Steve Parish Shares the Lessons of a Lifetime Behind the Camera (EP200)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Class rolling down the mud. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Well, g', day, everybody, and welcome back to the Camera Life podcast. It is Thursday 16th July, 2026, and of course, being a Thursday morning, we are bringing you a live interview of an amazing, interesting and potentially legendary photographer. Today we are joined by photographer, author, artist, visual artist and holder of a oam, which is the Order of Australia Medal. We're joined by Steve Parish. G', day, Steve. How are you? [00:00:53] Speaker A: Wonderful to be with you. [00:00:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great to have you. [00:00:56] Speaker A: It's a very sunny day. It's a very. [00:00:57] Speaker C: Yeah, you're not going to get sunburnt there, are you? [00:01:02] Speaker A: The sun's just doing its thing. [00:01:06] Speaker C: That's right. [00:01:06] Speaker B: It gives you. It gives you a godlike aura, which is kind of fitting in many people's opinions, but. And of course, today we're joined by Justin. G', day, Justin. How are you, mate? [00:01:14] Speaker C: Good morning. It's great to be here. [00:01:17] Speaker B: It's good to have you. [00:01:19] Speaker C: Thank you. [00:01:19] Speaker B: Steve, thank you so much for joining us today. This is. We've been talking about this episode for quite some time because we feel it's a bit of a. It's one of those rare occasions where we get to speak to someone who, you know, we grew up with as a, you know, seeing images. Our kids, my kids grew up seeing your images. We bought a lot of your books as a family, but of course, you've done much more than just that. And we're going to deep dive into your story today. Typically, we'll ask a question up front whenever we have a new guest on every Thursday, but today I thought what we'd do is we'd read out an email that one of our followers, Felicity Johnson, sent into us with some information about an experience that she had doing one of your workshops. So let me just go to the email. Hi, Justin and Greg and Jim. Jim's not here, but, you know, he can take the win. I just want to thank you so wholeheartedly for getting my hero, Steve Parish on the weekly podcast. Ever since I was a kid, I had Steve Parish photos all over my walls and Dombroskis. Last year, I completed his photography masterclass, which was based on six modules, some 60 pages, others over 300. Students create a document which helps them define their creative life purpose. And we'll get to that in more detail in a minute. Mine was 43 pages. And he likes your document to be filled with your images. And as Steve says, it provides a doorway to deeper thinking. Using photography as your language. The classes allow your way of Seeing to settle, clarify and find its own voice. And I have attached my creative life purpose. Should we go into the modules, Justin, do you think? [00:03:01] Speaker C: Now let's read Felicity's Creative Life's purpose and then find out Steve, what he's. What his thoughts are. [00:03:07] Speaker B: Have you got that open there, that part of it? [00:03:10] Speaker A: I do, sorry. [00:03:11] Speaker C: Yep. You want me to read it out? To foster connections to nature by sharing unique images and in the process inspire people to be touched by nature. [00:03:24] Speaker A: Beautiful, beautiful. [00:03:25] Speaker B: Perfectly said, perfectly said. Speaking of nature, my dog is now growling. Sorry about that, folks. Felicity, thank you so much for sending in your email. It really helped to sort of get us into the right mindset to have this conversation with Steve. And you know, Steve, I wanted to get a bit more information from you in your own words. What is creative life purpose for you? [00:03:50] Speaker A: Well, for me, I actually crafted mine in 1984 while I was in the Kimberley and I'd left the Queensland Parks Service as a photographer and interpreter and I left them in 1981 and I'd signed a contract with Rigby Publishers in Adelaide to do a series of coffee table books. I don't know whether you remember the. The 80s was the era of the giant coffee table book. [00:04:24] Speaker B: Yes, it was. [00:04:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And there were two companies, Rigby and Lansdowne Press. And the photographer was Landown Lansdowne Press, Leo Meyer. He and I are extremely close friends that I'm going back, you know, 40, 40 plus years. We, we were on contract, both of us, to do ranges of coffee table books. And in those days they used to print 15,000 copies. You wouldn't be doing this today. There was no Internet. People were starting to buy four wheel drives and starting to travel. Yep. And I did the. I did the Great Divide From Cape York to the Grampians as one title. The publisher's brief was stop every hundred kilometers and take a picture. Oh, wow. It didn't sort of work out that way, but I had to do the geological research to find out exactly where the Great Potting Range ran. I would say 10 Australians would actually know. [00:05:50] Speaker B: Hang on. Sorry, Steve, I just need to stop you just. There. Your microphone's dropped out. I'm not sure why. Sorry, mate. Something really. Sorry. [00:05:56] Speaker A: Changed my