From Headshots to NASA Features: Andrew Campbell's Photography Journey (EP194)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Far away. Well, good morning and welcome back to the Camera Life podcast. It is Thursday 25th June and of course being a Thursday morning, we are joined by an amazing guest today we're joined by Andrew Campbell or Andy Campbell as he's known in the astro scene. Andrew is a AIPP grandmaster photographer. He's a director of a Melbourne headshot company, one of the the proudest headshot companies in the country. And but on the flip side of Andrew's story, he is a phenomenal astrophotographer and we're not just talking star trails or the Milky Way over a well lit country barn, we're talking deep space astrophotography. And on that note, Andy, I'm getting to it, is also the co founder and competition director of the Australian Astrophotography Prize. Andy, welcome to the Camera Live podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you on. [00:01:17] Speaker B: Thanks so much guys and good morning everybody. Nice to see you. [00:01:22] Speaker C: Good morning. Where are you joining us from? Andy, you're in what cosmos are you in right now? [00:01:27] Speaker B: We're in sunny Melbourne, Victoria. [00:01:31] Speaker A: Is it sunny your way, Justin? [00:01:34] Speaker C: Yeah, it's beautiful. It's going to be a really nice day up here, I think. [00:01:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I might go hunt some light later. And of course, yes, co host here is Justin. We have to have him on board because he pays the bills. So that's your only redeeming quality. Jay, Andy, thank you again for joining us. I've spent a lot of time looking, poring through your images on your website and your socials, marveling at some of the toys, as you'd like to call them, that you use for your astrophotography. Jay, you want to bring up a couple of images just to kick off, kick things off maybe. Andy, we'll get you to talk about, I guess, the style of astrophotography that you shoot. How do you, how do you qualify or how do you explain to people the sort of work that you do? [00:02:17] Speaker B: I guess, I guess my work's a little bit different to some typical astrophotography in that I tend to be a deep spot space guy. So I'm not photographing Milky Way with a horizon. That's what we call nightscapes and I got plenty of respect for that. But I was always more interested in, in what's really out there. So galaxies, nebulae, supernova remnants, the kind of stuff that you only read about in, in books or see on science fiction movies. And I guess that always has been of interest to me. So I sort of took the plunge And. And went deep straight away. [00:02:55] Speaker A: Yep. And from what I've read of your, of your history, someone gifted you a telescope in 2012, and that was where it kind of kicked off for you. Tell us about that. That experience of discovering, you know, setting up that telescope and discovering that there's so much more to see out there. [00:03:14] Speaker B: Very good friend of mine literally rocked up at my door one day and he said, here. I said, is that a telescope? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's for you. I said, thank you. Why are you giving me a telescope? He said, well, I bought this fancy new one that, you know, has all the bells and whistles, but this is good enough. You can show your kids the moon and, you know, all that stuff. And we thought, okay. So I took the kids out. They were quite young at the time, and they went, oh, moon daddy, moon. And that was exciting. And then I thought, well, what else can we see through this thing? And he showed me the rings of Saturn. I thought, oh, that's cool, because I think everybody, they kind of go. When they see the rings of Saturn for the first time through a telescope, they go, oh, my God, it's real. [00:03:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:03:56] Speaker B: Then we saw the moons of Jupiter. And then I kind of thought, you know, how do you attach a camera to this? And you couldn't because it was sort of bit old and that kind of thing, but it sort of set me down a slippery slope on a rabbit hole of, you know, how could I do this with a camera and what's involved? And, yeah, off we went. [00:04:16] Speaker A: And it obviously turns out there's. There's quite a lot involved, even just from a gear perspective. Jay, do you mind bringing up Andy's Toy room page? Andy's Toy Room. Isn't that from. What's that, kids animation with Buzz Lightyear? Toy Story. That's what it's like. [00:04:33] Speaker B: Toy Story. Yeah. [00:04:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:35] Speaker B: I guess my Toy Story is a little different. My gear sits on a. On a friend's property at up in rural Victoria, and we have a shared observatory there. And it's a what we call a roll on, roll off roof observatory. So all the gear is sitting in the observatory, and the roof rolls off when it's clear. It's all automated so that literally when the sky is clear, we can fire up the telescopes and start imaging without having to sort of set everything up many times. Yeah, because historically I was setting up in the backyard and then pulling it down because Melvin, you know, rains a lot. [00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:05:18] Speaker B: And this way, with the observatory there, for us, it sits on his property and there's always someone there so it's safe and protected. But also he's, my friends are really good technical wizard so if there's any kind of major issues that he can troubleshoot them. Yeah, that box you're looking at now, that's the portable rig. So when we go to something called a star party, and a star party is, you know, I know 50 like minded geeks hang out together in the darkest skies on, in Australia, you know, in the desert or somewhere. This one's at a camp outside of Ballarat, a place called Snake Valley. And we set up, we image through the night, drink too much whiskey, have a great time in the morning, process our photos, you know, generally live the life of, you know, nerds in the dark. So. [00:06:13] Speaker A: Oh wow, that's amazing. And now you meant, you said something earlier that, that, that caught. You said you have these star parties and I wondered what your nickname was for these star parties because earlier you said one of your kids went, oh, Moon Daddy. [00:06:24] Speaker B: Moon. [00:06:24] Speaker A: Now I wasn't sure if they were saying that your nickname is Moon Daddy. [00:06:29] Speaker C: No, it's a good one. [00:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I like it. I'm quite, quite happy with that. [00:06:35] Speaker B: I was a cricketer for many years as a hobby before I took up this astro thing. And there was a, another player there called Anthony Campbell, Hyphen Burns. So his nickname was 2Dads. So when a book came out about our club written by Gideon Haig, who's a very famous cricket writer, he dubbed me as One dad because I was Andy Campbell without the hyphen. [00:06:55] Speaker A: One dad. [00:06:55] Speaker B: So One dad is a nickname that has stuck in cricket circles. So Moon Dad. Yeah, that could, that could. Daddy. [00:07:02] Speaker A: It's got to be Daddy. Moon Daddy. [00:07:03] Speaker B: Gotta be Daddy. [00:07:04] Speaker A: It just has more sex appeal that way. [00:07:06] Speaker C: That's got answering to it. [00:07:08] Speaker A: It does, I think so. That's amazing. And, and you know, for anyone that wants to have a closer look at Andy's toy room or his toys, if you just head to his website, there is actually a, a page dedicated to all the geeky glory that Andy has acquired over the years. [00:07:25] Speaker C: And we'll probably get, we'll dig into that gear maybe a little bit later in the show once we've got a bit better of an understanding what it might be because at the moment I'm reading some of the things and I'm like, I don't even know what that, that is. Is that a word? We'll circle back to this, this gear page later on. [00:07:42] Speaker A: Yep, cool. Jay, let's say good Morning to some people. [00:07:46] Speaker C: Yeah. If you're listening live too, don't forget, just, you know, make sure you're logged into YouTube and you can jump in the live chat and ask questions or, you know, just tell us where you're listening from. Paul's here. He says, good morning. Good to see you. Lucinda Goodman. Paul is here. Here whilst editing. That's good. What are you editing? Philip Johnson is here. Paul timed his walk to arrive at a cafe just in time to settle in. Oh, that's awesome. [00:08:09] Speaker A: Nice. [00:08:10] Speaker C: Stuart Lyle. Ah, Nick Fletcher. Hey, Nick. [00:08:12] Speaker A: G', day, Nick. [00:08:13] Speaker C: How's the. How's the BFOP planning going? Rodney Nicholson's here. Craig Aliff. And Greg Stubbings. Samantha Olson. [00:08:22] Speaker A: Hey, Sam. [00:08:23] Speaker C: Brian Maxwell Carr. Oh, and David Leporati. Long time no see. How are you? [00:08:29] Speaker A: Speaking of the devil, we're talking about you earlier. [00:08:32] Speaker C: Yeah. And so if you're listening, let us know where you're listening from, what you're up to this morning. And if you've got any questions for Andy throughout the show, just throw them in the live chat. And otherwise, if you're listening back later, enjoy the show. [00:08:47] Speaker A: Andy, what we'd like to do here is just roll back the clock a little bit. I want to get to the point where eventually we'll get to the point where you have the Melbourne headshot company going and you've got your astro going about that diversity between those two genres. But even before then, rolling back the clock further, can you identify what some of those earlier influences were for you to become a photographer? Was it something that you always had an interest in growing up? Was there key figures in your life that sort of said, here, take this camera, give this one a shot, let us know. Where did that journey begin for you? [00:09:26] Speaker B: I've always been a bit of a petrol head, so I used to enjoy going to speedways and racetracks with my father and thought I'd try and take some photos of my favorite racing drivers, that kind of thing. And I borrowed my mum's Instamatic and got a couple of shots. I thought, these are great. Took them down the chemist shop one day and said, mate, you know, give me a poster this big on my wall. You know, being 15, the guy said, go buy a real camera, mate. And it's like, okay. That kind of started on a bit of a journey of getting a DSLR and I think it was a Pentax SP1000 and trying to photograph, you know, racing cars and that kind of thing. It was always a bit of an interest. I foolishly Was very good at art at school, but. And reasonably good at science, but hopeless at mathematics. So I took up a course of environmental science at uni and that lasted about a year before I realized this isn't me. And I fluked a job at processing laboratory called F Stop in Queensland. And they only dealt with professional photographers. So suddenly I'm processing Ektachrome and C41 and black and white and I'm kind of thinking, this is pretty cool, I'm enjoying this. And those guys liked me and I liked them and they sent me to college. So suddenly I'm at Seven Hills Art College, you know, studying photography part time. [00:10:49] Speaker A: Wow. And the company supported that? [00:10:52] Speaker B: Yeah, the company actually, you know, made the introductions and made that happen. So suddenly I was on the journey of, you know, learning about being a photographer. [00:11:01] Speaker A: Wow. [00:11:01] Speaker C: Wow. [00:11:02] Speaker B: And it was cool. [00:11:02] Speaker A: That's quite amazing. Yeah. [00:11:04] Speaker C: Did they, did they have a plan for you? Like, did they, were they. So you were, you were processing there. Did they also do photographics? Oh, okay. Did they, did they do photographic services? Were they hoping that you would. [00:11:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:18] Speaker C: Oh, okay. [00:11:20] Speaker B: But I did score a job with one of their clients, fellow called Ian Poole as an assistant for a little while and that gave me a little bit more insight as to kind of what photographers do, if you like. And then I scored an opportunity with a fellow called Derek George. And Derek is one of the, the advertising fashion industry's real characters. So imagine like huge handlebar mustache, Beatles haircut, smokes rollies and listens to opera. So. Oh, a little bit eccentric. Absolutely lovely guy. And he gave me a chance to be a photographer, if you like. So he shot advertising and fashion. And the deal was you can use my studio, fully equipped studio, you can use my Hasselblads and lights and anything you want, darkroom, anything you like. You give me 50% of your earnings and I'll use my. Use you as my assistant and pay you to do that. Pay you to do it, run my dark room, that kind of stuff. And off I went. And it was a really good deal. Yeah. [00:12:31] Speaker A: Amazing opportunity. How old do you think you were at this point? [00:12:35] Speaker B: About 22. So. [00:12:38] Speaker A: Wow, that's. That's impressive. That's really impressive, isn't it? [00:12:41] Speaker B: My first professional photos in 1983. [00:12:45] Speaker A: Okay. [00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I had hair then. [00:12:48] Speaker A: Yeah, me too. [00:12:49] Speaker C: Do you remember, do you remember what your first professional photo shoot was? You have any idea? [00:12:55] Speaker B: Funnily enough, it was headshots really, because I was shooting for Derek. Had some amazing clients, but one of the sort of more fun clients he had was the Queensland Ballet Company. And so I was shooting headshots for dancers. That was fun. I thought, this is cool, I don't mind doing this and, you know, interacting with people and that kind of thing. But I guess we were also shooting a lot of advertising work, fashion work, Maya, that kind of thing. So catalogs, pick and pay, hypermarket. Good opportunity to learn the craft of being a commercial advertising fashion photographer. And I went out and got my own clients, you know, went to advertising agencies, showed the Folio, which is kind of what you did at the time. And I remember one particular client I went to see a studio called Concept and Derek said, oh, you'll never get a job out of those, don't even bother. And like literally got on well with the guy and he gave me a job that day. Um, and that's sort of how it was. It's just all built on relationships. You know, if an art director liked you and you had some ability, there's good chance that you'd end up working together. And I think that thing about working and relationships is something that's continued for everyone's life thereafter because, you know, it's all about the, the relationships you build and maintain and keep with people because ultimately people like working with people they like. [00:14:23] Speaker A: It's very true. And what do you see as the core differences between, you know, attaining landing a job like that back then versus what new photographers are facing today? Do you see some core differences there? [00:14:39] Speaker B: It's, it's a little strange because I feel like I was very, very lucky and very blessed to get that opportunity. But I don't see the same motivation from people nowadays. I sort of feel like I'm at a stage in my life where I'd like to give back to the community and to give back to the world a little bit of all the knowledge that I have attained over 40 something years of doing this. But I don't get people knocking on my door saying, you know, hey, let me work for you, I'll come and do this, I'll sweep your floors, I'll do anything you want, just let me be there and hang out. Mostly they sort of, if they do approach you, it's very much like, hi, I've just graduated from college, pay me 90 bucks an hour and I'll come and work for you. And it's kind of like, interesting. Maybe I'm just old school. [00:15:31] Speaker C: Well, I'll come and sweep your floors. Yeah, I'll be down there next week. What day do you want me? Yeah, I wonder whether that has been lost. That mindset of just not. Not. This isn't a work ethic thing. This is more. I'm thinking more like a. It's just not as common anymore. So it doesn't get talked about to kids in uni and stuff like that. No one's saying, hey, go knock on some doors and an offer to. To work, to learn or whatever. People are just sort of. I don't know, is that. Is that kind of missing from society now? That. That idea that you could just go and ask someone who's in the position you want to be if you can just learn from them? [00:16:14] Speaker B: I don't know. Because I think if you. When. Excuse me, when people do that and if they make themselves indispensable to the photographer, it's like I picked up after two years of doing this with Derek. I had a really good friend working in London and who encouraged me to go to London. So I went to London to assist, to start again, if you like. And the way that worked was the advertising, fashion and editorial photographers had like a hotline. And as an assistant you could ring in and see which photographers were looking for assistance. [00:16:49] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [00:16:50] Speaker B: You effectively door knocked your way into opportunities. And so if you made yourself indispensable and if they really liked you, then you would obviously stay on. So the first one I worked with was expatriate Australian. He ran something called the dirty tricks department. And every shoot would take a week. So it's all special effects model making, set building. My introduction was, there's the camera room. Put the camera together and it was an 8 by 10 cine. Fortunately, I'd seen one before, never actually built one. So it was all disassembled. So I put it together. Once he realized I could build it, he said, okay, well, you've got the job. So each shoot would take a week. So we're doing things like 92 sheet posters for the London Underground. There was one that said, from Paddington to Bristol at 100 miles an hour. We're getting there. And you had literally had Paddington Bear flying over a series of cars with his little briefcase behind him, with his little marmalade sandwich behind that. And this all had to be shot on 8 by 10 film. And massive production. They had these things called strobes. Now strobes were a high voltage AC powered flash unit that literally, I think it came out of World War II in the design. It was scary as hell, these things. There are lots of urban myths about photographers, you know, electrocuting themselves with these. So I actually went to the strobe factory and said, look, I've just got this job with this guy. Can you show me how this stuff works? And honestly, it felt like I was going back into the 1920s or something. But they showed me how it worked. And we had these 5,000 jewel flashbacks, the massive things, and they had lights called swimming pools, which are enormous pools of light. And you had to plug these flash packs together. So I'm literally sort of very Tefly, plugging one in and thinking, please don't electrocute me. And then you had to hook it up to the next one. And eventually you've got like 15,000 jewels of light coming in. And, you know when it goes off, it's like, boom. Yeah. Pretty amazing stuff. But Angus's shoots, that's the fella's name, Angus Forbes, were really interesting. He said it was great to spend lots of Paul McCartney's money because he would go and photograph him on a mountaintop in Switzerland or something for an album cover. But Angus was an alcoholic. Little did I know that the reason the studio was next to a pub was he hired me because I could run the studio. And literally, he'd be there for 20 minutes. I'd set things up. He'd say, okay, take a Polaroid, bring it to me at the pub. So I'd do that. He'd say, you know, adjust that light, move it a bit, take another Polaroid. And then this would go on all day while I'm building his shots for him under his direction from the pub. And then come about four or five o' clock in the afternoon, he'd be off to the wine bar and on. On this would continue. I lasted with him for about six weeks. He was a fairly volatile fella, pretty explosive. But I was learning and I'd gone all the way around the world to kind of see what happened in the. In the big picture, which was pretty amazing. But I remember one particular shoot, and there was this Paddington Bear one. We had to get this special effect where Paddington was streaking. So you had to have this time exposure combined with the flash, where Paddington was literally appearing to be moving, which meant about half an hour of exposure for each one. You'd have to gently move the camera a little bit at the back and tweak it down there to get this what they call strobe swoosh effect. So each shot took about half an hour, I think about 5 o' clock in the afternoon. He said, yep, I need you to take about 30 of these on transparency, get it processed at Joe's basement, which is a 24 hour E6 lab and deliver it to the client at 9 o' clock tomorrow morning. I'm thinking that's possible, but I'm not going to get any sleep. Yeah, so I did that, handed the transparencies in, got them there and resigned next day and said, okay, I didn't come halfway around the world to work for, for this. Let's see what else is out there. And that's when I got back on the hotline and I heard about this other fellow who was a fashion music guy and his name is Mike Owen. And that absolutely changed my life because Mike was, first of all he was nice, he wasn't an alcoholic. He lived on a, in his studio which was five floors up in a warehouse on the Thames in Clink Street. If you know the expression to be thrown in the clink, that's from Clink in London. So he shot, he was the guy. If you were a big pop star in the 80s, he would photograph your album covers or magazines or whatever. He made all his money out of Duran Duran and that kind of thing. So his client list was like, oh my gosh, you know, there's people like Jane Collins in there and you know, Kylie and everyone else from the 80s. But I was the assistant so I would set up lights, get lunch, get the mail, make cups