting. Everyone else is getting them and mine hasn't shipped yet. [00:38:14] Speaker C: So you're a cannon shooter, obviously then? Or are you buying it just to sort of kick it around and prove to be. [00:38:19] Speaker B: Oh, no, no. I don't have that kind of cash. I'm a canon. I'll finish this checkout off air so that no one can actually see. But I am doing this literally right now. So if anyone wants to come to the bright photo festival and catch up, I will be there. [00:38:34] Speaker C: You got 19 spots left then. Yeah. Also. [00:38:37] Speaker B: Yep, that's right. Although I did see on this ticketing page, the one back it did said 500 ish tickets. So, you know, depending on how. How well you can suck up to Matt when they sell out, you might get one. But I wouldn't. I wouldn't wait. [00:38:51] Speaker C: Can I explain quickly the. There is one more little catch on the ticket. It's not a catch, it's a little bonus thing. Right. [00:38:56] Speaker B: Should I check out this first or. [00:38:58] Speaker C: Oh, no, you can check out first, that's fine. But the. We have a. A ticket that will be released shortly and it is what we call the golden ticket. And so there's only a handful of these. We're actually doing it by ballot this year because it's a very popular topic or popular product. The golden ticket allows you to book all of your workshops before the bookings go live so you don't have to get into the chaotic queue and fight people and miss out on your favorite and all that. So if you have more money than cents, we desperately discourage you from buying this ticket. But there will be golden tickets available for those who just simply can't help themselves. But to be via vip. [00:39:40] Speaker A: That sounds like you, Justin. [00:39:42] Speaker B: I do have more money than. And that's not because I have a lot of money. [00:39:48] Speaker A: But just quick comment, a quick comment on the channel. Linda Richmond has befop is an amazing experience and so much fun. Would highly recommend it as the presenters and workshops are fantastic. [00:40:03] Speaker B: I'm just checking that there's nothing on here where someone can steal my ticket. But no, we are, we are done. [00:40:09] Speaker C: We're in there. [00:40:11] Speaker B: So I'm coming to the festival. Please come and meet me. Sorry, to answer your question. So I am a cannon shooter and I was Nick on. So I was canon, then Nikon, then back to Canon. I did a little switchback. Yeah, I did a little switchback switcherooie. I worked with Julie actually for a while while Jim and myself were shooting weddings full time. Julie was kind of our Nikon person, looked after us because we both shot Nikon kits and Jim knew her from his work as a photojournalist because she worked with the papers and all that sort of stuff. So yeah, she used to help us out with gear and all that sort of thing. But I switched back to Canon when I made the jump to from DSLR to mirrorless, went from D reals and sort of went full mirrorless. Canon have been a wonderful supporter of our camera straps for years. Back when Canon collective was a thing, we were making straps for them and then we made a strap for the release of the five reals, a limited edition sort of strap. And then they've recently done the same thing with the five reals Mark II, which was pretty, pretty amazing for us as a. Quite a small business to work with them. So. [00:41:27] Speaker C: And how many straps did you have to exchange to get this new one in the mail today? [00:41:31] Speaker B: I bought it. I don't. [00:41:32] Speaker C: Oh, wow. [00:41:33] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [00:41:34] Speaker C: Can I lift your game? There should be a free camera involved in that transaction. [00:41:37] Speaker A: Look, everyone, the first thousand buyers of the, of the australian EOS mark. What is it? [00:41:45] Speaker C: Eos five. [00:41:48] Speaker A: Thank you. They get, they get a free camera, but the purchase. They get a free camera with the purchase of a very expensive camera strap. [00:41:56] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. They're actually buying the camera strap and then the five reals just comes free with it. But yeah, this is, this is the strap that we made with an artist called Kentaro Yoshida. He did this. Hang on, this is not focusing very well, but he did this awesome design which we put on the leather with this really, really complicated plate. So yeah, I. It was really fun and great to work with them. Yeah. 1000 in Australia and 150 New Zealand get the limited edition straps. I'm really hoping that I got my pre order in time to get my own strap back. I don't know until it arrives. [00:42:33] Speaker A: You're a dag. [00:42:34] Speaker B: I am a dag. [00:42:35] Speaker A: You are a dag. [00:42:36] Speaker B: It's funny because I have one, but I want one with the camera. [00:42:41] Speaker C: You also want to get one for free, you know, like. [00:42:43] Speaker B: That's right. [00:42:45] Speaker C: Well, yeah. [00:42:47] Speaker B: So if anyone's listening that does already have an five reals mark, two reals. Hit me up. We want to have some people on the podcast that get them and get the first impressions and stuff like that and do a bit of a. Want to, like, crowdsource a review from people that wouldn't other otherwise review cameras. You know how the only people that review cameras are people that have time to spend 40 hours making a YouTube video? [00:43:09] Speaker A: I don't know. [00:43:10] Speaker C: Probably not actually out there using it. [00:43:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't mean you, Craig. Yeah, but I don't do that. [00:43:15] Speaker A: I don't have the. I don't have the. I don't have the capacity for video. [00:43:19] Speaker B: I just like them. What. What I mean is. Yeah, I think if you imagine all the. All the people that are at your festival, all these amazing photographers, whether it be the presenters or the workshop attendees, most of them don't have YouTube channels. Most of them don't have time to make a YouTube video about a camera or something like that. But they've got very real world, firsthand experience with cameras and some great opinions. I want to get them on podcasts every time a new camera comes out on a four or five people on a live podcast and be like, let's talk about this thing. So that's the plan. So if you've got an r five mark to hit me up. [00:43:57] Speaker A: Yeah, we want to get up. Speaking of camera affiliations, Matt, who do you shoot with at the moment? [00:44:04] Speaker C: Yeah, look, this is a funny question. I can complicate no worse. Not complicated, but it's a. Maybe I'm funny about the question, not that it's a funny question. So I own Sony gear that I use in my work, and that's probably what I carry around, I guess. I had a really similar thing to what you did, Justin. And when I swapped, I've actually shot on every brand except for Pentax now over the years. [00:44:33] Speaker B: Nice. [00:44:34] Speaker C: So I started my. When I said professional photography, I started my grown up photography with Lumix very quickly moved across to Olympus. I got a sponsorship with them for underwater photography. And so I shot with them and worked with them for a long time. And then in the mix of that I had canon that I used in working environments. Then I went to Nikon, back to Olympus again, and then back to Nikon with D. Then when the mirrorless cameras came out, I had that panic moment where I realized that, you know, DSLR, DSLr gear will have a very little secondhand value when this all kicks off. And especially in that sort of first phase where, you know, Sony were really the first ones to properly commit to saying, hey, this is going to be an awesome product. So when the a one came out that the, the z nine, the z eight, none of that existed. And so there was no really high end offering from anyone else at the time and the a one really blitzed everything. So I sort of went, look, I, I have to make a decision. There's only one option. Don't regret it. Love my gear, that's for sure. But at the start of the year I worked with Fuji on the GFX 100s tomb launch. So I shot the campaign for that up in the northern territory with a bunch of other photographers. We also did different parts of Australia and now these days the Fuji rep invic lives probably five k's down the road. So I just jump in and grab the kit from him every time I'm heading out to do sort of my passion, photography. But yeah, like I, I'm probably a firm believer these days, having gone through all the brands, all the lenses, all the things, I think every camera brand has a really strong point to them. And if you're really at that kind of pointy end of photography, you know, an example, if you're really into your wildlife and quite, you know, maybe birding is an example. I'm not a birding person, but if you are into your birding, like having a camera with stupid high frame rates or drive mode, as well as high resolution and crazy fast auto focus, that's really important. But I kind of go like, well, Sony's got the a one, the z eight and z nine are crazy for that these days. The Canon R five's incredible for that. I'm sure the r one that came. [00:46:47] Speaker B: Out recently or that one is getting a lot of bad press. The r one s the new flagship. It's getting a lot of bad press. And it's. It's funny you say this because I think after digging into it, it's from wildlife and bird photographers because it's only 24 megapixel, which as a sports photographer seems for me totally fine. In most situations, but it's. Yeah, people that are saying I need a crop and I need fast speeds. [00:47:17] Speaker C: Yep. [00:47:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:47:18] Speaker A: So for the r one isn't marketed to birders and wildlife photographers. It's a media camera. [00:47:23] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:47:24] Speaker A: You know, it's people that are constantly on the move, constantly shooting for a living that don't need 40, 50, 60 megapixels. [00:47:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And the r five mark two has. It's got that though. Yeah, five mark two. It maybe it doesn't quite compete with. Yeah, like the z nine and. And I'm sure when an a one. There's no a one mark two yet, is there? [00:47:47] Speaker C: No, I think they were clever in. [00:47:49] Speaker A: Releasing about it, you know, the five. The five reals. Mark two reals with the r1. Because, you