microphone. [00:05:59] Speaker C: It's good again. Yeah. [00:06:00] Speaker B: It might have been the Internet. [00:06:02] Speaker C: Yeah. Something bizarre just happened. That's. Yeah. Felicity just said we've lost Steve. He's back. He's back. It's okay. I think we can see. [00:06:10] Speaker A: You can blame Elon Musk because I'm on Starlink yeah, there we go. [00:06:15] Speaker B: Always love a villain. [00:06:18] Speaker A: So anyway, I, I did a contract for eight books. I used to pay $12,000 to do the, the book. The sort of thing would never happen today. And so I, I kept getting this lovely check in the mail, you know. And anyway, when I got to Broom, I was doing Outback, a book called Outback, which was to interview Outback characters. And I got on the phone and they told me they'd gone bankrupt. This does lead to creative life purpose, by the way. They'd gone bankrupt and there wouldn't be any more money. And there I was stuck in Broome. And so I decided that while I was camping in, in the Kimberley that I would go become my own publisher. Because having worked with Rigby and been to their staff meetings, I felt that because they weren't actually connecting with their audience, they didn't know really who their audience was. They weren't embedding themselves with looking backwards to see, you know, they were publishing books because they thought people wanted coffee table books, that they weren't defining who those people were and what they really wanted. Right. So I, out of naivety, decided to start Steve Parish Publishing, which began in 1985. So there it was. And what I did is I penned my creative life purpose. I've never changed a word of it. I set up the business and when I interviewed sales reps, I used to say to them, this is the purpose of the company. This is not about me, this is about, and here it is to inspire others to connect to nature for their mental, physical, spiritual well being. So the key, the key to this is to inspire others. Okay? So my role, my passion, my life's purpose, the thing that gets me up every single day, driving, driving, driving. Too much computer time, I might add, not enough. I've got a walker that I walk past a lot. And so it becomes an anchor in your life. Okay, so if I'm going to go into a new venture, does even buying equipment or doing a trip or investing in something, does it actually fit my purpose? And I ran the company on that basis. And I used to say to the Reps, we had 19 sales reps at one stage. The company ran for 36 years. And all you've got to do is go out and show this product to the retailers. And you know what we found out pretty quickly is that Australians in particular, and there isn't, there isn't a replica to this, there isn't a replica to what we were doing anywhere in the world is because Australians, carers, mothers, Parents, kids really related to their own content. They related to their own landscape, they related to their own birds, their own animals. Yeah. And you know, that's what they wanted. They really wanted it. So it wasn't about lions and tigers and so on. And so, yeah, I set that up. So we, we start with defining creative life purpose. Then we look at nourishing it. And to nourish it is to, you know, through music, through writing, through digital art, through whatever, whatever it is that nourishes your creativity. Yeah. And then we look at roadblocks. Now the roadblock element of it, out of the whole of the master class, the, the trigger of defining purpose and the next important element is the 22 reasons why people give up. You know, I've got a whole, I've got a whole section on giving up. Right. So I'll just click on that and we'll have a look at. I call it Meeting resistance through awareness. And that's where we do things like. Creative comfort equals creative death. In other words, we as photographers often slip into our comfort zone and we don't, we don't ever take the risk of actually stepping out of it. So for instance, if we were to, if we were to look at, you know, you, my quote. And I'm, I'm into quotes. Unique creative expressions often evolve when we step outside of our create comfort zone. Yeah, and I use the Cansburg wing butterfly as a metaphor. I like to use nature as a metaphor for the challenges that we face in our lives, everyday lives. I'm talking about here. And I use the butterfly because it lives for seven or eight, nine days. Its goal in life is to reproduce. And then it's gone, which is not much, if you like, different to the human life. I mean, I'm 81, I've probably got 5, 7, 8, 9 to go. There was nothing about me before it started. And when I'm gone, there'll be a few books in ebay that people are still trading, I guess, but that's the beginning in the end. So that that period in your life cannot be wasted. It's such a precious, precious, precious thing to embrace. So looking at all those persons, you know, too many people, it costs too much, it's too technical. And what I refer to those in my teaching is as stories of the mind. They're mind stories, the poor little me stories. Overthinking can kill creativity, managing self doubt. All of these things that we all, we all experience, those things don't go away. They still linger. You know, you wake up two in the morning and you think, oh, you know, I'm getting old, I'm not as fit as I used to be. And so the