of tea for famous people and learn. But he didn't use flash, he used tungsten light. So very sort of Hollywood inspired from the era of George Harold, that kind of thing. And he learned from a fellow called Angus McBain. And Angus was one of the great Hollywood photographers who discovered Audrey Hepburn, picked her out of a, out of A Chorus Line and said, I'm going to make you a star. And that lighting style was like, wow, this is so cool. You know, I've never seen anything like this live. I've seen it in books. But then you realized everyone was using these like blazingly hot lights on faces. No diffusion. But the lenses they used had these little apertures that you could adjust which made them softer or harder depending on how you wanted it to be. And so you'd end up with these beautiful soft images lit with these incredible hard lights. And they'd be like a dozen lights in any one shot to do a portrait. And it's all creative, like he's throwing gels at stuff we're in. Sometimes around location there was things like we had a location van at one point which literally is like, it's full hair and makeup facility, change rooms. We had models we had set builders, we had all kinds of people. We're in Soho, it's the middle of the night, it's like 11 o' clock at night. We're shooting these models. I'm holding various lights and getting things going for some magazine that we're shooting. I think it was just 17, might have been. There was a film called Absolute Beginners at the time with David Bowie. And we were sort of inspired by the fashion of that to do this. And suddenly I'll turn around and there's like 500 people watching as we've got this production going on. And I'm just trying to be the assistant and keep it together and keep my jaw off the floor because I'm still a little bit amazed that I'm doing this. But Mike was amazing, wonderful fellow, really creative. Very much liked working with him for the year that I was with him until he decided he was going to try his luck in Paris. And it was like, okay, mate, it's been great. Thanks for coming. Why don't you go back to Australia and see what you can do? [00:24:14] Speaker C: Yeah. Wow. [00:24:15] Speaker B: Full of inspiration and wow, this is amazing. Went back to Brisbane to be a, you know, fashion photographer, I guess. [00:24:22] Speaker A: Yeah. It is interesting hearing. No, no, no, please don't. No need to apologize for that. That's what we're here to do. We're here to talk a lot. We want to extract the best we can out of you. It's interesting hearing you're going back to that question about the difference between people starting off when you started and how people start off now. I think there's a much stronger drive for instant gratification these days, instant success. And we see it in this sort of influencer market a lot as well. But it is interesting hearing all of the hard yards that you've had to go through dealing with, with people that are horrible to deal with and, and, you know, working all hours and. And I think there's. I think that we're lacking that sort of work ethic today, granted, you know, things have changed, laws have changed. You can't, you know, obviously you can't overwork your workers and all that sort of stuff. But it's just interesting to hear what people can and are willing to go through to. To build their own career. I think it's really admirable. [00:25:24] Speaker C: I wonder whether it's just looking back, like listening to these stories and nostalgia and stuff, but it sounds like such an interesting thing to be doing with your life at that age. Like. Like, yeah, helping set up a Production like that. And I'm like, does stuff like that even exist anymore? Or, or, you know, like, how. How does a young person find that kind of adventure in work today? [00:25:51] Speaker B: Or. [00:25:52] Speaker C: Because everything's, you know, everything's so automated or aied, or whatever the kind of production level is, is it obviously happens on movie sets and things like that, but it's definitely. It's. I can't imagine it would be easy to find that kind of work, but it probably wasn't easy for you to find it either. So I don't know, maybe I'm just. [00:26:14] Speaker B: Well, I remember thinking it was easier before. I've got lucky with, with Derek. I think I'd written 100 letters and sent them all out. So, you know. [00:26:23] Speaker A: Know. [00:26:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's what you did at the time. Because the email didn't exist. [00:26:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Or go door to door, quite literally. [00:26:32] Speaker C: Photocopy them, at least. I don't know. [00:26:34] Speaker B: Yeah, all that stuff. Yeah, it's just. It's just a different time, I guess. But, you know, it's. If you want something badly enough, you'll find a way to get it. [00:26:44] Speaker A: Yeah, that's very true. Can I ask you before we sort of jump into, you know, your return to Australia, what. What do you think were some of the key, you know, two or three key lessons that, or even one lessons that you took away from those early years of traveling and working as assistant. [00:27:04] Speaker B: Don't be late to a shoot ever? There are. There are just. No. [00:27:11] Speaker C: Does that mean for you, you are always there early? [00:27:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm an on timer, that's for sure. Or early. Because, you know, doesn't matter if the bus isn't running that day or if the trains are on strike, you know, you know, you need to be there. They have to have a plan B because they're relying on you. They literally can't start without you. And everything's on the clock and you're dealing with, you know, at that time, pretty famous people who only had a limited window of opportunity. And that translates all the way up to when I'm shooting Prime Minister John Howard a few years ago and his diary was micromanaged to the minute. Like literally, I had 11 minutes with him. And you've got to be on your game and aware of, you know, what's going to happen and have it all planned out. So that was, that was one takeaway from. From that. [00:27:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:01] Speaker B: Another one is that a duck is a duck no matter where it is. So it doesn't matter how famous someone is, they still get dressed in the morning the same way everyone else does. They still want to, you know, milk and tea with their. With their tea or whatever. I mean, they're just people, you know. [00:28:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:22] Speaker B: So If I'm shooting CEOs, execs, lawyers, politicians, that kind of thing, as I do now, I guess those lessons from years ago of being involved, being on a set where, you know, very famous pop stars are there, you don't sort of have to kind of bow down and worship them. You just acknowledge and respectfully deal with them like real people because that's what they want. So that was interesting, and it was a good lesson to learn and take that through life as well. [00:28:56] Speaker C: Did you. Did you learn that one by watching the photographers that you were working for and how they dealt? Were they good at dealing with these people? These. These very famous people? But, yeah, there was a fellow that [00:29:09] Speaker B: I briefly didn't really work with. He was one of the photographers in a studio that I did work in at the time. And he had this amazing ability to interact with people quickly by insulting the hell out of them in a really funny way. Now, you probably couldn't get away with it now, but he had this amazing ability to just bring everyone down to earth. And I suddenly realized, you know, like, I guess if you. If you're very. If you're photographing people and you're very confident, you know what's going to happen, you've got your plan, and then you reassure them from the start, this is what we're going to do. This is what we're going to do. This is what I'd like you to do. It sort of breaks down all the barriers of what is unexpected to a degree, because then suddenly everyone's on the same page and we're all kind of working together for an outcome. And I just talk to people now, you know, it's like, so where are you from? How long you been in Melbourne? What do you do when you're not being a really busy, famous, fantastic, incredible lawyer? You know, Tell me about your hobbies. Sailing, boat building, whatever it is that you do. Because people love talking about themselves, you know? [00:30:25] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:30:26] Speaker B: And once they start talking about themselves and they relax a bit, and then suddenly they're smiling and they're happy, like when we're doing headshots, you know. Okay, before we start taking the photo, do you prefer to smile with teeth or not with teeth? Oh, no one's ever asked me that before. Okay, I don't want to show my thing. All right, fine. Well, that's not whatever you want to do. It's like, oh, no, I want to smile. I want to be happy. It's like, okay. And then we'll start photographing and say, well, okay, let's get you smiling. And they'll give me like the school photo and I'll say, no, no, give me a real smile. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. And then they start relaxing and being the person that they are. And then if you start out, you know, who's your footy team? How are they going make a joke out of it if they're, you know, Obama supporter or something, Whatever works to get people comfortable talking about themselves, their family, their kids, their life, whatever. When they start relaxing, they just start being. And then you can photograph them. [00:31:30] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:31] Speaker C: So do you find that with. With your. So, yeah, I had a big list of stuff with headshot questions. We'll just. Let's just dive into some stuff right now. Do you find that. [00:31:42] Speaker B: Didn't mean to get off topic? [00:31:43] Speaker A: No, no such thing. Perfect. No such thing. [00:31:46] Speaker C: That when people come in initially they've got a busy day probably, and this is just something they've had to wedge into their day that they need to get done. And can you sort of feel when you're talking to them that at some point that all that noise in their head switches off for a minute? Once you've had a chance to, like break down that barrier and talk to them a little bit, they stop worrying about the meeting they just came from or the meeting they're going to after this or whatever thing has been weighing on them. Is that the strategy to try and get them to let go of that stuff for a minute so you can get five minutes of them just sort of being happy thinking about their boat or whatever it is that they really like? [00:32:29] Speaker B: Justin, that's exactly right. First of all, most of our work is studio based. We've got a studio in the city. First headshot company in Australia set up 25 years ago. There you go. [00:32:40] Speaker C: What? [00:32:41] Speaker A: Congratulations. [00:32:42] Speaker C: That's crazy. So also, longest running headshot studio in Australia. [00:32:46] Speaker B: There you go. There you go. Yep. Yeah. As a family business. The wife had this idea back in 2000 that, you know, we should do headshots. And away we went with that because we. We were doing a job. My wife's a photographer as well. Well, at least she was up until a couple years ago. Now she's a very brilliant psychologist. But we had this idea that we would photograph some doctors on location and we had these really famous doctors coming out every 10 minutes out of a seminar. And we'd take their picture and have this little studio set up and so forth and get chatting with them. And I thought, wow, this is really interesting. Imagine doing this all day. How cool would this be? And so that's when we eventually created this thing called the Melbourne Headshot Company. And we named it, like, well, let's make it easy for people. Let's tell them what we do and where we do it. [00:33:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:33:39] Speaker B: Because at that time, if you were looking for a headshot, you know, do you go to a wedding photographer, glamour studio? Do you go to some kind of a, you know, how do you. Where does someone in a suit go if they need a nice photograph? So we thought, well, let's make it easy for them to do that. And so that's when we started, literally out of our, you know, lounge room in Bennett's Lane in Melbourne, opposite the jazz club, which was quite a nice place to be. Open the windows and jazz would come in and it was nice. But getting back to the question, probably a lot of the people we photograph are sent by their company. They're a new hire and the company needs a new photograph of them to announce them, put them on the website, that kind of stuff. And because many of them have not either had a good professional photography experience or even had any photography experience, 99% of them will walk in and go, I hate having my photo taken. It's like, now we shoot 2,000 people a year. Probably shot the equivalent of the MCG individually over the years. So, yeah, we hear that a lot. So my usual line is actually, you hate having your photo taken badly. Let me help you with this. This is what we're gonna do. [00:34:50] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good line. [00:34:53] Speaker B: And I say, have you had a hamburger at McDonald's? Yes. Have you had a five star restaurant meal? Yes. Okay, let me introduce you to the hamburger McDonald's of photography. This is the iPhone. You're not going to rave about that hamburger to all your friends and family. But if you go to the five star restaurant, you'll probably have a good time. Well, now you're in the five star restaurant of photography. [00:35:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:17] Speaker B: And let's talk about you and what's your role and who are you and how do you want the world to see you? And suddenly they go, oh, oh, oh, well, this, this, this and this. And they start relaxing. And then most of the work's done before we even pick up the camera. Because suddenly. [00:35:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to ask that because that must be A big chunk of that process for you is to break down that barrier and get the person in a more natural state. [00:35:40] Speaker B: Exactly. And then we can explain what's going to happen. We're going to show them the image, style, we're going to tell them, look, I'm going to show you what to do, where to put your hands, where to put your feet, when to smile, how much to smile, just stand there and look good. I'll take care of everything else. Then we'll come back, choose your favorite photo, Photoshop the hell out of it and you'll be happy as Larry. Great. And keep it fairly subtle and simple and people are happy. So, yes, that's something I guess we learned along the way. But it all began, I think, from understanding, working with those pop stars that all these people have natural fears and concerns and people surround themselves with this kind of stuff and they're under a little bit of a microscope when they come to a photographic studio, whether they like it or not. But once you tell them we're amongst friends, we're not shooting the front cover of Vogue today, you know, there's a corporate headshot, it's going to be fine. You know, and most of the time people go, that was amazing. So, yeah, happy. [00:36:47] Speaker A: Sorry, I was just going to ask, do you, you know, in terms of, I guess the overall structure of headshot photography has much changed in that 25 year period. I think people are becoming more expecting, [00:37:02] Speaker B: people are a bit more aware now. So when we started, yes, we could do Photoshop, yes, we could tweak backgrounds, that kind of thing. But people are very much now exposed [00:37:16] Speaker A: to [00:37:18] Speaker B: Instagram, Instagram filters. A lot of the Photoshop like stuff that we used to do that people would go, wow, I've never seen this before, is now available to almost everyone. So there's, there's an expectation that everyone's going to look kind of like someone in a magazine. The reality is you still got to get the photo first. You know, you got to get the, the expression's got to be right. So, for example, with a lot of people, when they see their photos as we're going through them, they'll just zero in on whatever part of themselves they like the least. And that's all they see. It's like they've got this pimple here, that's all they see. They don't like their hair pushing out this way. That's all they see. I'm looking at it holistically because I'm thinking what I'm looking for is the Combination of your expression and your body language that makes you look warm and confident. And knowing what I can edit. Right. Because we'll do. I'll then edit it live while they watch and suddenly it's like, oh, wow. Wow, that's really cool. [00:38:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:38:17] Speaker B: And with the tools that are available now, we use something called Evoto, which is AI driven editing software. Interesting. [00:38:26] Speaker C: I've been using that too. Interesting. [00:38:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's a game changer. [00:38:31] Speaker C: I've been experimenting with pet photography. Want to start a pet photography studio? I've been playing with it for that. It's very powerful, really powerful. [00:38:40] Speaker B: There is a button in there that says pet photography. And I always, always wondered what that setting was. [00:38:48] Speaker C: It doesn't do much for that. I actually don't use that at all. I think all it does, all that pet photography button does, I think is remove stray hairs. So if it, if they had like hairs crisscrossing all over the place that are like loose hairs, it might remove those. But I've mainly used it for cleaning backgrounds and expanding backgrounds and stuff like that to sort of. Yeah, it's, it's, it's super interesting. So do you. Because I haven't, I've haven't gone the other way. It's got all these controls for like blemish reduction and, and all that. Like anything you could imagine that you could do to a portrait, it seems to have a dedicated control for it and you can dial it up and down so you don't get this over processed look because you can just do it a little bit or whatever, depending on what you're doing. So do you use those kind of controls in there? [00:39:36] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So Justin, with the Evoto, a lot of this stuff is I guess applicable to almost all the stuff that we do, you know, soften lines, remove blemishes, stray hairs. Like you said. It's got these funky buttons in it that will decrinkle suits, it'll iron shirts. Yeah, I know, right? [00:39:57] Speaker C: That's correct. [00:39:58] Speaker B: Change backgrounds literally at a touch of a button. So there's no more cutouts or any kind of contouring that you have to do. It does all that for you. But I had one client, you know, a principal of a law firm, and they wanted a lot of shots of this person for Instagram and one every day. And so they ordered like 34 very similar photographs of this person. And this is before I had a photo. So this is Photoshop and it's like, take out this pimple here, move this thing on his ear, do this there and do that 34 times. It took, like all day. Now with the photo, I do it once and then you press this button called sync, and it just does it to all of them. It's like, oh, that is so cool. So things like that are a game changer. But again, you still got to drive it manually a bit because you don't want people to look plastic. There's one engineering firm that we deal with that we build these composite team photos. So that's something we've always done, photograph people. And this started out of real estate because real estate agents burn through their stuff like there's no tomorrow. They do. It's crazy. And so we build these composite images for a team photo because there's nothing worse than having a nice team photo, a group photo, and then suddenly Bob's not working there anymore and Sally's not in the photo. So by shooting everyone separately and then merging them together, we build these. These team photos. And this particular engineering company has an office in India, and they send photos from India of their staff based over there. And they, honestly, they look like Barbie dolls because they're so heavily over processed. There's no texture in skin, like just nothing. And I'm wondering if that's like a cultural thing or it's just the studio they use. But they look kind of strange. [00:41:48] Speaker A: And it goes back to that whole Instagram filtering. You know, you see some people who do selfies will just, you know, like me. I just. If I happen to do a selfie, which is rare, it's just raw. It's just. That's it. That's the photo. But I know some of my kids and their friends, they. They're sort of young adults now. They use those filters that will just completely make the face this porcelain kind of dull look, and it sticks out [00:42:14] Speaker B: like a sore thumb. Yeah. I had another client who was sent to us from a firm, and this person was Asian, and we did the usual thing and edited it and so forth. And then they said to me, okay, can you send me the photo so I can take it home and edit it now? I just edited for you. Is there anything else you want me to tweak? I'll do it for you now. Oh, no, no, no. I. And they. What they wanted was to look, do you know, Close Encounters or Disclosure Day, you know, the gray alien, big eyes, tiny chin. [00:42:46] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:42:48] Speaker B: They wanted to transform themselves to look like almost like a manga character, because that's how they wanted to see themselves online. And I'm kind of Going, yeah, okay. Thinking it's not very authentic but you know, it's a. Must be a cultural thing. I don't know. [00:43:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, I think there is a little bit, bit of cultural differences amongst countries. I think from what I can remember of trying to think of where I saw this, but in Indian people. Photography did seem to