know, if you're at that, if you're at that pointy end, as you said, matt, of purchasing gear or using gear at that pro level, well, you've got a really good choice depending on which way you swing in terms of, you know, are you a pro media photographer who doesn't need, you know, the ultra fast burst and the huge megapixel count or are you sort of more of an enthusiast's high end? [00:48:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I reckon. And the other thing I look at with these is, in my opinion, like, again, opinions are cheap and I've got one, but I never sort of think it's always the right opinion. It's just my experience of it. [00:48:32] Speaker A: But you're on the right channel for cheap opinions, mate. [00:48:36] Speaker C: People get very passionate about things and I'm like, just calm your farm. It's not a very balanced argument anymore. So I try and be quite balanced. Like, I spend a lot of time with a lot of different photographers because of the festival. You know, I'm pretty privileged to have, you know, phone calls every single day with, you know, multiple photographers in different realms and different genres doing different, and they're all quite top of their game photographers. And I can tell you now, if I put any one of those brands in any one of their hands, they would shoot amazing shots. And the camera itself is important to a degree. It has to be able to do its job. But I do kind of feel as though it can be quite toxic when professional photographers kind of get brand heavy and go, oh, I'm a, I shoot this or I'm at this brand, because the reality is they're not, they're an incredible photographer and they happen to use that brand. Like, you don't see a tradie walking around going, oh, yeah, I'm the world's best house builder and I'm a Ryobi guy or I'm a Makita man. They happen to have those tools. And I think we can sometimes confuse photography with cameras. And I almost look at it these days when I'm choosing a camera brand to shoot on. And that's not say that I go and buy new cameras all the time. But, like, as I said, I've got access to a lot of brands, which is gain. I'm very lucky. I'd look at it and probably make my decisions more around the lenses that are available or really niche features that are available. So, like, as an example, you know, I've recently had this battle in my head of, do I buy the GFX system? Because I particularly love it, like, I really do. I shot on it for this campaign. It's the first experience I've ever had with it. It rocked up on my doorstep 12 hours before I flew out. And I'm thinking, I'm panicking, you know, like panicking about what's going to happen. But what I found was the panic was there because it was a new camera. It hadn't been released, obviously, and so the raw files weren't readable through any software and I had to deliver my portfolio to them before I could access the raw files. So it was a JPEG campaign, which to me is terrifying. Like, you know, we've become. I've become so reliant on the flexibility of a raw file that just shooting JPeG would. It just scares me. But that's it. I came back from it and I was like, it made me think harder, of course, but I was so happy with the way it looked out of camera. You know, we could obviously pump up a little bit in lightroom, add some color and things like that. But I wasn't doing any really fundamental changes. And so I sort of fell in love with the look of that camera. Like, the actual sensor output from it does definitely look different to me compared to my Sony gear. It looks to me more natural. It doesn't have as much of a digital feel, and I'm not a particularly wanky kind of pixel peepee kind of guy, but I do feel like they look like a smoother finish. They don't look as almost like it's crunchy is what I get from my other camera. That said, I look at Sony and I go, Sony's major benefit for me, and the reason I do, I recommend them a lot, is if you look at the prime lens lineup, I go, you can't beat their prime lenses. They're so sharp, they're tiny, they're all consistent in size. So, like, when you go to a camera bag, it looks good and it feels good. And more importantly, that nearly every prime lens they sell is under $2,000. [00:51:49] Speaker B: Yep. [00:51:50] Speaker C: Whereas I compare it to canon and I go, I know no qualms with canons, cameras or lens quality and whatnot, but geez, you go and look at the price of a prime lens and you go, you might get a bargain on the camera part and you go, hey, the r five is cheaper than, say, an a one, but you buy one lens and now you're out of pocket more on the canon system. And so finding that balance of going, well, what's the right gear for the right job? But also when I look at my whole kit, you know, what can I afford? You know, if you're a photographer who's a hobbyist, you know, you're not going to be spending $20,000 necessarily on gear. Well, how many lenses can I get for my $10,000 versus another brand? That, that could be a huge play in it. So I don't really like the whole, what brand are, you know, do you shoot? I guess it's a valid question, but, but I think it's important to kind of clarify that with, I shoot on this brand for a really specific reason. Yeah, but they all kind of do the same sort of thing. Like, I don't endorse a brand just because, you know, I shoot on them. That, yeah, if that makes sense. [00:52:56] Speaker A: And I think, I think some of those reviews that come out about new camera gear, often you see that apart from the people that get it before the embargo lifts, you know, they're the privileged ones and they tend to do in depth reviews. But you see these ones that drop, you know, within five days of a new product releasing that clearly didn't have it before embargo. And they've got the greatest opinions in the world about this thing that they've probably barely taken out and shot with, let alone done a real deep dive. And, you know, getting familiar with the system. It always bothers me when that sort of thing happens in, especially in video reviews, because you can see that they're kind of, they're highlighting selling points. Things are attractive, things that are unattractive, and it drives volume for them, it drives clicks and it drives views and eyeballs and all that sort of stuff. It really bothers me a bit. But I think it's interesting that Fujifilm Australia saw your work. However that affiliation came about and, you know, dropped this brand new system that you'd never shot with before. I assume you hadn't shot with the GFX before, and it can be quite intimidating. They sent it out to me and I'm a X series user, strictly Fujifilm. I was canon back in my early DSLR days, but moved to Fujifilm. And my point of swapping to Fujifilm was a few, but the biggest one was around size and weight. I just couldn't carry heavy gear anymore due to some spinal issues, and I needed something that was lightweight. I wasn't going to lose my craft because of it. And that's, that was my specific point of moving to Fujifilm. But I know when I shot with the GFX, I found that the skills still kick in. You know, there's that anxiety about a new system and, you know, the GFX and the X system use pretty much the same processor in the high end cameras. Menu settings are much the same, and even just the feel of the cameras are much the same as the X series. But I think, you know, it's, it's about that. Not letting the camera define your skill set, but letting you define your own skill set and applying it to whatever piece of gear you pick up, whether it's an iPhone or a $10,000 GFX. And I think a lot of people get caught up in the, in that whole, you know, especially like a Q. Three owners, Justin, get caught up in that, you know, needing the best. And they, you know, they really use it for, for what it's made for. [00:55:31] Speaker C: Can I throw one big kudos out there for it touches on what you were talking about with the review things with Fuji. So it was really interesting because we have five photographers on this, this project, and of the five photographers, two of them were full time Fuji shooters and three of us weren't. [00:55:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And great, isn't it? [00:55:53] Speaker B: Was that a strategy? Like a specific strategy, you think, as in for them to go, we want to get content from a variety of sources, or like, how do you think that evolved? [00:56:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I reckon there's a few things. I think one of them is probably the fact that just purely based on statistics, there are less people shooting on Fuji, although that's growing hugely at the moment. But, but go back even twelve months and that it was based on the professional realm. [00:56:19] Speaker B: Based on this podcast, everyone shoots Fuji every week. I'm just like, okay, I guess I need to buy GFX. [00:56:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that has nothing to do with me organizing all the guests from my Fuji community, but. [00:56:32] Speaker B: Yeah, but I know what you mean. [00:56:35] Speaker C: Yeah, they do stand by their product as well. Like, I think part of it was that part of it is also the fact that. Yeah, it's actually, um. They had a really interesting way of going about this whole thing. So we all got sent off to do our projects. We got the opportunity to shoot with it. They gave us, you know, not as much time as we always would have loved, but they definitely tried to give us as much time as possible with these cameras. We didn't get it for a day. [00:56:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:56:56] Speaker C: You know, we had, you know, in terms of doing our projects, you know, like, the approach David took on that, because I said, well, like, what, do you want me to pitch here? Because they basically said, we need to do wildlife photography that's Australia based, because it's an australian theme. And I said, well, I mean, I could do, like, you know, the world's largest project in Australia, or am I limited to kind of. You're gonna have the camera for a day and you've got a budget of $25, you know. [00:57:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:57:21] Speaker C: And what they said to me was. Was really great. They said, why don't you pitch us the craziest idea you can think of? Because then at least we know what we're saying no to. And, you know, I pitched this wild adventure in the Northern Territory in the complete wrong time of year. We hired