stories start to grind away. Right. Those repetitives. But what I encourage people to do is to see the. See them as stories, those self doubt elements in your life, see them as stories and then you're able to switch them off. This is just another story. So for me, I carried childhood stories. I left school in primary school, had no formal education, so I carried this sort of self doubt about, you know, I'm not well educated, other people around me have got MSCs and PhDs. So you carry this sort of poor little me story into your life. Yeah. Although you know that that can work in your advantage because we were in Adelaide once and we launched a encyclopedia of wildlife and I was interviewed on a radio channel and having grown up in Adelaide, I was talking about Norwood High School and primary school and that, the sort of thing. Of course, back in the, back in the 50s, late 50s, early 60s, leaving school in primary school and going direct to employment wasn't as big an issue as it would be today. Right, yeah, yeah. So, so, so anyway, I was talking about the fact that I didn't go to school and I had a phone in, they had a phone in channel, much like you've got. And a woman, a woman phoned in and said, I wish you wouldn't talk about these things because my son now says he doesn't need to go to school because Steve Parish didn't. I love that. I mean, you know, I mean, it's true. Yeah, yeah. So amazing. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's seeing those shifting goalposts, you know, pessimism, finding your own unique voice, you know, do I need to be original? All of these things that we photographers face. So I use life metaphors, my own life experiences and of course I'm a culmination of the thousands of people I've met, employed, work with and remain open minded and be being prepared to change. That's the other thing. Yeah. Which applies to all of the genre that you have, your guests and you've got some wonderful guests. Big fan of Art Wolf's work. I've been watching Art Wolf decades. He's a bit of an iconic globe, isn't he? Rock star when it comes to capturing the essence of the globe. Really. Yeah, yeah. [00:15:25] Speaker B: Pretty phenomenal photographer. Jay, please. [00:15:29] Speaker C: Well, I was just going to say this is probably a great, this is a great moment to. So it was your Birthday yesterday, Steve, you said 81. [00:15:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, yeah, I was 40 yesterday. Yeah, that's right, 40. [00:15:39] Speaker B: Sorry, yeah. [00:15:41] Speaker C: That is amazing. [00:15:43] Speaker A: I made a bit of a deal about it. At 88 is a sort of a round number. And I noticed you had Dean Holland on and some time ago, Dean. Dean and I run a Introduction to Wildlife half day workshop which is coming up very soon. We've got three spots left and he's a master at the back end of the camera, which is something that I'm not a huge fan, you know, and he, he's able to all the makes and all the models. I mean, when I was teaching, teaching camera tech, specifically, it was Canon and Nikon and I was using both and it was pretty easy to navigate those cameras. But now we've got all the makes and models and brands and they're all wonderful. But somebody says, you know, I want to change this, I want to change this setting and your head goes into it. [00:16:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:16:40] Speaker A: He looked after the back end and I look after the aesthetics and the composition and the background, encouraging people. And we sort of work as a Bopsy twins, you know. Yeah, that's, that's worked well for almost 12 years now. We've been doing that together. [00:16:55] Speaker B: That's amazing. [00:16:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:57] Speaker B: And when we, when we caught up with Dean and we interviewed him on the Camera Life podcast, it was Dean who recommended we get in touch with you and thank you to Dean for helping us make that connection because we wouldn't be having this conversation today without him. But yeah, he's, he's, he's quite a masterful image maker in his own right. That's absolutely for sure a phenomenal body of work. [00:17:17] Speaker A: And he's really, really helped me with structure and teaching as a critic. I met him in an event and I said, you know, I've got a workshop, why don't you come? He turned up with a notebook and I said, you, you, I only want you to come to critique me. So he did the two days and there he was, madly writing in his little book. And it was a huge leg up for me in terms of. Teaching people the whole concept of lightness and darkness and sharpness and softness and breaking down that whole journey into the capture process, which does a lot of people's heads in when they're new to it and really simplifying that. And so the structure of module four, where it introduces tech is, is structured around, initially is, is, is advice. And I update those. They're actually keynote teaching and they're all full of links and the Wonderful thing about them is you can update them and reload them overnight. [00:18:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:29] Speaker A: Because you, you guys in the video game, if you, if you fluff it, particularly if it's live, it's there forever. [00:18:37] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, that's