be more heavy handed on, on editing than what I'm used to. But I think that that could happen in. I'm probably on the lighter side of editing for people photography just in my style. So I guess it's also. It can come down to the individual photographer like you said. Lucinda has just said, oh no, not another software that I need. I can't remember exactly, but from what I remember Evoto is actually, it's a credit based system. There might be like a really low monthly fee or something like that, or maybe none. It's cheap, especially if you don't, if you're not doing volume and you wouldn't need it for anything you do volume, Lucinda. It's like every now and then you're gonna throw some images in there that, you know, you edit them in Lightroom to get the color and stuff you want. This is the way I'm doing it. Cause I'm trying to figure out a workflow that works with Lightroom. But then you just bring a tiff over to do sort of final edits. If you were doing headshots like Andy, I'm guessing you go raw straight into a photo or how do you RAW to a photo? [00:44:20] Speaker B: It's got kind of a Photoshop interface built into it where if you want to change your exposure or color balance or any of that sort of stuff, you can do that before you do the other. Work your way through all the other sliders and stuff. It's pretty good fun doing that live with people because they go, this is cool. Oh, you can do that? Oh can you? What else can you do? [00:44:42] Speaker C: The other cool thing listen to is credits only get used when you export the photo. So you can actually take it in, have a play with it. You know, like you can, you can play with a heap of images and then you use the credits as you export to deliver a finished file. So yeah, I don't think it's expensive to have a play with and see if it's useful for your workflow. It's certainly not like the Adobe Endless Subscription kind of thing, which is nice but. [00:45:09] Speaker B: But mostly it's. It's fast, you know, it's. Yeah, it's fast and repeatable and you know, if you're doing, you know, eight people from XYZ Law firm and there's a certain style you. You can pretty much just press that sync button and, you know, most of them are going to look pretty much right straight away. You still got to override it. I mean, you know. [00:45:31] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. Even, even doing stuff that was all on the same background, I still had to get in there and adjust settings to make sure it wasn't doing something that I didn't want to do. Brian, it is. The name of it is Evoto E V O T o the photo. [00:45:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it's that whole thing of. Sorry, Jay. [00:45:51] Speaker C: It is an AI like things. [00:45:54] Speaker A: Yes. [00:45:55] Speaker C: So, but don't be scared because they're very much. Even though there was some weird publicity about them earlier because they did something that didn't make sense, they're not training some AI model on the images you're putting in. Well, they're at least saying they're definitely not. Whether they're doing that in the background, well, that would be dodgy. But they're saying they're very professional photographer first as a tool. It's not like they're trying to replace photographers or whatever, but I've found it very powerful. [00:46:26] Speaker A: Yep. I was just going to add that, you know, that whole, that whole thing of using AI software or features in software. It's like the, you know, a pilot, the pilot might turn on the autopilot to fly the plane, but it doesn't leave the cockpit necessarily alone. You know, you've always got to keep your hand on the wheel and watch what's going through those. Those editing processes. [00:46:48] Speaker B: Greg, you're absolutely right. We want people to look like them on a good day. That's the line we use. [00:46:54] Speaker A: Yep. Nice. [00:46:57] Speaker B: Now you've. [00:46:58] Speaker A: You've got a studio for Melbourne Headshot company. And I wanted to ask you about that space. You're located in the city in Melbourne. How important or how valuable has that location proven to be for the clients that you end up photographing? Does it. Do you think that's made a huge impact on your availability and accessibility? [00:47:19] Speaker B: Well, the original plan was to be where the suits are. And we figured, well, all the suits are in the city, so let's make it easy for them so they can literally walk to us. And so a great many of them do. We're literally right in the middle of the center of the heart of the city of Melbourne, so we're not very far away from anyone to walk to us. But I mean, if they're at the other end of Collins street, they can jump on a tram and they'll be with us in five minutes. But it's, it's really very, very central. So we're on the sixth floor of a commercial building. We purchased this suite and with my wife and I and a builder, we gutted it out. It used to be a jeweler. So we took out all the walls, the floor, the roof, the air conditioning ducts, the everything. And we transformed it to become what it is now. And it's kind of nice that, you know, we sort of figured we're always going to need a studio, so we might as well buy one and make it an investment. And that's been sort of good because I guess, you know, I've been studio based my whole career and I got sick of paying rent to landlords. So it's nice to have a space. And I guess, you know, eventually the exit plan is to, we can sell it and, you know, go and hang out in the country and do Astro. [00:48:40] Speaker A: Yeah, [00:48:42] Speaker C: the retirement plan. [00:48:44] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's not a bad plan. Not at all. [00:48:47] Speaker C: Is this, this photo that I've got up, Is that what the space still looks like now? [00:48:52] Speaker B: Mostly, yeah. This got a floating wall in there that I move around a little bit as well for backgrounds and so forth. But effectively that's. That's the studio space. Yeah. [00:49:03] Speaker A: Yep. [00:49:05] Speaker B: So that's very cool. And it's got the exposed facilities on the roof and all the plumbing and that kind of stuff is up there. And all the. Oh, here's a. Here's a thing for you if you want to get into a real job that makes money. Fireproof. So you know how they have those little sprinkler systems in the roof. So when we moved in, it was, as I said, we took out all the walls from what was a jewelers facility. Lots of little room. So up there on the roof was like an octopus. There were pipes everywhere. And we thought, well, that looks kind of messy. Let's sort this out. And we wanted to get a fire prevention company to delete a bunch of the sprinklers and straighten the pipes and basically make it look a little more professional. And so we eventually got one that would come and do it. They sent three guys down for the day. One to depressurize the building's system because it's a 20 story building and if there was a fire, then obviously someone's got to be mindful of it. One to do the actual plumbing work. And then I'm not sure exactly what the other one did, but six grand. Thanks for coming and have a nice day. I tell you, fire prevention, man, that's, that's, that's the business to get into, you know. [00:50:12] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:50:12] Speaker A: And also either that or plumber in a aged care facility. I think they'll, they'll do well. [00:50:18] Speaker B: And we were told. Told if we bumped one of those sprinklers, we would have three fire engines down to us within two minutes at ten grand a pop. [00:50:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:50:27] Speaker C: Wow. [00:50:27] Speaker B: So we didn't. But about six months after we moved in, someone was renovating one of the offices on the first floor and they did. And sure enough, three fire engines rocked up. The whole building has to be evacuated, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Someone would have got a big bill. [00:50:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:50:44] Speaker B: So. [00:50:46] Speaker C: Damn. [00:50:46] Speaker B: A little bit of the reality of being in a big city, I guess I was gonna say. [00:50:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:50:49] Speaker C: The downsides of having a studio space. [00:50:52] Speaker A: Yeah. In cbd. [00:50:53] Speaker B: Oh, and. And we're on the sixth floor. So moving in was pretty challenging because, you know, not everything will fit in the lift. You know, camera stands will. Lights will. But the actual sheets of plaster, which were, you know, three meters by two and a half, they had to be carried up six flights of stairs. So we weren't going to do that. So we hired some guys from Itasca and, you know, here's the job. Off you go. And I think we nearly killed them. [00:51:20] Speaker C: Probably like, oh, this, this won't be too bad. [00:51:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:24] Speaker C: Rough day? [00:51:26] Speaker A: Amazing. Before we move on to maybe some of your. Your astro work regarding the headshot company and your work as a principal photographer for that, if you could go back and tell yourself, your younger self, something that would help you today, what would it, photographically speaking or dealing with clients, [00:51:51] Speaker B: probably just have a bit of faith in your ability that it's all going to work. But have it pre planned so that you know exactly what it is you're going to do and let the client know exactly what they're going to do. So that. I think I might have alluded to this earlier. If you have all your technical stuff sorted out in advance, then it's just you, the camera and the client. If you're worried about, oh, that light's a bit hot or that's focusing on their face or some other little. Not sure what shutter speed I should be using, anything like that that can break the momentum of the connection that you've built with that client is going to affect the flow of what you're actually doing and it'll probably affect the outcome because people smell fear and if they think for a moment that, oh, this person doesn't really know what they're doing, I should get out of here. That. Because they're already a bit vulnerable. So if that sense of uncertainty creeps in at all, then it, it gets a bit hard to get, get that back if you're starting on the back foot. So kind of, you know, if you're going to shoot three people on a white background with clean lighting, test it, get it ready in advance so that, you know, right, that's it. Not touching that. So then it's just the people that are going to change and then you just direct them as you want to. And directing people is something you have to do with a lot of confidence. So you have to know like, okay, just bring your left foot across, slip your right hand in your pocket. Know your other right hand. It happens all the time, you know, bring your chin forward a little bit. So you don't want this in the photo. So bring your head forward. Should feel like a turtle should. Now does that feel strange, that. Yeah, it feels really weird. So good. If it doesn't feel weird, you're not doing it right. So just bring your head forward. Hit me with a real smile, that kind of stuff. Yeah. And suddenly they, you know, you run through 20 of those quickly. You know, fold your arms, bring your hands here. No, like this, not like that. You tell them what to do and they go, oh, that was easy. And it is because they don't have to think about anything because remember, they're used to someone pointing this at them and you know, they've been at a party, they've got a bit of hot dog between their teeth, they've had a couple of drinks, someone's doing this in the background and it's not going to build their self esteem, you know what I mean? It's, it's going to hold them back a little bit from having that confidence to look good. So my personal philosophy is there's beauty in everyone. You just have to help them show it how to be, I guess, themselves. And by showing them and telling them what to do in front of the camera, they don't have to think, they don't have to, you know, pose if you like themselves because most of the time they will have no idea what to do. But you as the photographer directing them, it means you're going to get a good outcome. And that just comes with practice. As I said, I shot fashion for many, many years back in Brisbane, so I was very used to directing models. So it wasn't a huge departure to directing people in suits. In fact, it was kind of weird when we first started shooting people in suits because, you know, suddenly he is, you know, Mr. Or Mrs. Six or seven figure salary walking into the studio, and I'm kind of going, you're earning that and you're wearing this. [00:55:37] Speaker C: Okay, [00:55:39] Speaker B: I think I can help you here. [00:55:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And do you. Do you provide alternative options for clothing? And I think I saw a shot with jewelry on a table. Is that something that you have on hand or. [00:55:51] Speaker B: We tell them what to bring? [00:55:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. [00:55:54] Speaker B: We've got a couple of emergency pieces, but it's mainly we'll guide, direct, prompt, and show them what to do on the day. But also we'll send them out preparation sheets in advance. You know, what color are your eyes? I've got blue eyes. Okay. Wear something blue. It'll make your eyes pop in the photo. What color are your eyes? Oh, they're brown. Okay, well, you need something either purple or dark green. Have you got anything like that in your wardrobe? Maybe go to Myers. Don't tell them that. You know, buy it there, and you can take it back after the shoot. But don't tell them I said that. You know, if people are wearing the right thing, then it will help. I try and avoid people wearing white. White leeches, the color out of people's faces in photos. And yet here I am shooting people in suits. So they're typically wearing a jacket and a white top. It's like, well, do you have a light blue top or a pink top or something else in the wardrobe? So we can have that conversation in advance before they come to the studio. If they're bringing for a personal branding shoot, which is where instead of just shooting one person on a white background, I'm shooting one person with a dozen different looks, changes of outfit for social media, for presentations, for any kind of different look that they need. Then we'll guide them as to what sort of things to bring for their shoot. Bring an accessory, bring a laptop, bring a journal, put a bit of realism in the photo, that kind of stuff, which helps. So if you prepare it right, you can then work through all those scenarios and those shots, and they will feel really great. And I'll guide them a little bit when they first arrive as to, you know, we'll go through the wardrobe that they brought with them and go, okay, we're going to use that one with this, with this. What combination? Do you like that? Yep, that's great. Okay, we'll put that one away. Never see that one again, you know. Yeah. If they turn up in a shirt like this, I probably won't photograph it. Unless it's their signature thing, right? Yeah, yeah. [00:57:46] Speaker A: Doctor, if Dr. Carl shows up, you're not going to ask him to put on something a little less vibrant. [00:57:51] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Right. Very, very cool. Yeah. [00:57:56] Speaker C: Before we, before, like, we're, what are we, an hour in? We should. We do need to get to some astro stuff. [00:58:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:01] Speaker B: But sorry, can I jump in? Just quickly there, Greg. Greg Stubbings, 8194. Yes, that is exactly. That's spot on. [00:58:13] Speaker C: I'll read it out. He said psychology and photography go hand in hand. Great. Portrait photography is a team effort. Why do you think that? So on the button, Andy. [00:58:26] Speaker B: Yeah. As I said, my wife's a psychologist and I can sit with her and we'll watch a movie together and she'll say, now look, that person just needs to be left alone. That person's having a meltdown and they need this, this and this. And that person just wants to be understood. And that person's probably had trauma in their lives. And so all of this kind of by osmosis soaks in a little bit. So if I'm sitting with someone, I can kind of, in a very layman's uneducated way, unpick a few of these things before they surface. And a lot of that will come down to know, like we said earlier about I don't want to show my teeth in a photo. It's like, oh, okay, let's talk about the elephant in the room. Why is that? Oh, I don't like the color of my teeth. Okay, I've got a button that'll fix that for you. But I can't change the way you feel about your smile. In a half hour photo session, I can just take the best possible photograph of you smiling that you might have ever had. [00:59:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:59:16] Speaker B: You still might not like it, but it'll look good. But, you know, let's work our way through this. But honestly, the as, as Greg was saying here, the psychology of it, understanding, listening, give people space to talk about themselves. Makes it a lot easier to be a photographer of people when you understand a little bit more about them. [00:59:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And I was going to ask on that, you know, do you think that as a, as a portrait or headshot photographer, especially because you're doing volume often, is the ability to read body language a core skill for you? [00:59:57] Speaker B: Not only read body language, but also direct body language. So, for example, LinkedIn. Right. It's this. It's a head, headshot, head and shoulders, that's it. But it doesn't tell you very much about someone. So if you can shoot a three quarter length shot and suddenly you get arms folded or hands in pockets or some kind of gesture with hands and you integrate that, then that combination of their expression and body language work together for someone to get an understanding of who that person is before they meet them. And if they're some kind of professional service that, you know, for example, if it's a specialist doctor and someone's doing their research about having, you know, knee surgery or something and they want to see, well, will this person listen to me? Do they look like a nice person? Do they have skills and does that come across in their body language? They're more likely then to say to their gp, can you refer me to this person? Because they look nice or whatever and build trust that way. So if people equally walk into the studio and they're kind of very, you know, I don't want to do this, whatever, then you've got to have a little bit of time to unpack that. Now, most people are cool. There's always what we call extra grace required occasionally where someone's, you know, having a really horrible day for whatever reason, totally out of your control, nothing to do with you. And there's also a little bit of you got to be kind of water off a duck's back. It's like, you know, we'll go through photos and someone will say, oh, I hate that. I said, okay, well, we don't use the word hate in the studio, but, [01:01:41] Speaker C: well, I hate you. [01:01:43] Speaker B: Is it, is it the lighting? Is it? No, I just don't like the way I look. It's like, okay, let's unpack that a little bit. Let's see what we can do here. [01:01:50] Speaker A: Thinking here's my wife's card, you know. [01:01:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And so you got to realize that it's not you, it's not the photograph. Sometimes people have just got baggage stuff going on. [01:02:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:02:04] Speaker B: And you just gotta, you know, work around that a little bit. You can't please everyone. You know, you'll try, you'll do your best, but, you know, you please most of the people most of the time. And everyone's, you know, doing their best, but they'll always be, there'll always be that, that one person who stands out. But mostly it's rare, you know. One of my good friends is a wedding photographer, Mercury, really good wedding photographer. Amazing. He reckons one in 20 brides is Bridezilla right. [01:02:38] Speaker A: One in 20. What would you say, Justin? [01:02:40] Speaker C: Yeah, it's. Yeah, for us it was all. It was like maybe one a season. Like maybe everyone always said to us, oh geez, it must be, you know, dealing with the bridezillas. We're like, it's pretty rare, you know, like it's not, it's not the thing that everyone thinks it is. So yeah, maybe 1 in 20, maybe 1 in 30 for us, I think. [01:03:02] Speaker B: And so for us it's probably like count on the fingers of one hand every year, you know, maybe two or three or four people out of 2,000, you know. [01:03:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:03:11] Speaker C: Wow. Okay. Yeah. Not, not. [01:03:13] Speaker A: That's an acceptable rate, isn't it? [01:03:15] Speaker B: Yep. [01:03:16] Speaker C: I've got a couple of extra questions. One, one deeper one and then a few rapid fire ones about headshots and then we'll. And then maybe we'll get into some, some astro stuff. Yeah, but I wanted to. So you mentioned that, that knowing your gear and having it set up and having everything working is, is really important to making sure that you're not fumbling during a shoot and reducing confidence and trust in you as the photographer and creating some sort of tension. So you, so you really need to know your stuff. You also specialized a long time ago in headshots and went deep on that one thing and built a really cool business around one thing which simplifies like you can now know your gear and headshots inside out because you're focused in on one specific style of photography for business anyway. Yeah. Do you think that's still a good strategy that more people should adopt as photographers now in 2026, to go deep on something, master it inside and out so that they experts super confident in what it is they're doing, but also that your branding can cut through on just one. This is what I do. I'm this type of photographer. Is that still a good strategy