boats, helicopters, cars, you know, name it. We went nuts. And you can, if you go onto the JFX YouTube channel, my videos in there, it's called top end wet season or something like that, or staring down the wet season. And. But what was really cool about them was that, firstly, they didn't just hire fanboys or fangirls to do these shoots. They got genuine people who had their own, you know, they're good in their craft. And I. And the second thing was actually, as annoying as it was, they actually brought us up to Sydney on two separate occasions after the shoot, before the launch, to sit down with the japanese development team and actually give feedback on the camera from our professional standpoints of the different genres we shot, things that worked for us, things that we thought needed to be worked on, any bugs that we found, improvements we felt could be made. Obviously, at that point, you're talking firmware wise, you're not talking about ergonomics. [00:58:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:32] Speaker C: But there was a genuine sense that there was care about how this was going to get used. And it gave us opportunities as well to go and test the gear out. And they weren't just asking us to go, hey, can you go out and tell everyone how amazing it is? They went out there and said, tell us what you really think behind closed doors. Let's see what we can do to address any concerns you've got. And then by the time it launched, you know, some of the little things that did come up in those conversations were genuinely fixed, whether that's because our feedback or it was just in prototype mode still. But it made me kind of walk away going, that felt like a really transparent way to get cameras out there and to get real opinions. They weren't just sending it to us and saying, write a good review and we'll tag you or something. It was genuine care for how this is going to hit the market and what people are going to think of it. So it was huge kudos for what they did there. [00:59:23] Speaker A: I've always found just before you play that, Justin, I've been reviewing Fuji gear for a long time now and they, you know, they'll send me a crate with, you know, the X T 50 and the new 16 to, what is it, 15 to 60? No, 16 to 50 lens. And, you know, there's no, there's no pressure from them. It's all, you know, take it out, play with it, have it for two weeks, make the most of it and tell us what you really think. Like, write an honest review. Yeah, I am a Fujifan boy, by the way. I'm a paid up, really, I've got a lifetime membership. Shut up, Justin. He is jealous. But yeah, they've always been really receptive to feedback and I work with Katie and Charlie at Fujifilm Australia who are amazing and very supportive of what I do with the work I do. [01:00:20] Speaker C: So I think they're a great place. I don't necessarily, you can't say about whether other brands do that or not, you know. No, I've worked with, I've worked with Olympus, obviously, or Om systems and I know they've always had that kind of transparency too. But yeah, I tend to agree. If you send it to a product reviewer, even when they say that the brand had no input or affiliation with this, the issue with that is that they may not have had input. So you will, you could produce a really honest review. But if you produced a bad review, I would love to see that brand send your product again in two or three months time and say, okay, I know you gave us a bad review last time, try again with this one. Like, what do you think? I, this really, I suspect what would happen is you would just never see that brand again. Yeah. And so it's a tricky one because it's not. It's not specifically bias. It's not saying you have to say something good, but it's almost could potentially be putting a YouTube creator in a position where it's like, if you want to have a future, you have to say the right thing, you know? Yeah. And, yeah, it's a very, very challenging world. That's probably one of the reasons why I. A lot of the photographers I know don't touch YouTube in terms of doing reviews and stuff like that because it puts you in very awkward situations if you have to, you know, try and show goodwill in a situation maybe that isn't there. Yeah. Yeah. [01:01:35] Speaker A: It's more of a marketing tool than a honest piece. [01:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And like you say, it's, you know, if you're a youtuber and your goal is to, you know, get enough views and stuff to support your lifestyle, if those camera releases are the videos that get you 20,000, 100,000 views or whatever, if you all of a sudden start getting cut out of some of those releases. [01:01:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:58] Speaker B: You know, it makes a big difference. So they, like, you say they're not biased, but they are biased. Like, without, you know, they're not getting paid to say great things, but things could get weird. [01:02:08] Speaker C: But you're not getting paid if you don't. Say. [01:02:10] Speaker B: If you don't. Is this the video that you. [01:02:14] Speaker C: Yeah, it is that. You mean? Yeah. [01:02:16] Speaker B: Okay, cool. I won't. I won't play it because I'm sure. And I'm sure we'll get copyright dinged or something because that all that stuff happens magically on YouTube these days if you play more than. More than 7 seconds. But it looks epic. [01:02:29] Speaker C: So, yeah, I look at crazy. Yeah, it was a pretty crazy situation. And like. Like, I loved it. It was. It was everything that I would do and more, you know, in my own adventurous photography dreams, which is pretty cool. [01:02:43] Speaker B: I'll drop a link to this in the chat now, guys, and we'll link it in the description as well. But don't watch it yet because we're still live and we need you here. [01:02:51] Speaker C: I've got the real version of me. [01:02:53] Speaker A: Just before we move on, we've got a. We've got a few comments to just touch base on. So Mel Mac mook Louise, who did the warrior unicorn shoot, was amazing. Loved every second of it, which is pretty cool. I think Mel also said that they did the shibari that you're referring to, the japanese rope art performance last year. And yes, we all walked out in tears. Still get teary thinking about that experience. That sounds amazing. [01:03:27] Speaker C: I was so surprised. Yeah. [01:03:30] Speaker A: And this one from Jashani. I hope I'm saying that right. Well, this is interesting timing. My family have offered me a Matt Crummons workshop as a birthday present. I just need to choose which one. And I use an om one em five mark three. [01:03:44] Speaker C: Oh, that's, um. That's not me, though. That's a different. That Matt Crummons has got amm in it. They probably. [01:03:50] Speaker B: Yeah, different. Different Matt Grummans. Well, which is funny, because I actually originally made the title of this episode, Matt Crummons. [01:04:00] Speaker C: I was almost not going to correct it just to give the B fop vibe of authentically chaotic. [01:04:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Almost. Right. So which. Which workshop should this person choose? [01:04:12] Speaker C: I would. I always say to people. So I run a whole range of different workshops myself. I do, like, I'm a jack of all trades in my actual work, so my passions in wildlife, but. But I do workshops and everything. So studio lighting, I do waterfalls, seascapes. I've got a five day workshop up in the mountains that I run off to Africa in November and next year, all sorts of workshops, beginners, traveling, street, you name it. So I always say my workshops are all very small groups, so I only run a maximum seven people in my beginners, but most others are between four and six. And so you are never going to be left behind. So choose something that excites you. Choose something that you go, all right, this is the direction I want to head, or this is something I'm truly interested in shooting rather than, you know, a progression, you know, unless you're a complete beginner, in which case the beginner's workshop makes sense, it'll give you a good grounding, but everything else I go, you know, turn up excited about the topic and you'll get a lot out of it. So. [01:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah, very cool. And, Matt, for someone, for anyone that would be interested in, you know, who think that they've got something to share, they've got some experience, they've got, you know, proven knowledge about photography and their specific genre or a range of genres, what advice would you give people about getting into running their own workshops? Like, how does someone kick that part of their creative side off? [01:05:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I. Look, it's a tricky question. I get asked it a lot. I think the first thing is to find a community that works with you and for you as well. So photography can be a very lonely place. And when things get tough from a business sense. You don't want to be a solo act, so you can work solo, but you still need to have a support network of people that you can bounce ideas off, that you can refer each other to. And that's something that B fops done particularly well. We've got a really amazing instructor community that bounce off each other. We all refer through to different workshops. A lot of our workshop participants are the same. And you'll get a call at, you know, midnight from Tom put going, guess who I'm standing next to on the top of this mountain in such and such. And like, it's someone who was on my workshop last week. And so I think, though, that can be really important because it is a really tricky space. It's. It's becoming a more flooded space running workshops, that is. So if you have a bit of a community of photographers, it helps you to get referrals and helps people to kind of direct that traffic to you and can also help to endorse what you do because there's a lot of great photography workshop players out there, but there's also a lot of dodgy kind of, I just want your money and I don't really care about what happens next. Yeah. So that's kind of my first piece would be find that community, or at least have a couple of people you can bounce off. I speak to my colleagues, you know, daily about different things in workshops, what we're seeing in trends, maybe workshops that are coming up, ideas we've got maybe just experimenting with stuff. And yeah, it creates that sort of drive and passion, but also gets you through