right. But hey, speaking of live though, this is, this is, this is episode 200. You're, you are on episode 200 of the camera Live podcast. Live every episode. [00:18:47] Speaker A: Wonderful, wonderful. [00:18:49] Speaker C: Which is pretty fun. And I wanted to quickly check in with the chat before we continue on with the interview to see who's here today for episode 200. Philip Johnson, as always, says, good morning, Justin, Greg and guru Steve Parish. [00:19:02] Speaker B: G', day, Philip. [00:19:03] Speaker C: He's listening from a Chili Katumba. Peter's here. Looking forward to the show. Steve was an inspiration to me. One of my all time favorite shots is his jabberoo and flying egret shot from 1977. [00:19:17] Speaker A: Goodness me. [00:19:18] Speaker C: Using K64, I'm guessing, question mark? [00:19:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Kodogram 64. Yes, that's right, that's right, that's right. Oh, yeah. Reciprocity failure, you know, I mean, most people wouldn't know what the recipe, you know, that, that horrible purple tint you get when you push it too far, you know. Yeah. And I mean the digit. When digital came in, in for me, Digital came in in 2003. I bought the D2X Nikon 12 megapixel, went on one field trip and came back and bought three, three more. I don't change lenses in the field. I, I had four D2X's thousands and thousands and thousands of images before it went to full frame. And I started going into deep, you know, deep. I don't even remember the names of them. D2 and all the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. What it did is that, you know, as a nature photographer, you were using codecraft and even a 200 ISA, you know, pushing it Ectochrome, you were wrapping up at an hour and a half before we shoot. As you know, with digital we can shoot right into dark. I mean, it's just fantastic. [00:20:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:20:45] Speaker A: And now with denoising, the denoising tools and the upscaling tools and the sharpening tools, I mean, it is just like dying and going to heaven for an old bloke like me. Particularly, particularly bringing back, because I've kept all, every photograph I've ever taken, apart from those I lost in the flood digitally. And you can bring back images that are extremely old, very unattractive, particularly the underwater ones that are full of sediment from kicking up the sand. But the content the animals themselves. I was going through these, some of these the other day with a colleague, looking at images from the. The late 50s into the early 60s, shooting at night in Jervis Bay on muddy sea floors, you know, sea pens and scallops and all sorts of crazy creatures that come out of the mud at night. But there's lots of sediment in the water. And now you can take that into Photoshop and you can put a. Put a circle around it and say, get rid of the sediment. That's it. Yeah, yeah. And there's the link. There's this fantastically clear photograph with very little effect to the resolution of the image at all. [00:22:02] Speaker C: Yeah, amazing. It's an amazing change, like the difference of what you were dealing with when you started to. What's possible now. It's pretty crazy. [00:22:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, the. The biggest challenge for me in my life today is not technology, it's computer time. [00:22:20] Speaker C: In. In what way? [00:22:22] Speaker A: Well, it's killing me. I mean, too much. [00:22:25] Speaker C: Too much. [00:22:26] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm compulsive, obsessive. I haven't made a good husband over the years. I've had four wives. I talk about this quite openly because. Because the reason I talk about it is that negotiating creative life for me and the people that I've had through workshops, their biggest challenge in life is negotiating with their partners. Because we creatives, whatever the genre is, you know, it's not just nature can be compulsive, obsessive and fanatical about our activities. And because we've got all that tech at home, we go into the field, we come home, hello, darling. Let's have a meal together. Pat the kids on the head and disappear into the. Disappear into the studio and turn on the computer and start playing with our goodies. Not good for relationships. So I've had four wives, and the one I've got now is extremely strict. We've been together for 26 years now. And I live in the studio, she lives in the cottage. We meet each other, we have breakfasts and we have coffees. And yesterday for my birthday, we went out and had cake and coffee, have a wonderful, wonderful, loving relationship. But she has her life, I have my. I'm talking about it. We have our creative lives, we have our own interests. And being able to negotiate, to have that blend is, I think, for we adult humans, one of the biggest personal life challenges there is. Would you agree? [00:24:11] Speaker B: Yeah, there's definitely a. There's an element of negotiation and compromise in any relationship. And I think finding the person that understands your creative needs, that it's not just a hobby or it's not. Even if it's for work, you know, it's still something that you feel compelled to do, to go out with a camera and. And document the world around us. I feel incredible. I feel