in 2026? [01:04:36] Speaker B: Look, I think so. I think the. Having a niche is really important. We were the first. What is it? Marketing 101. Create a new category and be the first in it. That was my wife's philosophy on, on the whole headshot thing. And we've, we've invested a lot of time in, you know, learning business and becoming business people whose product is photography, that kind of stuff. I think if you were starting out today and you know, if you were interested in pet photography, maybe just focus on dogs or lizards or something that you can find a niche in and be the, the expert in that field because rather than being a sort of jack of all trades being really well known to do something. I mean, my wife, you know, she's a psychologist, she's booked out for till the end of the year, I think. And, you know, she's really good at her thing. And equally, if you try and go see any kind of professional medical specialist, chances are you're going to have to wait a long time for that appointment because they're really good at what they do. Whereas a GP you can probably get in in the next couple of days, Right? [01:05:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:05:56] Speaker B: I think the same thing applies to this sort of professional photography. If you're a generalist, chances are you're not going to be that memorable. You'll have your client base of people who like you, who like working with you because you're a nice person and you get on well and you've got good relationships. But are they going to refer you to their friends and colleagues? If there's an opportunity there for you to specialize in some area, then maybe you're better off being that person who is known for taking fantasies, fantastic photos of something. For example, when I was in London, there was a guy who just shot drinks and that was it. That was what he shot. Jack Bankhead. He shot bottles of booze and beer and wine and that's it, that's all he shot. And he was brilliant at it. Wow. And I suppose that's sort of the thing about it. It might also depend a little bit, though, Guy Justin, if you're in a big city, in a big city, you can probably afford to specialize, whereas if you're in a regional country town, maybe you are shooting weddings and hardware and bets and headshots because, you know, you're in a country town and maybe there's not that demand. [01:07:12] Speaker C: Well, the thing is, though, I figure, though, the smaller the population, the specialization just feels different. So in a very small town, just being the town's number one photographer is specializing. Just if everyone knows that you're the photographer that you call for anything to do with photography, that might be enough of a specialization. And then obviously, as the population gets bigger, you sort of need to, I guess, carve that niche into a finer. A finer point. But it's funny, your advice is perfect because for the pet photography, it's going to be just dogs and it's going to be just dogs in studio. [01:07:51] Speaker B: Cool. [01:07:52] Speaker C: And it's. It's called Dog Face. [01:07:54] Speaker B: Excellent. [01:07:55] Speaker C: So. So it's exactly what you're saying, rather than there's a lot of pet photographers that do all sorts of Things So they'll do inside, outside, like, whatever. And I'm like, no, no, I'm just going to do this one thing. So, yeah, I'm glad. [01:08:07] Speaker A: I'm still disappointed by that. I'm still disappointed because I'd like someone to photograph the cats. Yeah, I've got a few cats here [01:08:13] Speaker C: that if that would be. [01:08:15] Speaker A: I'll bring all seven over. [01:08:16] Speaker C: That would be the equivalent of me saying, I'm just going to photograph Andy's five toughest clients each year. Why would I choose to photograph cats? They wouldn't even want to be there. They'd be like, I don't want to be here. [01:08:29] Speaker A: Behind the scenes video would be great. [01:08:31] Speaker C: I hate that photo. That's what they would say in their cat voice. They'd be like, I hate it. That looks. [01:08:36] Speaker B: Are you a crazy cat person, Greg? [01:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah, we're a bit of a cat family and Sash and I, my partner, people that follow me on socials will have seen this. We just adopted two cats from the lost dogs home and my older kids have moved out, so their cats are about to leave. But in that transition phase, we've got, you know, around seven cats at the moment. [01:08:58] Speaker B: So, [01:09:01] Speaker A: yeah, yeah, the food bills, they. We spend more on them than we do on us at the moment. A big chunk of them are being shipped off very soon, so. But yeah, I would love to have watched Justin try to photograph all my cats. I would have just filmed a behind the scenes thing and would have been happy with that. [01:09:20] Speaker C: You know, it would be funny if I did it. We'd have to set it up at your house, I think. Not. Not. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, on the train up to Bendigo, one more quick. Two more quick questions about headshots before we switch gears. How long is your sort of average. Like you mentioned you had 11 minutes for Prime Minister John Howard. That's crazy. That would have been a lot of pressure. How long is your average headshot? Like, what amount of time do you allow a slot? Like if I just me. If I was just booking a headshot session with you, how long is that session? [01:09:54] Speaker B: 30 minutes. [01:09:55] Speaker C: 30 minutes. How long do you normally shoot for in that time? Like, how long is actual. You've got the camera up to your eye or, or whatever and taking images. [01:10:05] Speaker B: Maybe five or ten tops. Yeah. [01:10:07] Speaker C: So the rest is getting them in the right mindset and prepared and then. And then do you edit the photo in that session as well in that 30 minutes? Yes. [01:10:17] Speaker B: Then we're gonna choose the photo and edit it live. [01:10:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:10:20] Speaker B: And then deliver it live. So it's uploaded to Dropbox and they've got it straight away. [01:10:25] Speaker C: Yeah, there's no, like, hey, in a couple of days you'll get your photo or whatever. It's just they walk away with their image that they need because they're excited. [01:10:33] Speaker B: They're excited. And, you know, that's. If there's another shot, you know, where they are smiling and they wanted a more serious one, or there's one where they're wearing a tie and suddenly they think, oh, I want one without a tie. And if they're excited, you know, chances are they might buy another one. So. [01:10:52] Speaker C: And that's how it works. It's a per image fee. Yeah, okay. Yeah, cool. [01:10:57] Speaker A: And it. Do many other headshot photographers do that live edit with the client or with the. [01:11:05] Speaker B: I think in the minority there. Yeah, I'm aware there are some other headshot studios around, but a lot of them sort of suggest, you know, you get your photos a week later, that kind of thing. Yeah, I think that takes a bit of the magic out of it. And also, I guess I'm fast. It's like anything. You do it a lot, you get good at it. [01:11:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:11:28] Speaker C: And. But also, like, people, if they've booked this in, it's because they need it. So the last thing you want to do is keep them waiting when you don't need to, you know, if, like, ideally, if they've been tasked to go and get a headshot because they're starting at this new place or whatever, like, just get. [01:11:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:11:43] Speaker C: To be able to walk away with the file and not have to sit there waiting. Have we got that headshot back yet? Or whatever. [01:11:50] Speaker A: And I would imagine that there's more. More connectedness from the. The subject because they've had a say in how that final shot looks before it gets scientific. [01:11:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And also it avoids that back and forth of email a photo to them. Oh, can you take out that pimple? Oh, okay. Sorry, that's not what I meant. Can you change this thing? Can you. You know, you could go backwards and forwards three or four times before they're happy. Whereas if they're right in front of you, I know they're happy because they've told me, you know. [01:12:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:12:21] Speaker B: Can you fix my tooth? Can you fix this? Can you do that? It's like, yeah, no worries, you know? [01:12:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, that's a great approach. Love it. Just before we move forward, Jay, do you want to catch up on the chat? And maybe we should thank today's sponsor. [01:12:35] Speaker C: I was just about to say. I was gonna say, I might just mention Luckystraps.com if you need a leather camera strap. A beautiful, comfortable leather camera strap that you can wear across your body so it's not pulling on your neck and disconnects and reconnects to the camera really easily with no dingly dangly dongles. It's cut resistant, tamper proof with our little safety locks on the quick release Mechanism. Go to Luckystraps.com and check them out. If you don't need a camera strap, then just, you know, go on about living your life. That's my ad for today. And in the chat, not a lot going on other than Brian Maxwell Carr says, love this discussion. So do I. [01:13:13] Speaker A: Hey, Brian. [01:13:15] Speaker C: Lucinda's excited about trying a Voto to clean up backgrounds. Yeah, you'll love it for your studio stuff, Lucinda. You'll have it. You'll love it. Phil Thompson says thanks for explaining a Voto. I was wondering if it might be useful for theater stage shots. Probably not, Phil. Phil shoots like theater and stage rehearsals and performances and stuff like that. And I, I don't know, especially with the higher ISO that you're shooting at in some of those situations and stuff. I don't know if you would need the retouching as much and at the distances, but you could play with it. [01:13:49] Speaker A: Is there a trial version? [01:13:51] Speaker B: I think like a free. [01:13:52] Speaker C: There's a free. There's a free trial and you can [01:13:54] Speaker A: maybe give it a shot, Phil. [01:13:56] Speaker C: Yeah, try it out. But I just, I don't know whether it would be that useful compared to just using lightroom. Like, lightroom, you can just quickly throw a mask on someone and, and reduce, you know, like just smooth them out a little bit or whatever is probably enough for the sort of stuff you're doing, but worth a shot. Cool. I think that's about it. All right. Robert Varner said, good morning, Australia. Well, good morning, United States. Robert in New Jersey. New Jersey. [01:14:25] Speaker A: Yep. So. [01:14:26] Speaker C: Well, no, so good afternoon wherever you are. [01:14:28] Speaker B: Yeah, almost good evening over there. I would think by now. [01:14:30] Speaker A: Yeah. But yeah, maybe the day before. However that works. [01:14:36] Speaker B: I've been talking to Americans a lot, so, you know. [01:14:39] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, you used to it. [01:14:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:14:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Just before we move ahead into the next section of our interview, I just remind folks that we are the Camera Life podcast and we are proudly brought to you by Lucky Straps. We do a live podcast twice a week, every Thursday morning, where we get to interview an amazing photographer as a guest and unpack their story and their journey and look at their craft. And we go live at 9am Australian Eastern Standard Time. And then every Monday evening, we have our random photography show where we talk about industry news, we do live unboxings, but more importantly, we look at your images. That's right, you can send an image to justinuckystraps.com and we will bring up your image on our Monday evening show and we'll talk to it and we'll celebrate your success. So that's every Monday evening at 7.30pm Australian Eastern Standard Time. But the easiest way to remember when to watch the Camera live podcast is to subscribe. It costs you nothing. Give us a, like, give us a subscribe, but also tickle the bell icon and set it to always. And that way you'll get a notification in your time zone as to when we're going live next. But let's continue with our interview. Andy, let's change gears a little bit here. Let's change gears a lot, actually, because we're going from your headshot business and everything that went into building that for you from your earliest days as a photographer to. What was it, 15, 14, 15 years ago, someone gifted you a telescope. We talked about this at the top of the show, and that set you on a completely different path. Tell us a little bit about the early days of that journey into astrophotography. [01:16:26] Speaker B: So I was lucky enough to win a grand award for portraiture at wppi, and that came with a couple of thousand dollars prize money. And I immediately knew that, having had that dodgy telescope from my friend, that I wanted to invest in something that would be good for attaching a camera to and photographing stuff in space. And I had a camera. So I figured, well, all I need is the telescope and, and the mount. There's one for sale. Fit the budget. And as an introduction to deep space, it was, it was fine. It got me started, I guess, on learning about all of the tricky technical things that you have to learn. So, for example, the Earth rotates, so we see stars moving above our head during the night. Now, unlike star trails, the last thing we want is the stars moving. When we're doing astrophotography deep space, we want to lock those stars in, which means we have to have a camera sitting on a mount which is orientated with the core of the Earth. So as it, as the Earth rotates, the mount moves the camera and the telescope, and we have to have a little guide camera sending micropulses into that mount so that it's going to keep whatever we're shooting centered in the frame. Within one pixel. And so learning a little bit about that technology, aligning the mount with the, what we call the southern celestial pole. Easy. In the northern hemisphere, they have a star called Polaris, which is pretty much, I think they call it the North Star because it's very, very close to the northern celestial pole. We have something called octans, which is mag 14. Now, on a mag scale, one is really, really bright and 14 is. You can't even see it unless you've got binoculars. So aligning the telescope with the southern celestial pole is a bit of a black art as a beginner. They've made it a lot easier now with some different ways of doing that. But once you've got the thing aligned, polar aligned, as they call it, then you can start, you know, taking some exposures. So learning a little bit of that. I tore what's left of my hair out trying to work this out, you know, with YouTube and books and so forth. And then I joined the Astronomical Society of Victoria, who coincidentally had their meetings like literally two blocks from my house. [01:19:07] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [01:19:08] Speaker B: I couldn't believe it. I thought, well, this is cool. So I sat down next to a guy who had a Mac. I thought, well, I use a Mac so, you know, maybe I can learn something. And literally picking his brains that day and that night, I managed to take my first deep space photo that was, you know, halfway to becoming acceptable. And I thought, well, this is, this is cool. So advice to everyone out there is before you go and buy anything, if you want to go into deep space photography, join your local astronomical society because you'll meet a whole bunch of really friendly, like minded people who will share their knowledge with you about stuff before you go investing in what might be the wrong thing. [01:19:47] Speaker C: Yep. [01:19:48] Speaker B: And then go to the meetings, go to star parties. Cool, man. Because, you know, that's great, Moon daddy. You get to look through, you know, 10 or 20 different telescopes and all kinds of cool stuff. And you can talk to people who are photographing things and, you know, pepper him with questions about how does this work, what does this do? You know, what works there, that kind of thing. [01:20:13] Speaker C: So the most, just, just to pause you for a second, the most in an astronomical society, how many people would be taking photos versus how many, just like looking through telescopes? Is it common for people to be taking images? [01:20:30] Speaker B: I think I've often wondered about the numbers. I'd probably suggest there might be maybe 50,000 people in the world doing this. [01:20:40] Speaker C: Right. [01:20:41] Speaker A: Wow. [01:20:42] Speaker B: At some kind of level of expertise, right up from, you know, the beginner in the backyard. Who's suddenly gone from, you know, shooting nightscapes to thinking, I want to get a tracker and, you know, have a go at some of this. To people who have sent their telescopes to Chile and put them on a mountaintop so they can photograph under the deepest, darkest skies in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. [01:21:09] Speaker C: Okay. I've got so many questions, and we're just going to go in random directions all over the place because there's just a few things that pop straight into my head immediately. How accessible or inaccessible is the equipment to get at a beginner level to get to deep space? Type images like what sort of, how much is it going to cost someone basically, to get maybe entry level setup that works? [01:21:37] Speaker B: Bring up, bring up the toys page again. [01:21:41] Speaker A: Let's get into the toys. [01:21:46] Speaker B: So with the portable unit there, if you just scroll down to the. The bottom of the page there. Yep. So that little telescope there, that's about a 300 millimeter telescope. It's a couple of thousand dollars. The mount, that whole big white thing sitting on the tripod, 1500, $2,000. And you can buy some of this stuff secondhand. Remember that these people are going to treat their gear like they're seventh cat. They're gonna look after it, they're gonna call it, treat it and look after it well. And they're really only going to get rid of it when they're trading up to something bigger, better, or, or if they maybe lost interest. And the wife said, you know, that thing sitting in the garage, get rid of it, honey. There's a good market for secondhand astronomical gear. And you can pick up stuff, you know, usually about two thirds of the price of new, and it'll still, you know, be great. That particular camera, I bought that one new, that was quite expensive at the time, that was about $7,000. And that's a dedicated astronomical camera. So what you have to realize when we're doing deep sky is that the shutter is going to be open for a long time. We take a. We don't sort of leave it open all night. We take what we call a series of sub exposures. So each one might be somewhere between 1 to 10 to 15 to 20 minutes long. And then we'll stack those exposures together using software that the more sub exposures you take, the clearer, the sharper, the less noise, the better your photo will be. And there's a series of filters in these cameras that allow you to shoot the light that's emitted by a nebula. And it'll cancel out street lights, moonlight, any other sort of stuff there. So the filters are a little bit expensive. The camera is expensive because it has a, what they call a peltier cooling unit in it. So it brings the sensor to minus 30 or minus 40 degrees C, because the longer you have current running through a CCD or a CMOS chip, the more noise it will generate. And so by cooling the camera down, it will almost reduce or eliminate that noise. So that's part of the reason these things are quite expensive and, and dedicated and hand built. That said, companies like Zwo, Chinese cameras, nothing wrong with them, they're really quite, quite excellent. And they're probably about two and a half thousand dollars nowadays. So, you know, entry level, you could get started for under five grand and take, you'd have enough stuff there to take some really nice, nice pictures. If we scroll up a little bit, Justin, please, to the big boy there. Next one up. [01:24:49] Speaker C: This one? [01:24:50] Speaker B: Yep. So this is my dream scope. And this has taken a long time, you know, whatever it is, 12 years of winning competitions and horse trading and buying and selling to get to this point. So this thing's called a Takahashi. So if we put that in camera terms, you've got your Tamrons, then the next you've got your Tamrons and your Sigmas and then you've got your L series Canon lens and you know, Ed Nikon lenses. And then above that you've got your Zeiss kind of, you know, lenses that you see in Leicas and Hasselblads. This is that level of telescope. So it's made in Japan. It's generally regarded as the Rolls Royce of telescopes, of refractors. So this is what we call a refractor telescope. Light comes in one end, hits the camera at the other end. So it's just like a long lens, really. That big red thing in the middle, that's a focuser rotator. So as the telescope sits all night taking photos, it's made of metal. And as the ambient temperature cools, the metal shrinks. [01:25:59] Speaker C: Oh my God, the metal. Oh my gosh. [01:26:05] Speaker B: Stuff is crazy. So you do what's called a focusing run every hour where that focuser will then refocus the camera. There's a flattener there, which basically your typical DSLR camera with a lens on it gives you a flat field, edge to edge. Telescopes don't do that. So you have to put a special couple of lenses on the back, what they call a flattener, to give you a flat field so you don't have stars getting out of all wacky angles in the corners, you've got your filter wheel. We talked about that a little bit. That's that circular thing before the Coke can looking camera there at the back. [01:26:45] Speaker A: Yep. [01:26:47] Speaker B: And in that filter wheel are a bunch of filters. Now those filters are from a company called Chroma. They're probably the best