the times where you maybe don't have fully booked workshops and things and you sort of having a moment with it. I guess the other thing is, to me, I'm a big believer in the crossing the t's and dotting the I's. A. I like to keep things really fun in my workshops, but behind the scenes, making sure you understand what you are allowed to do, aren't allowed to do what your insurance covers, what it's not covering, and stay inside the boundaries of being a professional business. Because the reality is when you first start out, you think, oh, look, I don't need to have all these ducks in a row. I can just rock up to the botanical gardens and run a macro workshop because it's just a public space. That's great until you get pulled up by the ranger there who says, actually, it's $400 an hour to be in the botanical gardens running a workshop, and you might get away with it for the first little while. But as you start to grow, those things kind of you forget that they're real, though. They exist. And if you haven't put them in place, your workshops, if they start getting popular and you start this sort of juggernaut, all of a sudden you're a business that's running a lot of very illegitimate things. [01:08:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:08:25] Speaker C: And I think that can come back to bite you. I mean, just unfortunately, the world from an insurance perspective is really touchy these days. So I sort of think set it all up properly as though it's going to be the biggest thing ever and then it's going to be really successful and you almost set yourself up to fill those shoes. Whereas if you start off going, this is small, and I'm just doing this one little thing, it probably won't ever take off because you're thinking too small, you know, like, I started my workshops back in 2016. I quit my job from Om systems at about 03:00 in the morning at the Christmas party and flew back to Melbourne the next day and was like, oh my God, what am I going to do? Like, I always wanted to run a business, but I wasn't totally sure how it was going to work. And my goal was I didn't want to have a little thing on the side. I wanted to, wanted it to either be my full time sustainable. I want the lifestyle that I want, you know, I'm going to make this work or not at all. And I think that, um, yeah, when I started out, I ran a lot of workshops where there was no bookings. You know, there might be one person booked on it and you still turn up. You know, you show up for that one person, you don't call and say, look, I don't have the numbers because the reality is you're sitting on your bum at home earning nothing if you don't do it at all. If you've got one person, that's one more person who can vouch for you, one more testimonial, it's, you know, one more successful experience. And so it's tough at the beginning, and I think I was lucky. I already had a bit of a network of photographers. I had some reputation from Om systems or Olympus in those days. But, yeah, I always encourage people to treat it like it's going to be very successful. Get the fundamentals right and then all the good stuff happens and all this good stuff will come. People love and are always going to work with people who are above board and, and who do things professionally. It doesn't mean your workshops have to be boring. Everything can be still fun, but behind the scenes it's got to be pretty tight. [01:10:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll give my two cent on workshops. This is advice from someone who's ran one workshop. [01:10:29] Speaker C: You didn't think big enough? [01:10:31] Speaker B: Slightly different perspective. No, no, we thought too big. So Jim and I were wedding photographers for quite a number of years and we had a bit of a following on social media. Not big following, but like, some photographers followed us and we threw out the idea of running a workshop. We'd been to workshops, we're always big on invest, you know, instead of buying a new lens, go to a wedding photographer's workshop and learn some stuff and just connect with other photographers. Disconnect from business and connect with other photographers. For a few days. It didn't even need to be a photographer's workshop. That was necessarily hugely successful, international famous photographer or something like that. It could be someone that works just like we do, but just they're running a workshop. James Day comes to mind. He was quite successful, though, at the time, but we went to his workshop, had a great time, and so we thought we should run our own workshop. A lot of people ask us questions, we use flash quite a bit, do a lot of sunset photos, night sky photos, all that sort of stuff. We'd also figured out a way to run a sustainable business that supports both of us, that we'd never got into the point where some photographers do, where you are way behind on editing, or run out of money over winter, or any of those sort of common problems that happen when you're first trying to get a full time business running. So we thought, we've probably got some advice we can offer. And we'd been to a few workshops and really loved that idea of disconnecting for your business for a few days and connecting with other photographers. So we thought, why not? We'll do three nights, like everyone comes and stays on location and we run a start to finish. Improve your wedding photography business from all aspects. We did website marketing, pricing, we did camera techniques, we brought couples there. We did like multiple shoots with real couples on location. We use Flash, we did night sky photography, we did sunset photography, we did everything we could. We did a rain photo because it started raining at one point with Flash, everything you could think of that applied to a wedding business. We did, and it went really well. We sold all the tickets we wanted to sell. The people were really happy, but I was just wrecked by the end of it. It was up till midnight every night. Chatting with people because we're having a great time and giving advice and yep, up at 06:00 a.m. the next morning to prep for sunrise shoots and trying to remember what I was going to try and teach and all this sort of thing. It was too much, too soon for someone that had no experience. Like for me, getting in, talking in front of people is draining. Like, it's hard for me. It's not. I'm not like easy breezy in front of a crowd sort of thing. And I let. And the whole thing, I just didn't want to do it again. It was like I had a good time. But the next week I barely moved. I was just cooked. So what if I could give myself advice for running a first workshop, it would have been, hey, do a three hour workshop on one element. Just, just do that. Just start there and do that a couple of times. Or do a couple of different elements, but 3 hours at a time, spread them out over a month, like a month apart or something and just test it. Something you're really confident with. Like you say, do it properly and get whatever permits required and any of that. Make it a good experience. But don't try and teach the world in one session. Start with something. [01:14:06] Speaker C: And that applies, I think, to every workshop as well. Like I. One thing I'm quite well known for in my workshops and I think a lot of our instructors at the festival have this flavor through it as well, is you've all, you've really got to understand your audience too. You know, like if you've got an audience who is, you know, you were talking about appealing to professional photographers who want to improve their business. There's kind of a base level of knowledge there that you expect they have. But, you know, the research you needed, or you no doubt did was to look at it and go, well, hold on, why do they need to improve their business? What are you actually trying to achieve by running this workshop and make sure you fit that criteria? Like, I see a lot of new workshops kicking off in Melbourne that are beginners workshops. And you know, I say the camera shops are pretty guilty of this. And on day one the first thing they say is, alright, so everyone put your camera onto manual mode. We're going to learn about manual mode. And you go, this person has just bought a $2000 camera. They probably feel a bit silly that they've spent so much money on a hobby they've not proven yet. And the first thing you do is get them to turn a camera on and ask them to put it in the most difficult, complicated mode that it can be in, which actually overrides any of the camera's intelligence. And you think there is merit in that? There's definitely merit in learning manual mode, but you're talking to the wrong crowd at that point in time. At that point in time, people are in auto mode going, I want to get better photos. I want a quick win under my belt. So this felt like a good investment, and then I want to learn the guts behind it. You know, I don't want to spend two years slogging through the hard stuff to realize that that's actually, you know, they're getting somewhere. [01:15:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:15:42] Speaker C: And so to me, I feel like if you go in to run a workshop, yeah, you've got to be passionate about the topic, but you've also got to be able to talk to the people at their level of where they're at. You know, if you're going to run a beginner's workshop, assume they don't know anything that, you know, at all. Like, I'm talking, the amount of people have gone, okay, so the battery goes in the bottom part of the camera. You know, this is how you open the battery door. This is how you put the memory card in because they're sitting trying to jam it in the wrong way. And it's just like, so second nature to us because we do it, we forget. But when you're learning something, you know, the same way you go to school, they don't just try and go, look, oh, this is, you're going to blitz year twelve exams on day one. They say, hey, we're going to start by, you know, trying to color inside the lines, but if you don't, that's fine as well. [01:16:25] Speaker B: You know, it's an interesting point, and it's. It's why I often recommend, because some people say, you know, there's a lot of people out there with more experience than me, so I probably, you know, I'm not gonna start a YouTube channel or run workshops. Cause there's way better photographers than me. But communicating to someone that's just one or two steps behind you in your journey is often easier. And that's why it takes, potentially, I'd