incredibly lucky. I've got such a supportive partner who also has her own separate creative life in pottery and drawing and collage and things like that. And, yeah, it makes. It makes a huge difference to. To be able to negotiate that early on in the piece. And it's not. It's nothing to do with gender roles or anything like that. It's just about working how. Working out how you're going to live with the person who you love, you know, because there's so many elements to that. This, you know, it's really interesting. Steve, just before we go into the next section, I want to talk a little bit more about your publishing of book. But before we do that, Justin, do you want to finish the. The hellos to people? [00:25:18] Speaker C: I do. I want to say. I was like, I want to quickly say hello to everyone else and then also, what else do we need to do? Yeah. So Felicity Johnson is here as well. She's the one sent in that lovely email and says, Steve is my guru as well. Love doing your master class. And I have my creative life purpose up on the wall next to me. Always reading it to remind me why I love. [00:25:37] Speaker A: Incredible. [00:25:40] Speaker C: Paul says, good morning. This is going to be great. Rodney Nicholson says, morning, everyone. This will be fantastic. [00:25:46] Speaker A: Welcome. [00:25:46] Speaker C: What a career, David. [00:25:48] Speaker B: And that's coming from Rodney, who has 50 years of photography experience himself. [00:25:53] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, he's been shooting for a while. [00:25:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:56] Speaker C: David Mascara from San Francisco. Good to see you. Phil Thompson says, good morning, everyone. From Geelong, Bruce Moyles dropping in, in between jobs. Good job. Robert Varna. Good morning, Australia. Well, good morning, New Jersey. Who else? Peter says, bits of paper don't match life experience. Yeah, I agree. When you're talking about schooling. [00:26:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:26:20] Speaker C: Nathan's here, says, good morning. Really, really nice to look through Steve's books while listening in and goes on to say, photographing Australia is a book every photographer should have. I don't have that one, I don't think. [00:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah, you need to add that to your. To your library. [00:26:35] Speaker C: Yep. East coast photography. Good to see you. And finally, who else are we here? Michelle says, hi there. Michelle from Coffs Harbour, new to the podcast, but I'm also a masterclass alumni and longtime admirer of Steve's photography. Well, that's awesome. So if you're listening along live Jump in the live chat on YouTube if you would like to and you can even ask Steve a question. We'll bring it up if it's good. If it's no good, we won't bring it up. So jump in the live chat. Questions, comments, we'd love to hear from you, where you're from and if you've got any questions for Steve. I mean, if Steve's excited, we could even open up the phone line later in the show and take a live call if anyone's going. We'll see what he says. [00:27:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's lovely. [00:27:18] Speaker C: Yeah. And, oh, and the only other thing we should do before, before we go on the show is brought to you, remember everybody, by Lucky Straps, which is us. If you're interested in a beautiful Australian made leather camera strap, go to Luckystraps.com and have a look at what we do. We take a lot of pride in what we do and they're built to last a lifetime. They'll go from camera to camera because we all change cameras far too quickly these days. But you can keep your strap for your entire career. [00:27:44] Speaker A: I've just done that recently. [00:27:46] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:27:48] Speaker A: I went mirrorless. I went there a little. [00:27:50] Speaker C: Oh, oh, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. But yeah, so Luckystraps.com use code Greg if you want a discount or just don't. If you don't want a discount. Who would do that though? [00:27:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:00] Speaker C: And finally, episode 200 of the camera Life podcast. Subscribe if you are new and back to the interview. [00:28:07] Speaker B: Yeah, just before we do get onto the topic of gear, we might park that for in a minute. I want to talk a little bit more about, you know, your publishing business that you ran. Photographers who we often speak to, especially, you know, high profile photographers, people that are doing, you know, very big clients, very big gigs. They're always on the move. They often have a small team of supporters, like Art Wolf, for example. I think he said he had three in his team, two of, or three or four. Two of which had been with him for over 20 years each. That's quite phenomenal in itself. You know, the, the aspects of photography that we, that we manage as small business owners is one thing, but what you were managing with the publishing house was very much next level. I mean, I think at one point you had more than 125 staff at Steve Parish Publishing. 