in the world. They're not cheap that they were about 5,000 bucks at the time for the set. I think they're more now. Yeah, but they give you more contrast and better results. That camera, that's about a three, $4,000 camera, that one, the Wo Chinese camera, nothing wrong with it. And the mount that it's sitting on, that big black thing that the whole thing's sitting on, that, that's what they call an equatorial mount. So it moves the telescope as the night goes on. That would be about $5,000, that one. You can spend more. You know, my thoughts on this as a hobby is that it's, what do I say to my wife? It's cheaper than having a boat. [01:27:38] Speaker C: But that's a good way of looking at it. [01:27:41] Speaker B: Yeah, but you can go nuts. But it's not really the sort of thing where buying a, you know, thirty, forty thousand dollar telescope is not necessarily going to make better photos. It still comes down to the person who's driving it and processing the photos. Yeah. So you can get a little bit carried away. But I've seen competitions won with modest gear. Heck, I've won some myself when I was starting out with relatively modest gear. That little one you're just scrolling down to now, my, my portable one, I picked up six, what they call a pods with that. An APOD is NASA's astronomy photo of the day. [01:28:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:28:22] Speaker B: And NASA can draw from the Cassini spacecraft, from the Hubble, from the James Webb, from the, you know, biggest observatories around the world for their photo of the day. But occasionally they'll choose someone in their, you know, working out of their backyard with a little telescope like this because they might have photographed something that's a bit unique or a bit special and you get, you know, 3 million hits on their website and suddenly, you know. [01:28:49] Speaker A: Yeah, people are looking a little, a [01:28:51] Speaker B: little bit of, you know, exposure is not a bad thing. [01:28:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And just on that topic, correct me if I'm wrong, but is it true that a lot of astrophotographers, especially Deep Face, Deep Face, Deep Space, contribute to, you know, almost like a global effort of mapping, mapping the universe? Is that, is that correct with, you know, people like yourself, your Data is accessible to people like NASA. [01:29:19] Speaker B: Is that the way? So I guess we'll tackle that in a couple of. A couple of pieces of that. There's research telescopes all around the world, and their job is to effectively create a Google map of space. So they'll literally take a picture, move across a degree, take a picture, move down a degree, take a picture, move across, and eventually build up a. A survey of the sky. And that survey might be in hydrogen alpha. It might be in one of the other elements that's out there. So that when I go to photograph something, I. I kind of say I want to shoot this nebula. I put in the coordinates because I know where it is, because there's a Google map that tells me. And then it will literally send my telescope there, and then that rotator on the back will spin it around to whatever angle I want to shoot it from so I can determine my framing. What a lot of astrophotographers are doing now is they're banding together because, you know, maybe I can shoot a nice object in, you know, five clear nights. But we said earlier that the more exposure you put in, generally the more detail you get, the more you can see. So if suddenly five or ten astrophotographers are working on the same object and they combine their data and stack it together, suddenly you can go real deep on an object. [01:30:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:30:48] Speaker B: Wow. Maybe some things that might not have been seen before can be discovered. And that's happening quite a lot more. So with the astrophotography prize, for example, one of our judges hooks into a whole team of photographers, and they get hundreds and hundreds of hours of exposure on an object, and then it becomes the first picture of that object in visible light. And that. Yes. Then that gets the attention of NASA and various other science groups and astrophysicists, because they go, okay, that. That thing we thought might be there is there, and this is what it looks like. And then they can do research papers and that kind of stuff based on what citizen scientists, like they are producing. Yeah, there's. There's a telescope farm called Starfront in Texas, and it hosts, you know, your telescope. If you live in New York or Los Angeles or somewhere under light pollution and you want to have your telescope hosted for you, you can pack it up in a box and ship it out to Starfront or one of these other observatories like Deep sky west in New Mexico, and they will install it for you, rig it up, connect it to the Internet so you can sit in your lounge room in Los Angeles. And drive the telescope and tell it what you want to shoot and when to shoot it and all that sort of stuff, which is really cool. [01:32:15] Speaker A: That's amazing. Yeah. [01:32:17] Speaker B: So then if you. With some of these, they organize a group where they get, okay, we're going to get all 500 of these telescopes pointing at the same thing for one night. And it's. And if someone's, you know, crazy enough to then take all that data and stack it and put it together, then they can get some extraordinary imaging of something that's either never been seen or never been seen. Like that. [01:32:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:32:41] Speaker B: And that definitely is contributing to the science out there. [01:32:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's remarkable that there's, you know, there's so much that can be. Can be found that's new just through that. That collaborative effort. [01:32:55] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:32:57] Speaker A: Wow, that's really fascinating. And I love the concept of, you know, having your telescope set up somewhere. So can you, you can remotely access your telescopes that you've got set up on your friend's property? Is that, is that something you do as well? [01:33:09] Speaker B: These telescopes are driven by little computers called nux, which is a headless computer. And I can dial into that from, you know, here in Melbourne. And I can pre program my telescope to shoot this object at this angle for this many exposures, this many nights. And literally then there's all the. All my friend has to do is open the roof of the observatory and the telescope will fire up and. And start imaging. [01:33:42] Speaker A: Wow. [01:33:44] Speaker B: So. Wow. [01:33:45] Speaker C: Do you do that much? [01:33:47] Speaker B: Yes. [01:33:48] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So you, you'll do that regularly. So you go out there sometimes, but you'll also do that quite often as well. [01:33:55] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:33:55] Speaker C: Cool. [01:33:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:33:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:33:57] Speaker B: Occasionally I like getting hands on because I kind of feel a little bit detached from the whole experience of. [01:34:02] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:34:03] Speaker B: You know, here's my telescope. I'm physically wiring it up and manually driving it because I kind of used to do that so long, which is why star parties are still like them. You know, even though I've got a remote observatory, I still don't mind taking my telescope to Camp Nilakkudi in Mansfield or somewhere because I just want to hang out with. Do the social side of it as much. [01:34:23] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And I love that idea that everyone's. I assume everyone's setting up probably to look at different things, unless they're doing like you were talking about, where they're sort of collaborating on. On getting additional shots of the same thing. So then you can. Someone spent hours getting the setup, but you can kind of cruise around and check out their setup. You Know, like it's. Everyone's doing something different. That sounds like a very fun way to get, I don't know, just a lot of interesting stuff happening all at once. [01:34:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And we can help each other as well, you know, because. [01:34:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:34:58] Speaker B: Someone might have a bit more experience than someone else, that kind of thing. [01:35:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, No, I think that's really cool from a. From a technical standpoint, you know, these cameras that you're connecting to, these telescopes. Talk to us a little bit about the specs of those. You know, what sort of a sensor do they feature? What? You know, is there a megapixel count on that sensor? How does all of that sort of stuff equate to our usual photography talk? [01:35:22] Speaker B: So I'm using the camera with APS C format, CMOS sensor, which is the IMX571 Sony sensor. Some other photographers will use the IMX455 sensor, which is full frame. Full frame is bigger. Full frame doesn't necessarily mean better with telescopes because. [01:35:47] Speaker A: Hang on, hang on. Can you just say that again? [01:35:49] Speaker B: Say that again, Greg. [01:35:50] Speaker C: He said with telescopes. He finished off with with telescopes. [01:35:54] Speaker A: So I'll cut that out later. [01:35:56] Speaker B: Okay. Just because we want to get a flat field, it's easier to do it with a smaller sensor. [01:36:02] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:36:03] Speaker B: So my sensor produces a image that is roughly 40 x 50 cm at 300 dpi. [01:36:13] Speaker A: Yep. [01:36:14] Speaker B: So more than big enough to produce an exhibition level image. That little camera that I showed you before, the. The one I spent $7,000 on back in 2012 or something, that's a bit. That's an old CCD sensor. So that would produce basically a 20 by 25 centimeter image. So it's a bit smaller again. But there are ways you can process these images using something called drizzle. I don't want to get too technical with that, but basically it just means you can make bigger, sharper photos with what you can do. The processing side of this whole deep space astrophotography is a whole black art in itself. There are dedicated programs that kind of do your head in a little bit. I'm a photographer first and a, you know, nerd, scienty, sciency person second, whereas most of the people who do this stuff are kind of the opposite. They're kind of nerdy computer scientists, people who have got a great ability to understand how all this works, and then photographer second. So I kind of rock the boat a little bit because I'm kind of creative photographer who can learn technical stuff. There's a lot of these people at Technical stuff who are trying to be creative. Which is why, you know, I guess I, I rock the boat a little bit in this world. But that's okay. We all get on. Yeah, you know, we all get. [01:37:47] Speaker A: Jay, do you mind bringing up some of Andy's astro deep space images? [01:37:51] Speaker C: I was thinking that. But first I just want to read 2 comments out. But yeah, I was reading your mind. I think I was going to start with some NASA A pod ones and then we can go from wherever Andy recommends on, on his website or Instagram. But first I just want to read a couple of comments. Dennis Smith is in the chat. Says morning legends. [01:38:11] Speaker A: Lying. [01:38:11] Speaker C: Lying. Staring at the stars is amazing. Photons hitting our eyes from the most insane deep time. It's the wonder of. It's a wonder of the universe. Pretty crazy. Yeah, pretty crazy. And then a question from Roland. Are these new cheap smart telescopes worth it? What does that even mean? But yes. [01:38:33] Speaker B: So Roland's talking about the new revolution of something that has come out. There's a brand called Sea Star for example. And a sea star literally is a little automatic telescope that you can set up on the roof of your car in the country. Plug it in and it will literally go. You can drive it with your phone and it'll go to a, you know, I want to see this nebula. It'll go to that nebula, it'll plate solve itself, it'll align itself, it'll start taking pictures for you. The sensor in it is the limitation. It's still the same kind of size sensor that's in one of these. [01:39:16] Speaker A: So Right. [01:39:17] Speaker B: It's not going to be super sharp or amazing, but it's still going to be enough to hook you in, impress your friends and probably impress the heck out of, out of yourself that, oh my gosh, look at that. Look what I just did. And you can do that for 600 bucks or 700 bucks or something. And you know, it's not a bad way to get started, you know. [01:39:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's what Greg Carrick uses, Justin. I think he's got a sea star [01:39:47] Speaker B: recently and there are other manufacturers who make these things. Yeah, yeah, but they're good. I think School of School of Flight's comment there, lying at the stars is amazing. Photons hitting our eyes from deep time. The furthest image I have shot of something is 200 million light years deep. I think what and when you kind of think it's taken that long for the light to travel from that object to your sensor is mind blowing. I mean, you don't yeah, yeah. And that's the thing. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter where on earth you're born, what color your skin is, what you believe or don't believe. You go out camping and you step away from that campfire and look up, you're going to start asking yourself those big questions, you know, like, what does it all mean? What is our place? What is this all about? [01:40:53] Speaker A: What. [01:40:54] Speaker B: And that's really cool, you know, to ponder that a little bit. And the thing about the astrophotography is we can then bring some of those objects to the attention of an audience and they can go, wow, look at that. And there's still a wow factor about it, you know? [01:41:12] Speaker C: Yeah, it's still something that's uncommon to see. It's, it's not. You know, we've all seen beautiful landscapes from every part of the world. They still blow me away when I look at them, but I think, you know, the average person has seen a million beautiful landscape images, but stuff like this, it's still very out of the ordinary. And like. Yeah, you know, what do they call it? The final frontier? [01:41:37] Speaker B: Something like that. [01:41:38] Speaker C: Let's, let's whip this thing up. Look at this sea star. So it is, it's, it's completely different looking to a traditional telescope. It's like a little, it's like a [01:41:48] Speaker A: little, it's almost like a projector, like a home projector. [01:41:50] Speaker C: It's like something you would see from a company like DJI or whatever, where they'd be like, hey, we'll just do it like this. And it's way different. Cheap. It's not as, obviously not as high end, but. Okay, so that's, that's what it is. A new era of astrophotography pro performance. Debatable guessing. Infinite cosmos. It's. Yeah, really interesting. Enjoy stargazing any time, anywhere. [01:42:24] Speaker A: Andy. Just, just for clarity, you said that it was the deepest object that you've ever captured was 200 million light years away. For, for the uninitiated, how, how long is a light year? [01:42:37] Speaker B: Okay, how do we go with this? All right, so if we look up at the stars at night, most of us would be able to find the Southern Cross, right? [01:42:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:42:48] Speaker B: Okay. Yes. And we know there are two stars leading to the Southern Cross that we call the pointers. [01:42:54] Speaker A: Yep. [01:42:56] Speaker B: The brightest of those is Alpha Centauri. That one is pretty much the closest star to us at four light years distance. For us to go there with our conventional means of rocket launch travel that we have now would take us 86000 years. Bananas. All right. [01:43:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:43:26] Speaker B: And even then it would be a wasted trip because although it's a triple star system with Proxima Centauri, none of the, what they call exoplanets, which bodies like Earth that you know, are in orbit around those, none of them are in what they call the Goldilocks zone, which is not too hot, but not too cold to support life as we know it. [01:43:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:43:50] Speaker B: We would have to go to Barnard Star to find a super Earth that is the closest to the Earth. And that would be a 200,000 year trip with the technology that we have right now. [01:44:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:44:04] Speaker B: So I guess when we start thinking about space travel, UFOs, aliens and star Trek and all that kind of stuff. I think Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So what kind of amazing magical warp drive, warp speed, would another race of beings have to travel to our Earth from such distances just to come and probe some farmers rectum in Kansas. You gotta ask yourself all those questions. You know, there may well be life of some form out there, there, but would we see it in our lifetime Just because the distance is so vast, Would we ever actually connect? You know, I think Star wars had it right in some ways where they said a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Now, I'm not saying for a moment that, you know, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker existed, but I am suggesting that if anything does exist, it is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. [01:45:24] Speaker C: Yeah. And the chances of coming across them at any, at a point in time to intersect is so small. [01:45:34] Speaker B: Yeah. It's remote. [01:45:35] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:45:35] Speaker B: But then as Douglas Adams said in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if there's no one else out there, it's an awful waste of space, you know. [01:45:45] Speaker C: Do you have, so do you have a view, do you have any thoughts on that side of things about the [01:45:50] Speaker B: very Star Trekkie utopian view? Given that I was been watching it since I was a kid, I'd like to think there was life out there. [01:45:58] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:45:59] Speaker B: I'd like to think that one day we'll get our act together and we'll stop, you know, investing in nuclear arms and we'll, you know, get ourselves together as a human race and start exploring the stars and what's out there. I think that would be a much better use of the resources of mankind than, you know, blowing each other up over oil. And I guess that if there are some kind of intelligence out there? I mean, you know, there's been some pretty amazing discoveries with radio telescopes. The. Something called the wow Signal, which I think was 1978, when a radio telescope got this burst from. I think it was Vega that just no one could explain. But it kind of had suggestions that it might be of extraterrestrial origin. Something. If you ever saw the movie Contact, it kind of leans into that a little bit. [01:47:01] Speaker C: Okay. [01:47:03] Speaker B: I don't know. I mean, it's. We'll probably never know. [01:47:08] Speaker C: Yeah, we probably will never know. But do you. Do you look into any of that sort of stuff? Do you get intrigued by the, you know, the stories and the. And the things like that of. Of potential sightings or, you know, the. The things that come out by Air Force pilots about the. The Tic Tac or whatever it was. Do you like sort of just reading about that stuff just to just. [01:47:34] Speaker B: I went and saw Disclosure Day last week, you know. [01:47:37] Speaker C: Oh, I haven't seen it yet. Is it good? [01:47:40] Speaker B: It is very good. The last 20 minutes are absolute edge of your seat. What's gonna happen next? Stuff. And there's lots of action and stuff in it. It's probably a bit long, but I think it's well worth seeing at the movies. [01:47:53] Speaker C: Okay. [01:47:54] Speaker B: I think, you know, I guess it's. It's a question that one probably really needs to enjoy over a glass of wine at that campfire. But I think there's, you know, there's got to be something out there. There's got to be. Surely, you know, there's got to be. [01:48:15] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:48:15] Speaker B: And as I said, it doesn't really matter what you. What your philosophy is, what you believe. I just think it's. It's just too big a concept for us to grasp. And so when we come back to, you know, how far away is our nearest star? And that's four light years and it'd take us, you know, 86, 000 years or something to get there. You know, we're talking. Actually, have you got my website there? Can you bring up Andy's astro. Go to LRGB images for a moment. [01:48:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:48:45] Speaker B: And if you scroll down to see something called Sombrero Galaxy M104. [01:48:55] Speaker C: Where is it? [01:48:56] Speaker B: Let's see. LRGP images be the fourth one from the top on the left hand side. [01:49:02] Speaker C: Oh, I'm on the wrong thing. [01:49:03] Speaker B: Hang on. [01:49:04] Speaker C: Sorry. There we go. [01:49:06] Speaker B: Okay, so if you just scroll down there, that page from it. Okay. That galaxy is arguably twice the size of our Milky Way. And really? Yeah. And that's 28 million light years away. And it looks a bit like a UFO being chased by stormtroopers. [01:49:26] Speaker C: You know, I was going to say, I don't, I don't want to sound dumb, but you're talking about this bit here. Hang on, you can't see that. There we go. This bit here in the image and you're saying that, that this bit is compared to our. It's a galaxy twice the size of [01:49:42] Speaker B: the Milky Way and we're seeing it edge on. So we're not seeing that classic spiral pattern because how is that even possible? [01:49:51] Speaker C: I don't understand. It's so tiny. It just looks like a weird