imagine, someone like you or some of these really experienced workshop runners. It takes a lot of skill to communicate, you know, when you've been doing it for 20 years, to still communicate in a way that a beginner can understand. And there's professionals that do that, like yourself. But I think there's also value for just average people that just want to teach someone, hey, I just learned this. Here's what I just learned. It might be helpful for you too, because it's very relatable at that point. Yeah, it takes a lot of skill to do that when you've been doing it second nature for 20 years, throwing memory cards in cameras and then have to teach that or remember to teach that. That's something that other people don't know. [01:17:28] Speaker A: Just want to jump to a quickly. Jump to a. Sorry, Matt, I spoke over you there. Just wanted to jump quickly to a comment from Matt talks photography. [01:17:36] Speaker B: That's Matt Palmer from Bright Alpine Light gallery. He's also a previous guest on the podcast. Wonderful interview. If you want to jump back and check it out. Not yet, though. [01:17:48] Speaker A: Matt said not enough people consider the toll of running such a workshop. Our last tour was about 13 to 14 hours days for ten days in a row, and then as soon as we were done, our immune system crashed. [01:17:59] Speaker C: I agree with that. I run a workshop. I'm in bright. It's five days and we run from before the sunrises. We're usually out the door by like four or 05:00 a.m. and then we go all the way through into late evening doing astrophotography. And I genuinely get the exact same lung infection every single time I run that workshop. Like, it's identical. I go to the doctor and I'm like, yep, same one as last time. And they just throw the same antibiotics at me and it's, it's a, it is a toll. It's part of it. And, and I think that you're right, Matt, and all of us, you know, it is a taxing thing. And so if you're going to do it, you've also got to be going to it eyes wide open, that, yeah, this is exactly what it's going to be. And hard work, like photography, being a photographer is bloody hard work if you're going to be successful. This is, you know, people go, oh, but like, I often work. To be honest, I love having a bath. So, like, I'll often work from the bath or in summer I'll sit in the pool with my laptop in the, like, on the pool side and people kind of go, oh, it's such a cruisey, oh, my gosh, you know, all this lifestyle stuff. But the reality is I wake up at 430 to 05:00 every morning. I'm at my desk until my daughter's up at 07:00. I'm doing her things until 09:00 I'm back at my desk, I'm working somewhere in some way, shape or form, usually well into the evening and probably at least one night a week. I'm on a zoom zoom thing until nine or 10:00 p.m. and I work probably 50% of my weekends. My triple header weekend, I do a beginner's workshop from nine till twelve, a travel from two till five, and then a night workshop in summer that kicks off at 08:00 p.m. and runs through to nearly midnight. And it's hugely taxing. But if you love it and you've got the passion in it and you also, you kind of accept that you'll have these huge bursts of energy followed by, I need to rejuvenate. You know, it's a, you can balance it, but it's not easy and it's certainly not for someone who goes, oh, this will be quick money. You should never be doing this stuff for the money. If you do it well, the money will come, but never go into it thinking, I'm not making money in photography. If I run workshops, I'll be, you know, rolling in it because I look at the per head cost, it just doesn't work like that. You've got to do it from the right place. [01:20:07] Speaker A: And I think the parallel story to that, Matt, is that photographers, and even clients who want a photographer, they see these, these photos that other people have taken, maybe their inspirations or whatever it may be, and, you know, it's a fraction of a second in time and space, it's never going to happen again. But what they don't see is the behind the scenes of, you know, the early starts and packing the camera bag and cleaning your gear and charging your batteries and remembering the memory cards and booking your travel and getting to location and finding this complications with your accommodation or whatever it may be, and then you take that one fraction of a second shot, along with several hundred others from different locations, different compositions, different lighting, weather, all of that stuff, you're carrying it all day long. And, you know, photography takes time. It literally is time, you know, and it takes time to not only teach it, but also to do it. And people that pick up a brand new camera and think they're going to walk out the door and take a, you know, a fantastic shot that they can frame, I think that. I think there's a lot to gain from people doing entry level workshops and giving some reality around. This is what the craft involves, you know, and, and I think camera brands are partly responsible, as with all marketing, that there's this lifestyle of amazing imagery that you can capture, you know, because you go and spend $3,000 on a new canon or a sony or whatever it may be, but in actual fact, it's going to take you some time to get to that point. And I don't think enough people are taught that or given that impression because it's all flashy, glossy marketing shots captured by, you know, someone like yourself. [01:21:56] Speaker C: Well, you know, it's also that reality of what are you actually going to get out of it? Like, you know, I can give you an example. Um, you know, if I go like, I love, I love, um, my sort of wildlife safari trips and, you know, I can go away for a ten day trip and if I come back with ten shots that I'm going, yeah, these are really, you know, very, very solid shots that I might enter into a competition or something. So not saying that I only got ten good shots that were worth keeping, but yeah, I'm very fussy about what I do keep ten unique and interesting situations in ten days is actually incredibly successful. Successful. And what isn't often seen, as you say, is like, to go on that safari. For me to get those shots, I probably need to be in a private car. And so that's costing me an extra $600 a day to be in a private car. So before you do anything else, it's five or $6,000 in private travel that most people go, oh, why didn't I get that shot? And they realize they're in a 52 seater bus behind glass. Well, what you really need is someone in a June buggy letting you, you know, hang out the side whilst you're flying through the savannah or something, you need to do the crazy things to get to the crazy shots. And you're right. Like, if you look at promo shots of, you know, cameras, especially like new cameras, you only have to look at, say, like GoPro or those action cameras. DJI obviously is good at this as well, but those action camera shots, people go, I'm gonna buy GoPro because I'm gonna get the best shots ever. And then they realize that they don't actually go into the surface. And, you know, like, you're not going to get an awesome surfing shot if you don't go into the surf, you're not going to get a good shot of a penguin. If you go down to Phillip island, you get a good shot of a penguin when you pay 15, $20,000 to go to Antarctica. And it's like the camera, and that's what I was saying earlier, I think as well, is like the camera is important, but it's, it's you being in the right place. If you spend all your funds on a new lens, but now you can't afford to go on the holiday, well, you're not going to get better shots at home, you know, so. But photography is, it is. It can feel misleading sometimes like that. I think also the post processing thing can make people feel a bit cheated because they don't really see everything that goes into that work. I do it myself. I'm not against it, but people don't understand that. That's a whole process. [01:24:11] Speaker B: Interesting you say that. I've been, I'm in the middle of a challenge at the moment. I'm making a video a day on this channel. I'm up to day. Today's day 18, I think. So I go out, I put the Chesty mount on, go out. Most shoots have been around my town because I'm doing it every day. A couple have been professional shoots where I've done mountain bike photography, which I do a fair bit of. But most of the time it's like, alright, what am I going to do today? Go for a wander around my town for maybe half an hour and make a 15 minutes video out of it and put the photos in unedited JPEG straight out of camera. And I've been getting some really good comments. People like, it's really nice to see that not every photo, every YouTube person takes is great because it's literally me walking around, talking, being like, all right, let's see what we can do here. [01:25:04] Speaker A: You can hear him breathing, chasing the. [01:25:06] Speaker B: Trains, and it's like, click. Oh, that sucks. Okay. [01:25:11] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:25:11] Speaker B: And then just move, you know, move on to the next spot. And it's been, it's fun. It's been a fun experience. It's really challenging. But you're right, like most people put, most professional photographers that we see the work of, like yourself, it's like they put a lot of work into planning a trip then. So the GFX shoot that you did, what do you say? That was? Five days? [01:25:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I think we had five or six days. Yeah. [01:25:35] Speaker B: Of epic travel and planning to make a seven minute video. That looks like amazing, but yeah, yeah, that's a lot of work for seven minutes. And that's what, that's how, and I. [01:25:48] Speaker A: Imagine considerable budget too. [01:25:49] Speaker C: It was two, well, two videographers as well, you know, like, it's two videographers and then I'm shooting and then, you know, like, it's it is a huge amount of work, and I think that that's something that, um, you know, I think it's. It's starting to verge on dangerous territory at the moment in, from a social media perspective, because what you're seeing is this infinite amount of quantity of content. And, of course, if every single person on the planet produced a one hit wonder, you've still got 7 billion things to sift through. [01:26:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:23] Speaker C: And it's like, it is kind of a dangerous place because you go onto social media, and if you're