125. That's a phenomenal business in its own right, let alone the fact that you're out there taking photos every opportunity you can get to create the work that went into those books. And as I said earlier, we raised our children, my partner and I, when they were little on Steve Parish Animal Books, Wildlife, Birds, Australian Animals, because it gave us the best way to realistically show our children what each of these words associated with what animal and what, what the characteristics of each Australian animal was. When you started that publishing business, was the goal to become such a force in the industry, in the publishing industry? [00:29:38] Speaker A: Totally and utterly and absolutely naive. Naivety is something that I cover in the masterclass. Naivety is a blessing. The problem with today compared with my day is there's. There was nowhere. There was no one to put you down, there was no one to put you off, there was no one to whinge in your ear about, you know, you're taking a big risk, etc, etc. There was no social, there was nothing basically. But what there was, was no books, there were no nature books I grew up on. I was, I was interested in sharks and fish as a young spear fisherman. And the only book you could buy, and I still own it, is Kaylee's Australian Marine Fishes, you know, this big in black and white with little, little really corny little line drawings and Kaylee's what Bird Is that? Which is the very original field guide to birds. That was it. So I, it was a sheer coincidence I was actually doing freelance work. I'd done my trips around Australia. I come back and I started doing. Would you believe I was doing contract work for Australian zoos? [00:30:52] Speaker B: I could believe that, yeah. I could believe that. Steve. [00:30:55] Speaker A: No. Taronga Park Zoo wanted a souvenir book and posters. Western Plains Zoo. We did that. When I say we. I had a freelance writer and I had a freelance designer. The three of us both tended to do these books. We did Hillsville Sanctuary etc, etc. And I was getting to the end of that sort of. They were getting print runs of 50,000, 70,000. I mean if you did a souvenir book for a Taronga zoo today, they'd want print on demand or they'd want. Yeah, huge discount. And I remember that the, the, the Taronga Park Zoo that I didn't really want to do because I didn't really like the zoo. There were too many sort of the cagey effect, you know. Karumban Sanctuary was fabulous. Much, much more affinity with the, with the environment and concrete cages and rusty bars weren't really my thing. And I remember when the tender came in. I actually hope there's no one listening. It was a long time ago. I Doubled the quote because I didn't want it. Right, Yeah, I doubled the quote. And. And then in those days, it was facts. I sent the fax off the quote and with an hour and a half later they accepted it. So it was extremely profitable. But anyway, I come to the end of all of that and I got a phone call from. From an accountant, an earlier accountant that I'd used, and said, look, I've got a client who's I've been talking to that would like to talk to you about investing in the development of a range of souvenir products. That's how it was tended initially. Anyway, to cut a long story short, 1987, 15th of July, right at this very. On this very day, I met him on my birthday. His name was Cloud Benfield. He was a mega millionaire. He was 38 years old. This is a sort of a. A dream story. Anyway, cut a long story short. A month later we shook hands and he lent me $500,000 to launch Steve Parish Publishing. Wow. And interest free, payable as we could afford on a handshake. Wow, A handshake. This is a true story. Handshake, Yeah. I had nothing to lose, so we started. We launched our first range of Products in 1980. In 1987. January, July, August, about September, which were cards, just cards. And I knew nothing. I printed them on the wrong paper. They weren't. They. The. The paper I printed it on was art paper. And when you put the card in a stand, if it was a rainy day, the card would crumble over. [00:34:05] Speaker C: Oh, no. [00:34:07] Speaker A: Making huge mistakes. But anyway, 1987, October, International Global stock market crash. Cloud Benfield lost everything. Oh, wow. So I'd lost my partner and we just started. We sat in a coffee shop, we did a deal. He asked for payback. He'd spent about 300 grand setting the whole thing up. I agreed on a handshake, would you believe, to repay that money within 12 months. [00:34:42] Speaker C: All of it. The three. The 300, 000 that had been spent in 12 months. [00:34:47] Speaker A: In 12 months. [00:34:48] Speaker C: Wow. [00:34:49] Speaker A: Anyway, this is 1987. It's now 1988. What is it? World Expo. World Expo, right. In Brisbane. [00:34:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:34:58] Speaker A: No cards, no books, no posters. There wasn't a single solitary Australiana product available anywhere in Australia. So we had this range. I've still got photographs of that stand. And we were restocking 5 mini shops every 24 hours with product. So the company took off and I had above the stand a banner that said post Australia to a friend. Right. And Australia Post saw It and, and at the end of 1988, I got a phone call from Australia Post. His name was Bob Finch. And he made an appointment to come and see us. And he sat down, he said, we're about to launch retail in Australia Post now. Everybody's seen retail in