star. [01:49:56] Speaker B: So while you're on that page, if you can jump out of that object and jump onto Antenna galaxies. Go up a little bit, you'll see one called Antenna. Yep. Okay, so what you're looking at here, this little love heart in space, is anything but that because we're looking at two galaxies actually colliding. So this is where one galaxy is literally gravitationally drawn to the other one. It's what they call interacting galaxies. But you know, it's really a collision. Wow. You know, this is 60 million light years distant now. You don't want to be there, you know. Yeah, chaos, absolute chaos. So if you jump out of that one, just show you one more while we're here in this galaxy page, if you just scroll up for a moment to where it says Fornax Galaxy cluster. [01:50:59] Speaker C: Yep. [01:51:00] Speaker B: Click on that. One. So every blob you see there, every big orange, yellow blob is a galaxy. [01:51:10] Speaker C: Wow. What about the one down the bottom [01:51:14] Speaker B: is the barred spiral galaxy, which is face on and you know, quite pretty. But all those other ones, they're different kinds. Different that what they call irregular galaxies or different forms of galaxy, but they're all galaxies with star systems and planets and all that stuff. And you know, that's pretty distant, that one as well. That's, that's, yeah, whatever it is, that's. I think it's 62 million light years away. But that's the vastness of space, you know, that's. Yeah, that's mind blowing. [01:51:47] Speaker C: Is there any way to tell? I'm sure there's a way, but, but do you know how close are all these galaxies to each other? Roughly? Like, are they, are they in a cluster physically? Or is it just because they're in a similar angle of view, but they're further than I think, you know, like, are they all long distances away from each other? [01:52:11] Speaker B: Probably the angle of view because we can't really tell through the foreshortening effect. So one galaxy might be, you know, might be quite close, might be 10 million light years away, and there might be 1, 200, 000 years distant. When, when, when one zooms in on these photos, you'll see little tiny, teeny tiny galaxies that are like 500 million light years away that you can barely even perceive. And you need, you know, telescopes with more resolution than mine to pick up. But it's pretty cool. [01:52:43] Speaker C: Rolling back here has said the, the Universe Is this mean. 94 billion years to the edge. Is that, is that a commonly held kind of, I guess. What would you call that? Educated guesstimate by science, 94 billion years to the edge? [01:52:59] Speaker B: It's someone's guess. I'm not really sure. No one's, no one's got a taste. [01:53:06] Speaker A: How do they measure the distance from us to another celestial body? How is that achieved? [01:53:13] Speaker B: Some of it's done through something called spectroscopy where they measure the. Use filters to measure the elements that are emitted by a star so they get a sense of what that star is composed of and how long that light then takes to travel. And they can build a bit of an idea about that. But honestly, you'd have to talk to someone who's a bit more science versed than I am because ultimately I'm a photographer who learns a bit about this stuff, but I'm no astrophysicist, so I wouldn't be the first person to be able to give you a definitive answer on how big the universe is. I think they're still trying to work that out, aren't they? [01:53:50] Speaker A: I imagine so. Imagine so. Jay, sorry if I missed it earlier. Where did you. I heard you guys were talking about life out there. Where do you land on that, Justin? [01:54:01] Speaker C: Where do I go? So I love hearing about it. There's a. I'm trying to think of his name. You might remember the guy who's confident. He's a. He's a amateur or something, rocket scientist and he got hired by NASA to work at Area 51. Is this ringing a bell? And he's, he just, he, he Talked about element 113 or, or something like that. Element 112 or 111. And, and it didn't exist. And then they, they were able to synthesize it or whatever. What's his name? [01:54:36] Speaker B: I know the one you're talking about. [01:54:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I've got to find it now because otherwise people. [01:54:40] Speaker A: Are you peddling conspiracy theories? Is that what you're doing? [01:54:42] Speaker C: No, no, so he's, he's told the same story for 30 or 40 years or something. [01:54:48] Speaker A: Right. [01:54:49] Speaker C: And it's so interesting to listen to, but then, then, you know, if you dig into it, there'll be a million people saying that it can't be true and, and all that sort of stuff as well. So I'm kind of in a similar mindset to you, Andy, in terms of. I feel like there's got to be something out there, but the chance of, of people, of not people, of aliens visiting us to, to probe, slim. But then when hearing, hearing Air Force pilots talk about it, they're very serious people. Yeah. And, and I've heard people trying to bunk it as well, but it's hard to listen to them and then think that they're lying. So that doesn't mean that what they saw was an alien, but they saw something. [01:55:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:55:37] Speaker C: And they're very convinced of that, and that's really interesting to me. So I don't know. Yeah, but that's it. Bob Lazar. Bob Lazar is the guy. Yes. If anyone is just interested in this stuff and wants to hear some stories, his stories are very interesting and, and pretty cool, but I don't know whether they're true or not, but it's, it's fun to listen to. [01:56:01] Speaker A: Well, the, you know, the Pentagon is just really in the States has just released, I think their third batch a couple of weeks ago of UAP footage and stories and documents. And I've been fascinated by that, you know, and it's interesting because all of these things are coming to light from like the first moon landing, you know, from the first rocket orbiting the Earth with people in it. They, you know, they recorded strange unidentified objects. I think it's fascinating. But I also think that, you know, personally, I think it's. It's almost arrogant of us to think that we are it in this huge expanse, you know, it just, it just the odds are phenomenal that we are it. [01:56:43] Speaker B: I think Monty Python had it right, you know, with the. The Galaxy song. Do you remember that one? The universe is expanding at a 100,000 miles an hour. And yeah, I hope there's intelligent life out there because there's bagger all down here on Earth. That one. [01:56:55] Speaker C: Well, that's. Glenn Lavender said this before. Glenn Lavender, Creative Photo Workshops said, just pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, because there's bugger all down here on Earth. [01:57:04] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And if there is intelligent life out there and they're listening to this podcast first, if you could like, and subscribe. That'd be great. But secondly, could you send help? Because we're in a really bad spot at the moment. We could do with some intelligent life down here for sure. [01:57:21] Speaker C: I'll read out one or two more comments and then I'd love to do a whole episode talking about alien. Alien theories, actually. That would be wonderful. Maybe we'll do that on a Monday night. One night, Matt Palmer says from Alpine Light says, I saw a UFO about 28 years ago now and still remember it vividly. Not saying it was alien though, but it was definitely beyond known human capabilities. Wow. I want to hear that story one day, Matt. Maybe you can come on and we'll do a. We'll do an alien night and just talk about. Maybe we'll go through all the photos because that is the one when I get all excited about it and then someone says, we've had a lot of really good phones with cameras in the hands of a lot of people for a long time now. And it's not, not much is being captured on, you know, anything that you can actually see, you know, And I'm like, yeah, that's a good point. Why is everything always blurry and you can't quite see it? [01:58:19] Speaker B: Okay, can we jump over quickly to rocket launches? Can we talk about that for a second? [01:58:25] Speaker A: Yes, please, just. [01:58:26] Speaker C: Absolutely. [01:58:27] Speaker B: If you go to the home. Go to the home page of the Andy's Astro there. [01:58:30] Speaker C: Yeah, hang on, let me get that. [01:58:33] Speaker B: This. [01:58:34] Speaker C: Figure out how to navigate my computer and then bring that up and just [01:58:42] Speaker B: scroll down to the little photo with the astronauts in it. There you go. From Apollo to Atlas. That one, yeah. So being a, a space nerd, that, that I was, I had the opportunity, I was invited by a friend to go to Cape Canaveral and watch a couple of rocket launches. Oh, wow. And this was what we call a streak shot. So if you just scroll down, you'll get the picture of the craft they were using. So Boeing and SpaceX have been in a. A race for some time to send astronauts to the Internet International Space Station because it used to cost something like $25 million a person to send them up on a Russian Soyuz. So. So it's in the United States interest to have their own happening. So this was the Boeing one. The launch was spectacular. It actually missed the space station due to a computer malfunction. But it was a good launch. [01:59:51] Speaker C: I remember that. Is that the one where they had to get rescued or something? Is that that one? No, different one? [01:59:55] Speaker B: No, that's a different one. [01:59:56] Speaker C: SpaceX had to go. [01:59:58] Speaker B: That's that same vehicle, believe it or not. So seven years later, they still haven't quite got it right. Whereas this, whereas SpaceX are a little bit more advanced. But this statue is at Cape Kennedy of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. I composited this together. So the streak shot is there with a picture of the moon and the astronauts. I kind of thought it looked pretty cool because the light all kind of worked. But seeing rocket launches is amazing because they make a real big deal out of it. So Kennedy Space center is a bit like Disneyland, the kind of space nerds. And as part of the entrance, you can attend a rocket launch if there's one on. And you know, they've got astronauts on the pa, big countdown clock, you know, they've got everything sort of there. And, and you know, for this one, we had to be there at 2 o' clock in the morning because this was a dawn launch. And you get to the Space center and, you know, there's this huge car park and there's people with lightsabers sort of directing you. And, you know, the cafe is open, the shops are open, everything's open. It's America, you know, spend money. And then they get down to the, the final bit and the countdown and then, then you just see this glowing ball of light in the horizon and it's like, wow, look at that. And there's no sound because you're four or five kilometers away, so the sound hasn't got to you yet. And then as the thing starts raising up, the sound starts coming through and it starts reverberating. And by the time it hits you full force, it's like the bass at a KISS concert or something. It's like, oh my gosh, listen to that. You know, and the things roaring and sort of screaming into the sky. And I was lucky enough to see two of them, one during the day and one at night. [02:01:43] Speaker A: What an opportunity. [02:01:44] Speaker B: It was just mind blowing, you know, the. Yeah, you can say what you like about our American friends, but what they do well, they do really, really, really well. And this is something they do really, really well. Absolutely mind blowing. So if you ever get the chance, you know, go see rocket launch, because it's really cool. [02:02:03] Speaker C: It does sound like an amazing thing. And, and being able to capture that stuff, like seeing some of the setups that people use with the, that the accredited photographers that are allowed to set equipment up to capture some of the launches and stuff. [02:02:16] Speaker A: Yeah, we covered that launch. [02:02:19] Speaker C: Yeah, the Mars. Oh, sorry, Mars. Gosh, I'm Getting ahead of myself from the future. The moon, where they went around the moon. The SpaceX launch or SpaceX NASA. That was a collaboration, wasn't it? That one was SpaceX NASA Artemis Atlas. Artemis. [02:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, sorry, yeah, that was, that was [02:02:39] Speaker B: all NASA, that one. Yep. [02:02:40] Speaker C: It was all NASA. Was it? Yeah, right, yeah. That the images that were captured was so cool of the. The rocket taking off. It's just the amount of power and it's crazy. Crazy. Very cool. [02:02:56] Speaker B: I'm not sure how much time you guys have. I'm fine. But I wonder if we could briefly touch on the. The astrophotography prize competition. [02:03:04] Speaker A: Yes, please. Yeah, that was my next topic of conversation. So. Lovely segue there. [02:03:10] Speaker C: We've got time. Because I would also look. I'd love to look at some more of your images. Yeah. Whether the, the NASA APOD images or something like that. But yeah, let's, let's. I'll bring that the one up on your. To separate info for that. Oh, okay. [02:03:26] Speaker A: If you go to the. The running sheet, if you've got it [02:03:28] Speaker C: open, I'll find it [02:03:32] Speaker B: just astrophotographyprize.com. [02:03:35] Speaker A: oh no, it's not. Sorry, boss. [02:03:37] Speaker C: I got it. I'll find it. You guys start chatting about it. [02:03:40] Speaker A: So you're a co founder of this. Talk to us about what it is and, and why you saw a need for it to be set up. [02:03:48] Speaker B: Sure. I have been entering photographic competitions for. Since 1992 or something and the one that the AIPP used to run, something called Appa, was really cool because you'd have five judges and they would debate your image and you'd basically sit back and listen to the merits or the pitfalls of what you'd entered. And it was very educational to hear the comments from the judges. But what I found when I got into the astrophotography was that if you entered a competition, you might be lucky enough to win it, you might get a, you know, a second prize or something, but there'd be no feedback, there'd be no understanding of why your image was chosen or not chosen. And that's the case today where, you know, the biggest one is the Royal Astro Photographer of the Year out of Greenwich Observatory and they get 5,000 entries and they have a large judging panel but. And they've got some nice prizes, but you got no idea when you put your pictures in if they're going to be accepted or not accepted or win or not win. And there's no feedback whatsoever. Same thing happens, you know, pretty much with all these competitions and I thought, well, coming out of the whole APPA experience, being a judge, being a chairperson, my wife being chairman of jurors, and she set up something called the Australian Photographic Prize after the demise of the arpp. I think Scott Portelli won that, didn't he? Yep. So we talked about that and thought, well, maybe there's room there, an interest in astrophotography, to have a similar, a category, if you like, for this sort of judging. And so in one, in the second year of the Australian Photographic Prize, we had an astrophotography category. We had two categories. We had wide field and we had deep space with a little telescope as a prize for each one. And we got entries from like 50 countries. And we thought, oh, okay, clearly people want this. So we created a dedicated competition for it. And what then we realized was, well, heck, with zoom, we can get astrophotographers from all around the world as judges and hook them together up at the same time and then debate people's photographs live on YouTube so that when people enter this competition, be it in one of the categories for deep space or astro landscapes or auroras, if they get to the top 25, those images will be judged live by five expert astrophotographers. And they'll talk about those images, they'll give them a score out of 100. And if they, if there's a discrepancy in the scoring, if someone's really high or someone's really low, then a debate will happen. And that's what really cool. So, yeah, suddenly, you know, we're talking about, you know, this photo about why it's good or why it isn't. And that's hugely beneficial and educational to the community. And my philosophy there is a rising tide, floats all boats. So if we can all get a little bit better, then, you know, everybody wins. And so having this debate process has been hugely popular and it's unique because there's no other astrophotography competition in the world that does this. And a lot of it's down to my amazing brother in law who writes the software so that we can all connect via Zoom at the same time and score and look at these pictures and all that sort of stuff. It's hugely complex, the back end of it, but enormously gratifying. And we've got some pretty cool sponsors who've come on board with us and some really nice prizes. I've often been tempted to enter this competition myself under a pseudonym, you know, be like Luigi Vanilli or something, just to get the feedback [02:08:05] Speaker C: you can use my name if you want. Feel free to enter any of your images under my name. [02:08:09] Speaker A: Exactly. [02:08:11] Speaker B: But it's an absolute honor to look at these pictures and talk about them and assess them and hook up. You know, we talked at the start of the show about how we do this in isolation, but I can literally contact almost any astrophotographer in the world, some of the most, you know, famous ones out there, and say, hey, you know, do you want to judge this competition? Because we'd love to have you. And it's pretty exciting. So we've got this year, Alicia Pagans, one of the judges. She actually processes stuff for this space Telescope Science Institute. So she's processing images from the Hubble and from the James Webb every day. That's her thing. [02:08:54] Speaker A: That's her thing. [02:08:56] Speaker C: When she walks into a room, is everyone like, okay, so you've got the best equipment. You know, your telescope's the best. We all know it. [02:09:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Judy Schmidt, similar sort of thing. She's highly well known for doing this sort of thing. Marcel Dreschler is in Germany. He's discovered 50 objects out there with his team that no one ever knew existed. You know, there's. We've got an Aurora category this year. So we've got, literally, his name is Vincent Ledvina. He's known as the Aurora guy, and he's in Alaska. And then at the other end of the world, we've got Luke Sharkey from Tasmania, who's also an Aurora photographer. So we've got both ends of the globe carpet. [02:09:41] Speaker C: Wow. [02:09:41] Speaker B: For that kind of stuff. [02:09:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:09:44] Speaker B: And, you know, we've got Catherine Mash in there for the first time. She's got, like 200,000 social media followers. She's a space painter and a fantastic space painter. Like, amazing. Her stuff sells out in, like, seconds. [02:09:59] Speaker A: How does that work? [02:10:01] Speaker B: She's a brilliant marketer, but in addition to that, she's also a deep space photographer now with her husband. [02:10:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:10:10] Speaker B: So she's. She'll be assessing and judging these images as well, from a more artistic point of view. Yeah, it's really cool putting these people together. Oh, Tanya Hill, she's coming this year. She's a PhD in black holes and she runs the Melbourne Planetarium. Science shows that get sent all around the world. [02:10:30] Speaker A: And. [02:10:30] Speaker B: And this is the thing, you know, I just reach out to these people and say, hey, you know, like, we're doing this. Would you like to participate? And something I learned very early in my professional photography career is the worst something can do is the Worst something, the worst someone can do is say no. And so literally I reached out to Neil Degrasse Tyson. I said, hey, you know, do you want to judge this competition now? I figured, look, the worst thing he's going to do is say no. And sure, he didn't get back to me, but hey, not going to die wondering because I'm reaching out to him, you know. [02:11:02] Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And you never know. You can ask people every year, you know, in five years it might be so big and he might be, have, have time in his schedule and go, you know what? Yeah, sure, imagine, maybe. [02:11:15] Speaker B: So this year, for the first time, I realized that this competition would only grow if we had an exhibition. So through a bunch of networking and literally hearing no a few times, we landed with the people at Chevaux Space and Science center in California and they are going to host an exhibition of the top 25 images in the categories for the next year. So they'll be printing it and hanging it. They've talked about some of the celebrities that they're involved with, who they'll have opening it and doing all that sort of stuff, which is really exciting. So literally people can enter this competition and have a chance not only to have their images debated by some amazing astrophotographers, possibly win prizes and also have their photo hung in an exhibition, which is really, really cool. [02:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah, that is very cool. [02:12:13] Speaker C: That's a great. That's the best prize of all being. Yeah, yeah. The only hard part would then be flying from wherever you live in the world to get there so you could see your image hanging in that exhibition. That would be pretty special. [02:12:24] Speaker B: But, but Justin, people do this already. They, if, if their exhibition, if their image is in the Royal Greenwich Competition, there's a nice exhibition attached to that and people will fly from all over the world just to see their photo. [02:12:38] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, you, you would. Because it'd be so special to see it printed and hanging next to everyone else's, you know, award winning or finalist images. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. [02:12:50] Speaker B: So, yes, there are entry, there are entry fees. Yes, they, they cover the costs of all of this sort of stuff. I don't make a heck of a lot of money out of doing this. I probably make 10 cents an hour from the sheer amount of work that I put into making this event happen. But I just love doing it and being involved and you know, the entries are open now. There's the plug. [02:13:13] Speaker C: Yeah, look, just, I'll just read a couple out. So just so you know what the fees are. They're not, they're not expensive. A single entry into Any category is 30 Australian dollars. With a single entry with written feedback is 40 Australian dollars. We can do a 5 entry bundle for 125 entry bundle with written feedback. 160. 10 entry bundle 220 and 10 entry bundle with written feedback is 290. And the written feedback is there. [02:13:40] Speaker B: Is there for everyone. They tick a box. And what that means is that if the, even if their image doesn't get to the top 25, a really well known astrophotographer will dissect your image for you and they'll write six or seven paragraphs about what's good about it, how it could be improved and what you could do to make it better next time. And that's valuable. [02:14:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that's priceless. That's absolutely priceless. Really. And it's just interesting that there hasn't been this kind of level of supporting deep space astro or any astro before now. And it's something you should wear as a badge of pride that you've been able to establish this and you've now got this global support mechanism and feedback mechanism. I think that's crucial to any creative process to have feedback from your peers. So well done on that front. Andy, I'm curious, what is the next frontier for astrophotography? What's on the horizon? Are there murmurings and movements about new technology or new ways of approaching the craft? [02:14:50] Speaker B: The latest suggestion is that pocket rockets literally will create little tiny satellites that private individuals can collaborate with to have their own version of the Hubble telescope. So. [02:15:11] Speaker A: Wow. [02:15:11] Speaker B: You can, you can literally invest in some of these companies now and they will be sending up these little teeny tiny shoebox size satellites. And yeah, you can collaborate and have your own little Hubble telescope out there. That's the next thing. Because it doesn't matter how good your telescope is and where it's located on Earth, you've still got to shoot through this thick pea soupy fog thing called the atmosphere. [02:15:38] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:15:40] Speaker B: And that's going to have an effect on your optics no matter how good or pristine they are. So the moment you know, you're out there where, where the Hubble and the web and so forth are, then that's, that's the next frontier. [02:15:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So what is it you don't know about the, the investment up front? [02:16:00] Speaker B: No, but I know that's, that's, that's, that's in the wings, that's planned. Yeah. [02:16:05] Speaker C: Well, might be more than a boat, that one. You might have to say hey, it's not as much as a, it's not as much as a helicopter. [02:16:13] Speaker B: Yeah, potentially. But we've had conversations with some of the, with some of the telescope makers, some of the biggest ones worldwide when we were asking, you know, talk about sponsorship and that kind of stuff and some of them have been moving a little bit out of sort of imaging as such and moving into defense and tracking satellites. And you know, there's a whole world out there where, you know, governments will hire farms of telescopes to track other nations telescopes to keep an eye on what they're doing. And so defense with space is a, is a huge thing, but as a part of that whole evolutionary process, I guess, you know, there's nothing like a war to boost technology. [02:17:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Sad to say that that's where most of the world's big techno technological advances have, have been born, is through defense, conflict and defense. [02:17:19] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Because the, the money's there to, to do something that otherwise wouldn't be viable as a business. And it's very rare that that becomes viable without that. Those sort of, you know, like SpaceX is one of those few companies that's been able to become a viable business while doing something that normally would be kind of a money pit that a government would have to invest in. And I'm sure they've had a lot of government investment because of their, what they're doing. But. Yeah, yeah, actually it's, that's pretty rare that that happens where, where something can just try and push technology forward at that kind of pace and not be tied to defense spending or, or something like that, so. [02:18:07] Speaker B: Exactly. Mind you, in the Astro world, SpaceX is not regarded as a huge friend because of all their bloody satellites they're putting up there. [02:18:16] Speaker C: Yeah, that's the thing. It's a trade off, isn't it? Like, it's, it's amazing having Internet. It's really cool that they're trying to progress lower cost and reusable space exploration and travel vehicles and things like that. But on the other hand you've got Starlink putting out, you know, lots and lots of satellites. That's, that's so, so it's a. Yeah, it's not, it's never all good. It's never all good, sadly. [02:18:46] Speaker B: Right. [02:18:48] Speaker C: Should we look at some images? [02:18:51] Speaker B: Yeah, go ahead. [02:18:52] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:18:52] Speaker B: Where did you want to go now? [02:18:53] Speaker C: If you, if you've got time. I don't know like if there's, if there's any that you suggest. But I just, I, I love some of your, your let's let's jump onto [02:19:03] Speaker B: the APOD page, the NASA APOD page on the website. [02:19:07] Speaker C: Done. [02:19:11] Speaker B: If you like, you can scroll down to the bot to the bottom one where it says the eye of God. So what we're looking at, what we're looking at here is the death of a star. So this is what they call loosely, weirdly, a planetary nebula. And so when a star gets to the end of its life, it's going to do one or two things depending on this, the mass of the star. So if it's a high mass star, it'll basically collapse on itself and become so hot that it blows its stuff everywhere into what they call a supernova, or like this one. It'll be a low mass star and it'll eventually become a red giant as it burns all its fuel and expands and dissipates. And what we're seeing here is that red area here around the sort of eyeball is ionized hydrogen that's expanding and expanding out because the rest of the star, which is that little dot right in the middle of the eyeball, has collapsed in on itself. And as it's collapsing in, it uses then the rest of its material, which burns even hotter, and that's the ionized oxygen, which is why it's blue. And so then that collapses and you eventually end up with something called a neutron star, which is really super dense, but doesn't actually emit light as such the way we see it normally. And they think that, they've said that a, a teaspoon full of neutron star material would weigh as much as New York City. I don't know who comes up with this stuff, but that's some of the random stats that they come out with. But what you're seeing there is this is likely to be what will happen when our star reaches the end of its life cycle. And so this one is, I guess, a representation of what that is. So this one's relatively close to Earth. It's, you know, it's, it's within the tens of, of light years away and it's kind of pretty. And yes, it does look a bit like an eye. [02:21:21] Speaker C: It does, yeah. It's a captivating photo. [02:21:24] Speaker B: But the, the extremities, the outer chevrons there of, of this, they were really dim. I was probably getting like one pixel an hour on there, on an hour. But because that was about 75 hours of data, that's what I was about to ask. [02:21:39] Speaker C: So that. So it took 75 hours to shoot this photo? [02:21:43] Speaker B: Yep. [02:21:45] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh. [02:21:47] Speaker B: If we scroll out of. Jump out of that one. [02:21:50] Speaker A: And I'll never complain about the. The perils of slow shutter speeds again. [02:21:54] Speaker B: Yeah, go to the Dragon's Heart. Just under that one. On to the right. Yep, that one. So this is a. This is a mosaic image. So we talked about stars exploding. So this is the remnants of a supernova. The way in the middle of that is a little bit left over of the star itself. But all this red stuff here, this is ionized hydrogen that's expanding out into the cosmos further and further and further. So this is a huge object. It's so big that even with my little telescope, it's got quite a wide field of view. I'd had to shoot this in six panels. So this object took me six months to shoot. Right. Literally, it is. It was six months to take one photo and assemble it. And it was the first color photo that had ever been taken of this thing. And NASA published it as an ipod for that reason. And I remember when I had it kind of processed and ready, I remember showing it to my son and said, you know, what does that look like to you? And he said he'd just been watching, like, how to train your dragon or something. He said, oh, it looks like a dragon's heart, daddy. And so it loosely became known as the dragon's heart. And so whenever anyone nowadays photographs this thing, because there's been quite a number of photographs of it since it's now affectionately known as the Dragon's Heart Nebula, which is. [02:23:16] Speaker A: Wow. [02:23:18] Speaker C: That's pretty cool. [02:23:19] Speaker A: That's street cred for you. Yeah, that's big street cred for you and your son. Yeah. That's amazing. [02:23:26] Speaker C: Wow. [02:23:28] Speaker A: But six months. [02:23:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:23:31] Speaker A: So you. You know, every. So I assume that during the day, you can't do anything with this, and then at night, your telescope picks up where it left off. [02:23:40] Speaker B: Yep. [02:23:41] Speaker A: And that's all through using. [02:23:43] Speaker B: This is from my backyard. [02:23:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:23:46] Speaker B: So literally, you have to set it up every. Every time, pull it down the next morning because it might rain because it's Melbourne and, you know, it's. Sure, if you got three clear nights in a row and, you know, it's. It's all good, then we can leave the thing set up and running. But more often than not, you'll have to pack it up. I think there was only one occasion where my wife poked me in the sides at night when I'm in bed, and she said, honey, it's raining, and I'm going, oh, shit. [02:24:13] Speaker A: Oh, gosh. So. [02:24:14] Speaker C: So with you, talk about, obviously, the dark of the sky, the better for this sort of stuff. People, people trek all over the world and stuff to find the darker skies to do this deep space Astro. But, but you were able, like from your backyard, I assume it wasn't super dark. Like, you certainly couldn't shoot from your backyard like a decent Aurora or Milky Way photo. Is that, would that be true? Yeah, sorry, yeah. But for this sort of stuff, it's okay. [02:24:44] Speaker B: This is an emission nebula. So using those expensive filters, I can filter out light pollution. And just that light that's coming there is just the light coming from the nebula itself, which means that I can filter out light pollution in the moon and all that other sort of stuff. But if I wanted to shoot one of those galaxies that you saw earlier, then I have to go out to a dark site because you can't filter out visible light as such. [02:25:09] Speaker C: Right. Okay. [02:25:10] Speaker B: You want to keep all those lovely colors I see. Maybe while we're talking about nebulas, let's, let's find one that maybe that might help a little bit if you want to maybe scroll up to the Statue of Liberty there. So this is another, what they call emission nebula. So stars are being born here. So if you have that combination of gas, heat and dust, and you leave it there, cook it over time, then little baby protostars will be formed. And when those stars are formed, they generate something called solar wind. And that solar wind then pushes the dust into these wacky shapes that you see here, and it literally lights them up. And what we're seeing here is something that looks, if you zoom in a little bit, kind of like the Statue of Liberty with the armor. Ironically, you can only see this in the southern hemisphere, so our northern American friends don't see this one. [02:26:17] Speaker A: But how far away is that? [02:26:19] Speaker B: And then, oh, gosh, probably says there, says that there somewhere relatively close because it's, you know, it's within the Milky Way is in, in our galaxy. Just trying to see what it says there. I can't see it there now. I might have to look that one up again. If it's within our galaxy, if it's within our galaxy, It'll be within 50,000 light years, [02:26:46] Speaker C: just around the corner, really pretty much. [02:26:50] Speaker B: And so the bright area in the center, that's where the real star formation is happening. That's where the baby young protostars are literally hatching. And so those areas are extremely bright. The bridge brightness range is sometimes, you know, intense. The different colors are representing the different gases and the different elements present. And each one is from a Different filter. So I've got a hydrogen filter, an oxygen filter, and a sulfur filter on there. And then we combine all those together in Photoshop to build the image that you see there. And with this one, I've then removed the stars so we can actually see a little bit more of the detail underneath. Which is kind of crazy when you think, you know, we're photographing stars and then taking them away. But in this case, it just made a more interesting photograph. [02:27:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:27:35] Speaker C: And this is. Oh, sorry, Greg, I was just going to ask quickly. [02:27:39] Speaker A: You know, you collect in this data night after night when you can, for months. How much data are we talking in terms of file sizes for you to then work it to build a final image? [02:27:52] Speaker B: 10 gigabytes for one image. [02:27:55] Speaker C: Wow. [02:27:55] Speaker B: It's pretty normal. Yep. [02:27:58] Speaker C: Wow. [02:27:58] Speaker B: You. [02:27:58] Speaker C: Do. [02:27:59] Speaker B: You do have a bit of a storage issue. [02:28:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so does the telescope feed directly into its own onboard storage, or does it just feed directly to it wherever you are? [02:28:10] Speaker B: The camera feeds into the nuc. So the nuc then stores the data, and then I get the data off the nuc and then unpack it and then run it through the stacking programs. [02:28:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. [02:28:24] Speaker B: And that's. That's a whole different world. [02:28:28] Speaker C: This. This might be a dumb question, but I'm going to ask it anyway, so be gentle with me. The colors in these images, obviously you're using filters, and I know the only little bit I know about using filters for different things is more to do with, like, infrared filters and things like that and how it can change, like the. The what color we're seeing. And you have to do channel swaps and things like that. Like, are you. Do you have to. Are you trying to make the colors in this image what they should be? Or is this what they are? Or is this. Like, how does that side of it work? Does that make sense? Is that a dumb question? [02:29:13] Speaker B: Definitely not a dumb question. We're looking at what we call a false color image and a false color image. Let me see if you just jump on Google for a second. Can you bring up the pillars of creation? So this is a very, very, very famous deep space photo from the Hubble Telescope. There you go. Click on the one on the top left. Yep. Click on that. So you see how that's really different colors. Right. And what the astrophysicists do is they realize that to understand the different elements in this photograph, they needed to be able to assign colors to determine what they were looking at. And so they assigned the hydrogen filter, which is normally A very sort of red end of the color spectrum, gas, to green. They assigned the oxygen filter, which is normally a sort of a turquoisey color, to blue. And they assign the sulfur, which is extreme red, to. To red. And then they built this image so that any kind of well educated astrophysicist can look at that image and go, okay, that's where the stars are being formed. That's where there's ionized oxygen. That blue area tells me that that's where the stars are being formed and so forth. Now, that is great, but it's not particularly pleasing to the eye, if you like, from a photography point of view, because, you know, blue and green should never be seen without a color in between, et cetera, et cetera. So I assign the colors based on what NASA's theory is, but I then. I then shift them. I usually just get rid of the green because I generally find that that green is less attractive. So if we wanted to, for example, jump back to my website there and shift out of that one. Just jump onto a different page. Yeah, sure. Grab the Sagittarius sunflowers, for example. So that would have been those sorts of color palette that you would have seen originally, what they call the Hubble palette. But I have assigned that green to that orange color you see there. [02:31:46] Speaker A: Right. [02:31:47] Speaker B: Which I think is just more appealing because I was a little bit inspired by Van Gogh sunflowers painting, and I kind of thought that was representative, a little bit of what I was seeing there. [02:31:56] Speaker A: I also love that Hubble has its own color grading. That's cool. Like a Canon or. [02:32:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So a lot of the. [02:32:03] Speaker A: What are you shooting in Hubble? Hubble log, you know, that's my Hubble. Yeah. [02:32:09] Speaker B: So these, what they call narrowband images, which is literally these narrow bands of light that are emitted by a nebula which are filtered heavily just to show the emissions of that nebula. They're what we call false color images because they're not true to what you would see if you were in the starship Enterprise flying through that and looking out the window. [02:32:31] Speaker C: Right. So what would they look like if we were in the starship Enterprise flying past, looking out the window? Do you know? Or is it if. [02:32:40] Speaker B: If our eyes were sensitive enough to determine the color, they would be very red, slightly less red and turquoise. [02:32:48] Speaker C: Okay, right. [02:32:50] Speaker B: Which would not be that helpful for a space scientist to be able to differentiate between the two reds, for example. But ultimately, our eyes are made of rods and cones. As you know, the rods detect light, the cones detect color. The cones are not as sensitive, which is why when we look up at night and we see the stars, we don't really see the color. But when we leave a time exposure on a camera for a long time, be it an aurora or a nebula, we're going to see some color there because the camera sensor will be able to pick it up over the period of time to compensate for the lack of sensitivity of our eyes. [02:33:32] Speaker C: Wow. [02:33:34] Speaker B: Sorry. [02:33:36] Speaker A: No, it's just, it's mind blowing. [02:33:38] Speaker C: Yeah, there's. There's so much to it. There's so much. [02:33:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it all gets very geeky very fast. [02:33:46] Speaker C: Yeah, it's quite amazing. Wonderful. [02:33:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:33:49] Speaker B: You know, it's fun. [02:33:52] Speaker A: Well, yeah, you've got an amazing attitude towards it, Andy. And I think what's most compelling about your images is just the, I guess the, the depth of it draws you into question, what our place is. And I hate to sound like a. Sound like a broken record on that, but it really makes you question, you know, our place in this whole big scheme of things. [02:34:19] Speaker B: Yep. [02:34:20] Speaker A: You know, I think it's fascinating and, and, you know, and as we, as we develop, I imagine that as we develop telescope technology, we're only going to get deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper. Looks into the, into the universe. And is that where, where science is heading? Is it always trying to advance that ability to see further? [02:34:39] Speaker B: Seems that way. Does sound that way, doesn't it? And whether we're looking at inner space or outer space, I think, you know, they're just as fascinating. And obviously people are always going to ask themselves questions, you know. [02:34:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:34:52] Speaker B: And as technology develops, we can, we can answer some of them or in fact, create more questions. [02:34:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. No, it's absolutely phenomenal. [02:35:03] Speaker B: So, yeah, wonderful. It's out there. Indeed. [02:35:09] Speaker C: Are you working on anything at the moment? [02:35:11] Speaker A: Any. [02:35:11] Speaker C: Have you got. Are you like three months into an image or something? Right now [02:35:16] Speaker B: we're a little bit beset by Melbourne's winter at the moment. Clear nights are rare and hard to come by at present, even up in the remote area where my telescope is, it's affected a little bit by the current weather. So I think we're kind of at a bit of a crossroads at the moment. So we're waiting. I could show you a couple of other images, but they're a little bit. I can't really say too much until they announce things because I got a phone call the other day that I should make my way to parks for the David Malin Awards. So who knows? [02:35:56] Speaker C: Wow, that's cool. Wow. [02:36:00] Speaker B: Who knows what they've Got cooking up there. [02:36:01] Speaker C: But I was gonna say is that when they make those phone calls, because we've heard. Who did we hear about that from? Andrew Ravenko that did the Rocket Girl series. Rocket Girl series during COVID And he got this phone call to be like, hey, can't, you know, we just think you should come along for the night or whatever. And he's like, it's halfway around the. What were the awards, Greg? Do you remember? They're halfway around the, around the world in. [02:36:28] Speaker A: Yeah, it was Europe. It was in Europe. No, I can't remember. For the top, it was like the Vienna Awards or something. [02:36:34] Speaker C: Vienna Awards. And they're like, we can't, we can't tell you why, but we just think you should make the trip and bring [02:36:39] Speaker A: your daughter as well and your wife and. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And he's won this amazing prize for this series. [02:36:47] Speaker B: Yeah, fantastic. [02:36:49] Speaker C: But, but yeah, he said they wouldn't, they wouldn't. He was like trying to probe him. He's like, this is going to cost, you know, a lot of money to go there. You like, are you just inviting everyone that submitted to try and get, you know, like to fill the room up or, you know, like, what's that? Just to try. And they're like, we can't, we can't comment on anything like that. And he's like, oh, gosh, I don't know what to do anyway. [02:37:12] Speaker A: Well, that's exciting. [02:37:13] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:37:14] Speaker B: Because I mean, Parks is an eight hour drive from here, so. [02:37:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [02:37:19] Speaker B: It's worth going though, if you've not been there before. The. To go to the. I once they had a celebration of the 50 years of the moon landing. [02:37:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:37:27] Speaker B: At Parks and I went and saw the movie the Dish at the Dish, which was great. [02:37:32] Speaker C: Oh, that's cool. [02:37:32] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Did they project it onto the Dish or it. [02:37:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [02:37:36] Speaker A: Really? [02:37:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [02:37:38] Speaker A: What, what a great way to honor that. [02:37:42] Speaker B: And they had, you know, tours and stuff as well and you know, some men, scientists and all that jazz. So it was, it was. Yeah, it's, it's. Everyone should go and see the, the Dish at some point and they were, [02:37:52] Speaker C: you know, worth a visit. [02:37:54] Speaker A: Is it still a working site? Like, is the rest of the site still. Yeah, yeah. Radio. [02:38:00] Speaker B: They're doing a lot of stuff currently with the. Tracking the Artemis and that kind of thing because Australia plays a pretty big role in all of this stuff. If you saw the movie the Dish, then you know what the Dish was doing at the time to transmit the signal from the Moon. And because most of NASA's assets are in the Northern hemisphere, they rely on tracking stations like ours in the Southern hemisphere to track their vehicles and assets in space. Yeah. Yep. It's pretty interesting stuff. [02:38:37] Speaker C: I'll have to make a trip there one day, I think. I haven't been, so. That's very cool. [02:38:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I've been. I didn't stop. We drove through it on the way to somewhere, probably to Canberra or something when I was a kid. But I vaguely remember seeing them in the distance. [02:38:49] Speaker B: I'm not sure if they still play cricket on the dish, but. But you can go for something called a hayride, which is where if you're some kind of celebrity, that you can literally get bolted onto the edge of the dish and they'll. They'll pitch it up and spin it around and do all that sort of stuff. Yeah, I've seen them do that. [02:39:07] Speaker A: Oh, that sounds terrifying. [02:39:09] Speaker C: Yeah, that's nuts. Cool. [02:39:15] Speaker B: Bunch of well meaning scientists in the middle of nowhere with nothing else to do, I guess. [02:39:19] Speaker C: I don't say super bored, just like, what can we do today? Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. [02:39:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that is incredible. [02:39:26] Speaker A: Well, we look forward to hearing what comes from that. So please, yeah, definitely keep us in the loop. Yeah, for sure. [02:39:34] Speaker C: I've only got. I've only got a couple of silly questions left, Greg, so if you've got anything. Wow. One of them's only. This is only because Bruce isn't in the chat, so you won't hear it. Have you ever had to have a discussion with a flat Earther? [02:39:54] Speaker B: Yep. [02:39:56] Speaker C: How did it go? Did, like, were you. [02:39:58] Speaker A: Did you. [02:39:58] Speaker C: Were they sort of like, no, no, but this. And you had to try and defend your. Your position with like. I've seen. I've seen a lot of stuff out there. [02:40:07] Speaker B: One of my favorite jackets, right, is this one. It's got all the Apollo patches on it. [02:40:14] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. What? That's amazing. [02:40:16] Speaker B: And it's like an actual replica of a astronaut thing. And I feel sometimes when I wear that shopping or something, I'm a target. [02:40:27] Speaker C: It's a target. [02:40:30] Speaker B: Because they'll just single me out and go, you know it's all a conspiracy, don't you, mate? And like, they never went there. And it's like, I'm sorry, I don't talk stupid. Have a nice day. Yeah, I get it. I hear it. I usually tell them that. Look, just go watch Mythbusters episode six because they debunk every possible hoax theory that's there. You can send a satellite laser, you can project A laser yourself onto the moon, because there's plenty of places where the astronauts left reflecting surfaces there. It'll bounce back and it'll be your proof that they were there. The Chandra spacecraft, the Indian one, has literally taken photographs of the Apollo landing. [02:41:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:41:15] Speaker B: Module. It's still sitting there. But people will go, oh, yeah, but that's a fake photo, mate. You know, people will believe what they want to believe. All right. [02:41:24] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:41:25] Speaker B: Yeah. I am old enough to say I proudly watched the moon landing in a classroom when I was six years old in. [02:41:32] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [02:41:34] Speaker B: You know. [02:41:34] Speaker C: Yeah, that's pretty cool. [02:41:35] Speaker B: And it was mind blowing, you know, and why would 4 million people who are involved in that in America and then all the Chinese and Russians who are competing with them, why would they all say it's a lie? You know, why would America spend 4% of its gross national profit just to do this thing? [02:41:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:41:55] Speaker B: So that someone can say, oh, it's a fake and they did it in a film studio. Well, look, you believe what you want to believe. Whether it's at. The Earth is flat, whether aliens are there, whether they're not there. You know, [02:42:08] Speaker C: can I tell you what my. My crazy theory is? My crazy theory about the. This isn't about the flat Earth stuff, but about the moon landing specifically. It's really funny because. Because Bruce is here. He's so. He hasn't been here the whole time. And then as soon as we start talking about this, he's dropped in late December. Say hi to Andy. I'll have a listen after you finish. [02:42:27] Speaker B: That's good to see you. Hey, Bruce. [02:42:31] Speaker C: I think this is the only thing that could. That makes sense in my head. Maybe they were so worried about the potential of the. Of the footage not being able to be transmitted or something like that, that they had to have a backup of some sort in a film studio or whatever, because they were like, this can't. This can't fail. Like, we can't say this is going to happen and then it. And then it not be able to be seen, even though it's happening or something like that. And I'm like, maybe. Is there. [02:43:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Scarlett Johansson and Tatum. Tatum Chang. Is that his name? Yeah. Fly Me to the Moon. It's a great movie, really. [02:43:17] Speaker C: And it's. It's about that. [02:43:19] Speaker A: Exactly what you just said. [02:43:20] Speaker C: Okay. [02:43:21] Speaker A: Because that's right down to the manipulating the Hasselblad camera. [02:43:25] Speaker B: Yep, exactly. [02:43:27] Speaker C: Because it's like maybe it was happening, but it just. They were like, what if the footage drops out? And then we look Like a failure in front of the entire world. [02:43:35] Speaker A: That's what you need to watch this movie. I'm not going to say anything else because it'll spoil it, but, yeah, it's a great movie. Go watch it. [02:43:40] Speaker B: Right. There's also a really cool series. There's a great series on Apple TV called For All Mankind, which is alternative history. It's where the Russians got there first. [02:43:49] Speaker C: Oh, really? That's cool. [02:43:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really cool because it takes you through. Well, what was America's reaction to that? What did they do? And eventually, you know, colonizing Mars. It's like five series. It's a great show. Check it out. [02:44:02] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [02:44:03] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Nice. [02:44:04] Speaker A: You know, great. [02:44:07] Speaker B: I'm a big fan of all things sci fi and Star Trek and stuff. I met Scotty, you know. Yeah, it was great. [02:44:15] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:44:15] Speaker B: Wow. [02:44:16] Speaker C: Wow. [02:44:17] Speaker A: You rub shoulders with some. Some fine people over the years, I bet. [02:44:22] Speaker C: Any other. [02:44:22] Speaker A: Not just in the astro thing, any [02:44:24] Speaker C: other crazy names from. From John Howard to Scotty? Any other, like. Yeah, I know there's a long list, but is there anyone that pops to mind? Have you said, like, this is a. This is sort of briefly. [02:44:34] Speaker B: I meant I briefly met the actor who plays Luke Skywalker. [02:44:39] Speaker A: Oh, Mark Hamill. [02:44:40] Speaker B: Yep, yep. Yeah. I mean, my wife heads all the celebs. She, when she was photographing, she had Rove, Red Simons, Muhammad Ali, all kinds. Hugh Jackman. I just get the politicians. [02:44:55] Speaker A: Wow. [02:44:56] Speaker C: Okay, so she. We need to get her on the podcast. [02:44:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Who selects the clients, you or your wife? Like, [02:45:04] Speaker C: wow, that's crazy. [02:45:06] Speaker A: Yeah. That's so amazing. [02:45:08] Speaker C: Well, final. Final weird question. If you. [02:45:12] Speaker A: If. [02:45:13] Speaker C: If aliens did land and it was rather than what. What it would. We'd like it to be. And rather than it being some peaceful, awesome thing, it was kind of like, let's say it was like Mars Attacks if you've seen that movie. Or. Let's say it's more Mars Attacks than. Than something peaceful and you had to run out the door and escape the city with just one camera and one lens to document this end of the world. What would you. What would you reach for? [02:45:49] Speaker B: Well, behind me there's the Nikon Z62, which is, you know, my wife's version of the studio camera. So I could probably grab that. I think the iPhone would be useful. But ultimately, if you've got aliens attacking, the signal would probably drop out. So. Yeah, you could probably take photos but not share them. Yeah, I guess. [02:46:09] Speaker C: Okay. [02:46:10] Speaker B: No, wait, hang on. This is sitting on my desk. I was lucky enough to Win this at the Malin Awards about 10 years ago. What is that one? And it's a great little camera. It's a canon. Little canon G7 6 something G7X or something. [02:46:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [02:46:27] Speaker B: It takes RAW files. Greg will like it because it's an aps. [02:46:32] Speaker A: Absolutely. And the size is perfect. We've been talking a lot, Andy, about these compact point and shoots that the market seems to have lost interest in. But the consumer base has a renewed interest. We've seen in data that smaller compact cameras are becoming more popular but with good image quality. [02:46:57] Speaker C: So APS C sensor in a compact body. Yeah, that's what everyone's looking for. That shoots RAW and whatever. And. And other than the Fujifilm X100 which is. Fixed lens, there isn't. And Ricoh do the. The GR. Whatever it is up to now. GR3, GR4. But that's it. There's not really like Canon don't make one. Nikon don't make one. Sony don't make one. Other than their super expensive one on. So, yeah, that's. That's a beautiful little camera. That'd be great to throw in the pocket and run for your life while they. And that's the nice bobblehead aliens. [02:47:28] Speaker B: It can go in your pocket, right? [02:47:30] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. [02:47:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:47:32] Speaker A: That's the best bit indeed. Andy, we're just. We're just shy of three hours. I wanted to thank you for your time but I also wanted to finish. No, please don't be so awesome. This is Internet gold. This is why we do what we do. But putting aside genre, is there a photographer? Given that you've just had a camera life experience with us, is there a photographer you'd recommend for us to talk to? [02:48:00] Speaker B: Oh, that's a. That's a good question for you. Does it have to be Australian? [02:48:05] Speaker C: No, no, no, no. Anyone? [02:48:09] Speaker B: I reckon you could do worse than to talk to my old pal Mike Owen in. In the uk. Mike M I K E Owen. [02:48:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. [02:48:19] Speaker B: He was the. He was the chap who took me on under his wing all those years ago and I think he's still artist in residence at Cambridge College or something like that. From memory, I'm sure he would have a lot of fascinating stories about, you know, photographing super famous people from that era. That would be. [02:48:36] Speaker A: Yeah, all right. [02:48:37] Speaker B: That would be worthwhile. Having a chat. [02:48:40] Speaker A: Drop my UK artist in residence in Cambridge. [02:48:44] Speaker B: Yeah, There you go. [02:48:45] Speaker A: All right, we'll have a look. Thank you very much. [02:48:49] Speaker B: He is an absolutely lovely fellow. [02:48:51] Speaker C: Joan Collins like this website. [02:48:55] Speaker B: Crazy. I know Right. [02:48:58] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That'd be cool. Yeah, we'll have to. We'll see how we go. [02:49:04] Speaker A: Oh, dear. [02:49:05] Speaker B: I'm not sure who else you've had on board. I saw you mentioned Matt from the Alpine Gallery before, so I'm sure Matt and Mika would be worthwhile having a chat too, if you haven't spoken to them. [02:49:18] Speaker A: Oh, we have. We've already had. [02:49:20] Speaker C: Yeah, they're probably. [02:49:21] Speaker A: Matt's been on a few times, I think. [02:49:22] Speaker C: Yeah, Matt's been on a couple of times. He's been great. But yeah, there's. And yeah, Luke Shark, he's been on and lots of. Lots of people, but we're always just trying to find more. [02:49:31] Speaker B: All the cool kids. [02:49:32] Speaker C: All the cool kids. Yeah. Exactly. Now you're one of the cool kids. [02:49:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Welcome to the club. [02:49:37] Speaker C: Debbie. Lena Hassett has a question. Does Andy have a Facebook page or just an Instagram? [02:49:43] Speaker B: Yep. Andy's astro pics on Facebook. [02:49:47] Speaker A: Yep. [02:49:47] Speaker C: Andy's astro picks go and go and give it a follow and say, I'm on everywhere. Else. And yeah, the website's got tons of cool stuff on it. It looks like you can by wall art. There's mentoring. Do you ever do. Can. Does anyone do workshops for this kind of stuff, or is it too hard because the gear is so expensive and. And you wouldn't be able to sort of have more than one person using a bit of gear for the whole night? [02:50:14] Speaker B: Look, I ran workshops during lockdown because we had so many lockdowns. I was mentoring astrophotographers all around the world. You know, I had people in, like, Dubai and the United States and Island and all that kind of stuff that I was talking to. There was one guy in Dubai, had never even opened his box with a telescope in it, so we had to kind of walk him through all that. But I think with a lot of people get sort of courses and that kind of thing that you can buy online, but I think ultimately it comes down to joining that astronomical society of. In your area and hanging out. [02:50:53] Speaker A: Go to a star party. Tell them that Daddy Moon sent you. [02:50:57] Speaker B: Exactly, [02:51:00] Speaker A: yeah. Moon Daddy. [02:51:02] Speaker C: Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. No one's. No one's sort of running a getaway where you can spend three nights with, you know, telescopes and stuff like that. [02:51:14] Speaker B: I did read about a. I can't remember where it is now. There was a. A resort where you could rent a suite, but it also has an observatory and you can go and play with the telescope and all that kind of stuff. So I think just Google that and you'll probably find it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, These, these sort of things do do exist, but I'm not sure about the actual hands on training for all the reasons that Greg just alluded to earlier. It's a little bit challenging, but they do run boot camps, at least they used to for the Astronomical Society of Victoria, for members up at their dark side at Heathcote. And that was literally where they, you know, you'd have a classroom during the day, this is what you're going to do and then at night, you know, bring out your gear and put it together and, and this is how you run it sort of thing, I think. Not sure if they're still doing that, but it was pretty groundbreaking at the time. [02:52:11] Speaker C: Yeah, nice. [02:52:12] Speaker A: I think that's great advice. Andy, on behalf of us here at the Camera Life podcast, just want to sincerely thank you not only for the, you know, generous time that you've given us, but the phenomenal amount of information, insight and the fact that, you know, what, what you've, what you're doing presents us with so many questions about our place. And I think as photographers it's really fascinating as well that, you know, we photograph people or subjects here on Earth and that light took about eight minutes to get to us from the sun. Yeah, but you're capturing light that is so incredibly old. Some of those places will have definitely changed by the time you see that light. I think that's such a magical, phenomenal part of the craft that you've taken up that you are documenting the history of the universe as it's presented to you. And I think you should, you should be incredibly proud of all your achievements. It's, it's a phenomenal resume, it's a phenomenal list of achievements. And just having spent the last three hours chatting to you, I can see why you have been so successful in your headshot work as well. You have a natural ability to disarm people and bring out the best in them. And for your time today, we thank you very much. [02:53:22] Speaker B: Oh, that's very kind. Thank you for having me. Gentlemen, it's been a, been a pleasure having a chat. I hope I haven't, you know, bored anyone a bit. Thanks to all those people. [02:53:31] Speaker A: What are you doing next week? [02:53:33] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. There'll be calls, there'll be calls for a part two for sure. [02:53:36] Speaker A: Yeah, usually, yeah, yeah. But folks, like we said, you can find Andy's work if you hint at Andy's astro. It's that simple. Dot com, you'll have links to his Facebook, his Instagram There's a wealth of information on his website as well. And. And then obviously the Melbourne's. Sorry, just get this right. Headshots.com will take you to the Melbourne Headshot Company. And those two things, same poles apart, that well done you for mastering both [02:54:10] Speaker B: stars by day and stars by night, mate. [02:54:15] Speaker A: Daddy's got a phrase. [02:54:17] Speaker B: Yeah, all right. [02:54:18] Speaker C: We better roll the music on that one. Doesn't get much better than that. I'm going to read out some of these comments. Debbie Blenner has it says, awesome conversation. I just love Andy's photos. I'll have to get there and do some astro. Need more training. Phil Thompson says, thanks, guys for a great show. Listening to Andy has been fascinating and inspiring. See you Monday night. Matt Palmer says, Andy is a lot cooler than I am. David Leporati says, thanks for the chat, everyone. Missed most of it and we'll catch up later. Good to see you again, David, keen to show some images on Monday night from you again. Everyone's been missing them. Greg Stubbings. Love the chat blokes. Fantastic podcast. Andy, Greg and Justin. Philip Johnson says, fascinating chat. Thanks, Justin, Greg and special thanks to Andy. Bruce Moyle says, for all mankind is great. Need to watch the new one from Russia's point of view. And he says, thanks, guys. Even if I only saw the last 10 minutes. Thanks, everyone that dropped in. I saw Lisa Leach somewhere. Thanks. Roland was in the chat. Who else was in the chat? Brian, Max, everybody. Glenn was here for a bit. Dennis was here for a bit. Lucinda was here for a bit. Everyone, you're all awesome and we'll catch you guys on the next one, yeah? [02:55:32] Speaker A: Bye, everyone. [02:55:34] Speaker B: See you guys.