trying to compare your photos or where you're at in your photos, photography, and you're just looking at this feed, it's very easy to forget that you're not looking at one person's infinite feed of good stuff. What you're actually looking at is literally everyone's best of the best of the best. So if you actually extrapolate out how many photos were taken to get those hundred shots in the top 100 of your Instagram feed, or how much money was involved in travel and time and all that sort of stuff to get those shots, it puts a really strange perspective on it. But. But of course, we don't do that. We don't stop and think, you know, even YouTube creators, if you actually want to see the reality of it, go on to, um, onto YouTube and actually look up, you know, how to shoot a really compelling YouTube video. I know there's a couple of really prominent creators who have done that recently because they're starting to actually say, I'm not doing it anymore because they're producing these. These videos that look insane and amazing. The quantity of time. Like, there was one guy who, um, we watched him through all their family, through, um, Covid, when I was sitting depressed in the bath with a bottle of wine. But, um, it was, uh, called trip in a van. Um, and it's a like a family that's been traveling around Australia for, like, five or six years, right? [01:27:35] Speaker B: Seen that one, yeah. [01:27:36] Speaker C: And they like that on camera. And they're young, real people. Kids are awesome. And they sort of living the dream. And he did an expose on it, um, in. Because they, they were in Western Australia during all the lockdowns, so they had, like, the entire place to themselves. So they're quite lucky from that perspective. But he didn't expose because people were saying, how do you actually make money on this? A lot of people were in lockdowns going, oh, when we get out of lockdowns, I'm going to buy a caravan. The family we're going to get famous on YouTube and make a fortune. And he said that every episode he produced, and they were doing a weekly episode, he spent 65 hours working on every episode, 65 hours a week. And he said the off the YouTube money side of it, and don't quote me on this, you can look it on the video there. But I think he said it was $35,000 a year of revenue. And you go more with sponsorships, but, yeah, job and totally. But 65 hours a week of work, you know, you're talking about a full time job and a half. And even if you doubled that with sponsorships and stuff, like, you're nothing. Yeah. You wouldn't ever look at their video and go, that took 65 hours. But of course, the sifting through footage, the pulling it together, you don't see it. And it's the same with photography, you know, you don't see how long, you know, it took. Tom putt and I did a snow workshop, not a workshop. We did a snow hike last year or the year before last year, and we did 65 k's across from Mount Hotham to Mount Bogong. And we snow camped for five days. And it was meant to be this epic photography journey. We run a podcast sporadically, and we recorded every night. We just lay in the tent, freezing to death, like, talking and doing the podcast at night, reflecting on our day. And the joke of it was that we got to the end and we actually realized there was only two occasions in five days. We pulled our cameras out because the rest of the time the light wasn't right. We didn't find the right subject matter, we didn't get to the right ridge in the right time. Just all these things. And I look at the photos, there's probably two or three shots I'm really, really happy with from that trip. But it was five days camping in the snow. Probably cost me three grand in equipment to get myself snow ready, and we got virtually nothing out of it. That's just sunken money that you can't get back. And if you sort of say, I'm never going to go, because it might not turn into anything, well, you'll never get anything, so. [01:30:03] Speaker B: That's right. [01:30:04] Speaker C: It's a, it's a very tricky balance, I think. Um, and where I think that also shines through is if you look at, um, camera clubs and competitions especially, you often see these days these incredible landscapes from local areas. Yeah. How did that person win the, the top award? They're just, you know, they might be like, you know, retired. Very much an amateur photographer who just, you know, they've got this insane award winning picture and you go, well, actually, statistically speaking, they've got more time just to be out there and be in the moment at the right time, right place. And so that's a really good way to look at it. You know, if you've got a professional photographer who's trying to work, you can't just sit there all day and make nothing of it. So. [01:30:47] Speaker A: And that's the other thing, too. You know, burnout's a very real danger when you're churning that much work out of or, sorry, churning, burning that many hours to churn out a small percentage. And as Matt talks, photography has just said, you know, took me about one to one and a half days per ten to 15 minutes videos. Longer video would take multiple days. You know, it will catch up on you eventually and you will get lung infections and, you know, and also fall out of love with it. You know, that's the biggest that you'll lose your creative edge and you'll get in a funk and it's back in the bath with a bottle of wine. [01:31:23] Speaker B: The bottle. [01:31:25] Speaker C: Try to keep that consistent in my. [01:31:27] Speaker B: Life, you know, every Wednesday night. It's interesting that you mentioned the local photographers kind of landscapes and stuff like that. And it's. It's a shift that I made in my thinking recently, because when I was shooting professionally full time, which I don't do as I don't do now. Now I still do professional work, but it's not full time. Main focus is lucky straps. But I used to travel and I wouldn't take photos of usually special locations and things like that because I used to think my photo will never be as good as the person that lives nearby here that shoots this landscape a couple of times a week. They get access to the best weather conditions, the best lighting, because they know it and they love it. And when that magic is happening, they get out there and shoot it. So why would I bother trying to take a photo of the Wanaka tree when I'm here on some random day? Because it's never going to be as good as that person. And I had to have a shift in my thinking only in the last couple of years to making images where I can say, I stood there and I was here, I stood here and I took this photo on this day because I used to think, well, I could just look at a photo of the Wanaka tree on Google and see a beautiful shot of it. But now we went to Yosemite. We recently went through the states went to all the national parks and stuff like that. And I thought, we're going to Yosemite in the day with the summer crowds. Like, we're not going to get photos that in any way do it justice compared to what professionals that love that area, that do it all the time, get. But we were there, and I got to stand on the edges of these massive granite slabs and take photos that I'll remember that I took. I stood there. [01:33:23] Speaker A: Well, you're documenting the experience, aren't you? [01:33:25] Speaker B: That's right. [01:33:27] Speaker A: Your experience at my experience, yeah. [01:33:30] Speaker B: And I can put that on my wall and I can point it to it and say, yeah, we went there and this is what happened, and tell a story about it, even though the photo is not something that someone would want in their portfolio or whatever. And it was definitely. It was something that I think, as a professional photographer, I sort of thought that it was a waste of time to take mediocre images, but it's not now I realize it's not anymore. So it's been a way that I've shifted my perspective. But, yeah, I just thought it was interesting, you said because someone that lives in a location, lives near a surf break, they're going to just see the most beautiful sunsets and sunrises and storms and lightning and all these things that if you're just there once in your lifetime, you're probably not going to see. [01:34:18] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:34:19] Speaker A: And I think there's also that expert, that experience of knowing a place so well, you know, and you know, the locals that live in that shack and you know, you know that a certain time that rock pops out when the. When the tides a certain place and the moon comes up over there and you know, you know it so well that you can. You can optimize that experience and optimize how you document it. Yeah, because you breathing it, you're living it, so to speak. [01:34:46] Speaker B: Man know your subject. [01:34:49] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. [01:34:49] Speaker C: About that, though. So I've got a really interesting example of where this is. It's just so glaringly obvious, but, you know, we don't think about it. So during COVID I did a project with the indonesian government to do photography and videography training for small communities in remote islands so they could market themselves when they came out of lockdowns and stuff. And the very first Zoom session that we did, I remember it so vividly. We had 50 people on. Of course, everyone's using mobile phones and stuff to do on their Zoom calls. And the first question that came up once we sort of finished the basics. Someone said, yeah, but what are we supposed to photograph? And behind them, they were in Labuan Bajo. This is like, where the Komodo dragons are. They had, like, the nicest beach in the world with a. Basically with a volcano and Komodo dragons crawling around. And they looked at me like I was a total idiot. Like, well, yeah, but what. What do. What do you actually photograph to get good shots? And here I am sitting in my, you know, in my office at the time. I was back in my old place as well. It's like this tiny little box of a room going, are you serious? Like, your background right now is what we pay for on Zoom, you know, and. And that's their reality. And so I think that you're absolutely right. It's easy for us to look at people and go, oh, well, I'm never going to take the wanna tree, because people literally live there and they spend their time there. My argument to my comeback to that is you also live somewhere, and I bet you don't look at your own local area through that lens, but