Australia Post today. And he said, we want you to be the sole supplier for paper products. So just pausing for a minute. Creative life purpose was defined to inspire others to connect to nature. Right? [00:36:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:36:09] Speaker A: These opportunities come along. So that's what I call a pivotal moment in your life. So I'm just going to pause here for a minute. When you know where you want to go, it's like having a mini business plan. What do I want to do? I want to inspire people. Just like Felicity shared, she's got her goal and so I, I obviously we agreed and that went on to have 300 and I think there were 3,000 retail outlets when we finished with them at the end. Retail accounts right across Australia. So the product went out into those stores. We started doing things like children's books. We started publishing children's books in 19. In 1993, we did our first range of children's books which were Connect a Child to Nature, Big Blue, Stand Full of Books. I'm going to quote these numbers because they're unbelievable. 1.3 million in the first month we turned over. It went out into every post office, every news agency. The bottom line is for people to that, that want to do things that are exciting and new is to be able to step outside their own passion and their own friends that are saying what a great idea and look backwards. Is there a market? Is there a demand? Who's gonna, who's gonna warehouse the product? Who's gonna do the debt collecting? You know, all of the elements that of the venture. And we. What was fortunate for us is that because the company grew so quickly, we were able to employ people. [00:37:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:37:52] Speaker A: And within 12 months I was doing six month trips, three month trips and I had absolutely stunning staff of people, some of them. I mean I had 26 years. The company went for 36. And in2020, 2011, we had the floods in, In Brisbane. Yeah. The warehouse was flooded. And a shout out to all your listeners. Check your flood policy and make sure that the clause in there that says flood has also. Or add to that flood and inundation. [00:38:37] Speaker C: Because. Because they're two different things, aren't they? They're 100 things. Inundation is, is right. Rising water level. Yeah. [00:38:47] Speaker A: It rained somewhere else. Yes. And it flooded down the river. So in Brisbane it rained in the Great Dividing Range of Toowoomba, flooded down the dam. They pulled the dam up right and, and let the water out of the, the dam in Brisbane. It came down, came up the creek, came into the warehouse and caused massive disruption shall we say. I lost a third of the photographic library. I lost my entire collection books and we lost. The claim was in the over a million dollars worth of stock that was sitting on the. We had a 3,000 square meter warehouse. We were servicing 3,3300 retailers with 19 sales reps across Australia. We tried so hard to find someone else to distribute and handle the books which is what other publishers are doing. But when you're servicing camo wheel, Kakadu national park all over Australia there was no choice but to have your own salesforce. Yeah. So it just rolled on. It rolled on. It rolled on and rolled on and it was absolutely remarkable because I treated the cash flow as belonging to the company. I was extremely strict with overspending or any private spending. The only thing I ever bought for myself that was a luxury was a Range Rover. I did one trip, came back and traded back in for a Toyota Land Cruiser. [00:40:22] Speaker C: That's gold. Did you have trouble with it? Was that wise? [00:40:27] Speaker A: Well it cost an arm and a leg if you put a bull bar on it. That wasn't Range Rovers, you couldn't claim a thing. Yeah, it was absolutely, I mean it had 26 speaker surround sound and, and I bought it because the accountant said look, you know, you need to spend some of your cash flow. We were doing 15 million a year. Gosh, 15 million gross a year. And as you said I had was 127 people at one stage. The mid right through the 90s was, was massive. By 2007 I think we had 72. But we had designers, writers, post production people, had two people full time in the photo library and I had two people working at home writing books full time and I worked at home. My, my partner Kate was actually managing the business itself. And then it got flooded and we dog paddled for 12 months. We had a. Some retailer chains in 2011 went broke. The Reds group, you know the book chains, they owed us a fortune. And so in January 2012 I was forced into bankruptcy. So by signing one piece of paper. I can talk about this now because it's not, it's no longer painful. I signed one piece of paper and I lost 7 million in personal wealth. I lost $2 million house, an entire publishing company. Every photograph I ever took Cars, cameras. We were left with $3,000 and an old TV and, and, and a big hard drive full of digital photographs which are uninsurable digital files. I don't know what the law is today. Digital files don't exist. They're in the ether. So when the bankruptcy people come along, digital files. So there they were floating in the ether still. So I went into, you can imagine, I actually have a shot, I have a photo of myself, I should put it on