other people do. I bet you've got tourists who come to where you live. Like, people come to Melbourne from all over the world to travel, and they're like, Melbourne? It's an amazing city. And I go to Melbourne, I'm like, bloody traffic, you know? So you have to be able to reframe things as well and kind of go, it's your job as a photographer to transform what's normal into something beautiful, as opposed to, you know, just always looking abroad and thinking that everything else is beautiful. Because I remember a great quote. It was. It was not all photography related, but it was something like, you know, just remember that out there, there's somebody who's sick of sleeping with their supermodel wife, you know, and it's the. Everything becomes normal at some point to you and I. And so you have to break away from that and find a way to make it happen. I describe it to my workshops participants as the difference between photographing something beautiful and photographing something beautifully, because it's very easy to photograph something beautiful. You can go to Patagonia and shoot an epic landscape on your iPhone and it'll be the best photo that any of your family and friends have ever seen you take. But that is a beautiful spot. It's hard to screw it up. You go to somewhere, like, you know, mount Macedon and try and take an epic landscape photo and, like, that's bloody hard, you know, like, it's a great area, but it's very hard to photograph. It's incredibly busy. It's cluttered, you know, it's messy looking. It's got lots of features, but almost too many features. How do you pull it together so totally different way to look at photography. [01:37:53] Speaker B: Was there the other day. These are some of my straight out of camera one. One photo a day shots, mostly mountain biking, but that's cool. [01:38:01] Speaker C: Love that. [01:38:02] Speaker B: But you can't really see it on this. But, yeah, the Instagram's crushed it. But the wind farm, you can see the wind farm and you could see the city popping out of the fog. I needed it. I needed a 500 mil lens. That little pixel, that's a plane taking off. [01:38:17] Speaker C: Oh, that's actually pretty cool. [01:38:19] Speaker B: Yeah. If I had a. If I had a longer lens and this wasn't crushed by Instagram, but, yeah, exactly what you're saying. I tell you what will make you find the take beautiful photos in your area is forcing yourself to shoot and post every single day. It's bloody hard. But all these shots. And not edit all of these shots. Actually, no, that's Mount Hotham. But, like, all of these shots are from around Bendigo, just around my area. And these are photos that would absolutely not exist if I wasn't doing this challenge. I just wouldn't have. Why would I take. Why would I go and climb a multi story car park in the rain to take a photo of pigeons on a roof in the middle? It was like my lunch break. Yeah, I don't know, but, yeah, you are spot on. [01:39:13] Speaker A: Matt, I just wanted to ask you about your. About your photography. We've talked a lot about your workshops, your involvement in BFOP, some of the projects you've done with brands. What is your passion photography? What do you love doing that's just for you? [01:39:31] Speaker C: That's a really good question, because I think I've drifted away from it a lot, and just because of the busyness of. Of life, I think that, you know, you were saying that the podcast you did last week, or the last episode was about, you know, why you do it. And I think that the reality is these days, like, I, you know, this festival takes up huge portion of my time for about six months of the year. My workshops, I run over 120 workshops a year. I do corporate commercial work. Like, my life is just revolves around my work quite a lot, so. But when I do get out and about and get the opportunity to do my own passion work, it's definitely in wildlife, but probably more specifically underwater. I really enjoy the experience of, you know, diving and you know, snorkeling, scuba diving and whatnot, anything underwater based. But I think it's also, it actually gives me that ability, like what we're just talking about to, to add purpose into your photography, you know, because it's too easy to, to shoot, you know, stuff that you think is kind of boring. Well, for me, underwater photography, like, it's such a privilege to be able to do underwater, like, to actually just get into the water in the first place. You need to be physically fit enough. You need to, you know, it's not a particularly cheap hobby or sport to do. I mean, it can be, but for most people, it involves a bit of travel. And I think it's something that also has a lot of fear attached to it as well, probably for the wrong reasons, but it is what it is. And so underwater photography, to me, is a way to capture something that, and share something that a lot of people, the majority of people on the planet, will never have the chance to see. And so rather than me showing them, you know, a landscape that, yeah, they could drive past that, or, you know, there's lots of people photographing it. Underwater photography, really, in my world, is about going, hey, look, have a, have a look at this whole world that exists that you are not necessarily a part of, but you also need to care about, you know, you might not be there, but you have to look after it, and you have to care about the planet, not just the parts you can see. And beyond underwater photography, probably my main passion is actually monochrome underwater. Funnily enough, I always love taking photos of the most colorful things in the world in black and white, because to me, it's actually changes the way you think about it. So I feel as though when you look at underwater, people expect to see sort of finding Nemo, you know, colors. [01:41:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:41:58] Speaker C: And to be honest, that wouldn't really suit most aesthetics on people's houses or walls and whatnot. And I certainly don't shoot for that. But I think when you put it in black and white, it makes people stop more and go, wait, what? What am I looking at? Oh, wow, hold on a second. And suddenly we're not just going, oh, wow, how pretty is a reef? Oh, my God. [01:42:14] Speaker A: Gosh. [01:42:15] Speaker C: You know, like, because that, that people hijack your story, you know, if I show you a picture of a tropical reef, I know what's going to happen. I'm going to show it to you and you're going to say, wow, that's so colorful. That's like that time I went to Fiji and oh, my God. We stayed in the best place. They had such amazing food, like, oh, it was such a good holiday and. Except the kids got sick. But hospital care in Fiji is really good. I know, it's so good. I'm sitting there going, we're looking at a photo of a reef and now we're talking about the hospital care in Fiji. Because people try and find their own story in your shot. I think when you strip the color out of it, they actually can't relate to it on any level. And so you actually have to look at it from a completely clean slate. And you only get to hear the story that I'm trying to show you. You can't hijack it with your own narrative. And that's a really. Something's taken me a long time to realize why I do it, but I feel like the more I sort of repeat a that, the more I kind of convinced myself that, yeah, like, that's a great example that was colorful as anything in color, but when you see it in black and white, it gives you a totally different perspective and you have to make sense of it somehow. So you have to think about it. [01:43:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. [01:43:21] Speaker A: Very, very cool. [01:43:24] Speaker C: I also like big animals in the water. There's something really cool about like swimming face to face with a whale or a shark or a big turtle or something where you just go and it's just, it's. Yeah, I mean, it's humbling to see the intelligence of some of these animals that, you know, most people only see them off a boat and you see like that little tiny hump come out of the water or maybe the occasional breach in the distance, you know, you might be lucky and get something close, but, but when you can actually sit there face to face with some of these animals, like, that's a calf sitting on the top there and you can see mum's nose down the bottom. So just watching. [01:43:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:43:56] Speaker C: You know, it's pretty insane. Yeah. That's so cool. [01:44:01] Speaker B: Hey, speaking of monochrome, would you ever get tempted on one of these monochrome cameras that brands are bringing out specifically for black and white photography? [01:44:12] Speaker C: I don't know. Like, I, I shoot most of my photography in black and white anyway. And then if I'm going to use color, I just, it's a raw file, so it'll be color on the computer. [01:44:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I do that too. So you'll have it in the viewfinder as black and white. Yeah, yeah, I love doing that. [01:44:27] Speaker C: Yeah. I think it's, um, for me, it's like you can't change the color on the day, so it doesn't matter what color it is. What you can change is the exposure of it, and you can look at the light and work out what shapes are there. And I think strip the color out. It's easy to see the things you can actually control in terms of buying a monochrome camera. I don't know. Like, I love the idea of it, but I sort of also feel like unless it had some particular feature benefit, like it was ultra high resolution because it's monochrome and it had to have less, I don't know, pixels or something, or it was ultra amazing dynamic range or some sort of, you know, really funky feature. I'm not sure that I would notice a difference between using just a black and white profile. I think what I'd be really excited to see, and I've seen it rumored, and certainly not anything that I know about, that's for sure. But, um. But I've. I watch all the rumor sites and I've seen, you know, a lot of these camera brands are looking at bringing out kind of like the 100 x 106 in like, full frame and medium format versions, like fixed lens, large sensor cameras, you know, I know Sony had one ages ago. The RX was RX one or something like that. [01:45:40] Speaker A: RX one? [01:45:40] Speaker C: RX one, R, yeah. And I would have bought that in a heartbeat if it wasn't $5,000. If I had it at a sensible price point, I would have gone and bought that because I love a fixed lens. That excites me. But I think really, more than anything, what I want to do in my photos from a gear perspective is I'll buy the piece of gear or use the piece of gear that gives me the best possible quality version of that shot. Because if it happens to be the best shot that I've ever taken, at least it starts up the top. You know, I hate the idea of buying a lesser camera as my walk around, but then I actually capture this amazing moment and realize that it's, you know, it's not quite as good as my other images from a quality perspective. So I'll kind of do that. I don't mind lugging around a ten kilo camera if it gives me everything I want and more, you know? Yeah, yeah. [01:46:32] Speaker A: Very cool. I'm very conscious of time. And Matt, on behalf of Justin and I and Camera Life podcast, thank you so much for giving up so much of your time this morning when it's such a busy period for you. Although you did get away, you did get one more ticket sale out of Justin, which is lovely. [01:46:51] Speaker B: Worth it. [01:46:54] Speaker A: So a couple of quick, quick questions. Where can people find out more about befop, the bright photography festival? [01:47:01] Speaker C: So jump onto the website's Befop Australia. So bfopaustralia.com, you could search bright festival of photography. We should pop up there. If you jump onto Facebook, we've got a Facebook page. It's not overly active. We don't do a lot of social media. We just don't have the time. But we do have a group that you can join if you want to kind of see the behind the scenes insights into it all. It's called the official beefop groupies. You can join on there and, you know, you can look through past experiences, people's photos and stuff, behind the scenes photos and stuff that people have posted on there, which, which might give you a bit of an idea of it. I guess what I'd probably say to those people who are maybe on the, on the fence thinking about it is that I hear a lot of people in photography trying to find purpose and community in it. You know, you've brought it up as a hobby and you've got it as a hobby and you're trying to find that, that place where you fit. And where do you fit into this big picture? If you don't have photography buddies, this is the best place to go. Because the moment you walk through the door, you've got 500 people ready to just adopt you as a photography baby and they will nurture you, drive you around. Our instructors will help. Like, it is such a community driven place. So it might seem scary to book onto something like this, not knowing anyone, but I've never had a single person come up to be fop and not within minutes go. I feel at home. Even if you do have photography buddies, it's such a good place to expand that just to get away from it, to spend more than, you know, 3 hours on working on photography. You know, sometimes we get. Life gets in the way. And I think that if you actually go, look, I have to switch my entire life off because I'm here for three days, and all you're doing, day in, day out, is hearing different people's opinions, thoughts, approaches to different types of photography. You'll find that all these little bits of information that maybe kind of made a bit of sense but didn't come together, they just start to. Just to gel together and. Yeah, and I think it's a really good place for that learning, too. So if you're on the fence I don't think you'll regret it. I think I only had one person who. Who regretted coming. And to be honest, we probably didn't want them there anyway. But the. Yeah, it's just a friendly, great place and value for money wise, you know, that's one of our main focuses. How can we provide this? You know, you couldn't get on a single workshop for the kind of price of your ticket, and yet there's so much that you get access to. [01:49:20] Speaker A: Yeah, it sounds amazing. And look, we wish you all the very best for. It's in October. [01:49:26] Speaker C: It is. It's October 11 to 13th. So we kick off at lunchtime. Oh, can I say one more thing about one workshop? [01:49:32] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. [01:49:33] Speaker C: We forgot to mention this. I know we're on time clock here. [01:49:36] Speaker A: No, no, you're right. [01:49:36] Speaker C: I. I had a few people asking me because we've sort of hinted about it. But again, we'll give you the exclusive. There is a. There are actually four workshops running this year that are incredibly cool for those who have done this a few times before, these are going to be full day bus trips. So we've got two instructors on the bus, 40 people. So you'll still have two groups of 20 and you'll alternate the instructors. But you're going to be doing a trip that goes up through. Through mountain beauty, up into the mountains to do waterfalls and hut tours. And it kicks off at 10:00 a.m. and doesn't get back till well after sunset. So for those people who have kind of been up there and maybe feel like you've done a lot of workshops before and you're after something really different, this is like a full day experience. And it'll run on the Friday before the festival kicks off, it'll leave, and then on the Saturday, it'll be a full day one as well. So that'll be a really cool opportunity to do something different. That, again, the kind of price point of the festival, you just wouldn't get to do that with photographers. [01:50:32] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely not. Yeah, definitely not. Oh, that's wonderful. Exclusive for the camera life. [01:50:38] Speaker B: That's it. [01:50:40] Speaker A: Before we wrap, there's a couple of things I want to cover again. Thank you, Matt. Wishing you all the very best for yourself and Nick and the whole team for the upcoming festival. We'd love to have you back on down the track. And once the dust has settled a bit, you've gotten over your lung infection, we'd love to have you back and. And debrief with you about the festival and learn more about it. So I hope you can make yourself available for that one in the future. Now, Justin, you said you had a video of Jim. [01:51:09] Speaker B: I'm trying to find my phone. That's why I've been looking around. [01:51:13] Speaker A: Do I need to call you? [01:51:16] Speaker B: Well, look, I don't want to hold us up any longer. I honestly don't know what I've done with it, which is a real shame because I'm gonna have to just. Anyways, I'll call him. [01:51:26] Speaker A: I got it. Just gotta call the right Justin. It's amazing how many Justin's I know. It's calling. [01:51:32] Speaker B: Oh, hang on. Where is that? Got it. Hey, there we go. [01:51:44] Speaker A: All right, we're back, people. We're back. Sorry for that brief intermission. [01:51:47] Speaker B: So we got this video from Jim. I was gonna transfer it to the computer, but for the sake of speed, hopefully I can just hold it up to. But basically he said there's a free BT 50 on Kagari. Come and get it. He's in a rooftop tent traveling around Queensland. And I'll turn this down. He sent us this video. Can you see that? Is it gonna focus? [01:52:16] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yep. Focused. [01:52:18] Speaker A: Hang on. [01:52:19] Speaker B: Wait for it. [01:52:21] Speaker A: That's. [01:52:22] Speaker B: That's a snake trying to get into his rooftop tent. [01:52:27] Speaker C: I love it. [01:52:28] Speaker B: He didn't come out of that tent for 20 hours, he said, because he had no idea where it ended up and he didn't want. He didn't wanna. It was like the next morning, we're like, Jim, have you left your tent yet? He's like, no, not yet. Yeah, that's hilarious. It just kept trying to get in and he was too scared to get out in case it would just, like, drop on his head or something. [01:52:46] Speaker A: I don't think I could go to sleep. [01:52:48] Speaker B: I don't know. [01:52:48] Speaker C: I don't. Video isn't it. [01:52:50] Speaker B: Isn't it? So he's in there, like, editing and stuff on his laptop, just filling in time, waiting for it to leave. [01:52:57] Speaker C: He does know how long snakes live for, doesn't he? [01:53:01] Speaker B: He's probably. This was about three or four days ago. He's probably still sitting on the beach in his rooftop tent, just waiting. Waiting for someone to come and rescue him. So if you're up there, go and help Jim. He's in a white BT 50. You know what? [01:53:14] Speaker C: He'll probably, um. He'll probably. By the time he. He gets out of that tent, the snake will have lost interest because he will have lost so much weight, having not been accessing his food, that the snake will be like, look, it's not worth it anymore. [01:53:25] Speaker B: No meat on those bones. [01:53:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Although he wears nice shirts. Um, well, we're going to wrap it up there, gents. Once again, thank you. Matt. Great to meet you. Great to talk to you. We look forward to having you back on the show in the future. Jim, if you're watching, if you're still in your rooftop tent, please send us a message, and we'll send water and some sort of bottle for you to urinate in next week. We still haven't decided on our guests for next week, but by all means, if you're watching along now, or if you watch this later on, please add some comments. We can address them in future episodes. If you've got questions, if you've got questions of Matt, pop them in there and we can somehow send them across. But otherwise, you can look for Matt on socials and his own photography business website. That's kind of a wrap on episode 27 of the Camera Life podcast. [01:54:22] Speaker B: Come and hang out with us at the Bright festival of Photography. It's gonna be a good time indeed. [01:54:28] Speaker A: Well, on that note, if you've got a camera, it's no point sitting in your camera bag or on a shelf or in a cupboard. Get out and shoot. Make the most of the opportunity and just take yourself for a little stroll. And be sure to check out Justin's daily vids on the camera life YouTube. [01:54:43] Speaker B: Channel as well if you wanna see the realities of trying to take photos of. Not much. It's a great time. [01:54:48] Speaker A: It is fascinating. It is absolutely fascinating watching the process unfold. [01:54:53] Speaker B: All right, I guess we'll catch you guys in the next one. [01:54:55] Speaker A: You will. All right, everyone, take care till then. We'll see you next time. [01:54:59] Speaker C: Cheers. [01:55:00] Speaker A: Bye for now.