Facebook, of the look on my face about eight weeks after loss. Looking very sorry for myself. I went into manic depression. Talk about a shock. And the reason was that the insurance company said you weren't flooded, you were inundated. Okay. [00:43:14] Speaker B: Because of a word. [00:43:16] Speaker A: Because of a word. If you Google all this, it's all over the Internet. And what was the premiers of Australia's name? Julia Gillard. She came out and got really hostile about this clause. It's now been fought in court. And one, of course the receivers would get the, the winnings, not me. You know, that, that, that one clause. So. But it's worth checking your policy. Okay. [00:43:44] Speaker B: Yeah, very good cautionary tale. [00:43:47] Speaker A: Yeah. And, and we couldn't. But I'm telling the story because I latched on to the teaching of Eckhart Tolle. And I remember reading Facing Adversity. There's a CD called Facing Adversity. If anyone's facing adversity out there, and we all are, and I guarantee we all will at some stage in our lives, yeah, Google, Google that. It's still out there. And he said in that interview, in these talk, you can lose something you, you are, you can lose something you have, but you can't lose something you are. Yeah, just think about that. So who you are as a person, your spirit, your soul, your drive, your inner workings cannot be ever taken away from you. So I started, you know, two or three months out, started to heal. The company was by the way, put in it in the paper for sale. One publishing company, Steve Barish and I had 14 people bidded for the company. And the company that bought us was a company called Pascal Press in Sydney. And they have the company called Reading Eggs, which teaches kids how to read. They were roughly a 70 million dollar company at the time. So they came along and it took six months to, for all of that to happen. I went with it. So I was very, very fortunate that they picked up the product ranges, all of the files, books, and I continued on with them. And the library, you know, the library eventually came back to, through all Sorts of complicated channels. And I worked with them up until Covid knocked us off in 2021. Yeah, that was Covid. And so all of those files have come back to me. But we're talking history. Right. So what happened and where this comes back to the creative life purpose and that drive. I had my purpose and I still had me and I still had the digital files. And I thought, well, I've got two choices. I can go into a lifetime of poor little me, which is really easy to do. Really. It's particularly handing over the keys to, you know, your house and everything you own. Yeah, kind of, kind of a, kind of a shock. I went out and I started recovering myself and I started doing public talks, library talks about recovery, recovery from loss. And Australian Institute of Professional Photographers, director in Queensland at the time, had heard about this and seen it. And I remember going down to Newcastle to their conference and giving a talk on recovery from loss. And I was going through this and out of that came the masterclass. Yeah, that's how that whole journey I started documenting, you know, recovery from lost. So, you know, but I've got. Got it open on my screen. Inner dialogue can weave stories that quietly barricade the one realm that should remain untamed. Cure creativity. Okay, we cannot afford to lose our creativity. So I gave a talk anyway. In the audience was one of the key players from Griffith University. And Griffith University was undergoing terrible problems with anxiety, depression, which is a plague across the globe, with students, with teachers. And they said, would you be prepared to come and give a talk to the principals? So I went and gave my creative, like, very rudimentary mini masterclass on recovery, the journey of recovery, things I was learning, learning about myself. And they said, would you like to develop something that we could sell online? So that's how it happened. I started putting this thing together and it started working. And in 20, 2019, heading into Covid, they pulled the pin. So I decided to do it myself. Yeah, I put it up online and I do weekend workshops, talks about this journey, which is focused on others, not focused on me. It's focused on finding purpose, defining it and using it to kick down the door on the roadblocks. Because roadblocks are things that people don't talk about openly. Right, that's very true. We all have them and, and, and, and dealing with self doubt, dealing with distraction, managing, managing our own expectations, facing adversity, finding your voice. And of course I use animals as metaphors. I'm actually building this at the moment into a, a journey for for children. And I'm absolutely adoring the process because it's about becoming a young naturalist and looking at my own life where I was introduced to natural history and the concept of marrying science and photography or natural history and photography together as one. As a very young boy. Sixteen I was introduced. Introduced to it and that was number one pivotal. The pivotal moment in my entire life was when I was introduced to via the South Australian Museum at The age of 16 I did. Was invited to do a trip collecting fish for their fish collection. Put fish in bottles of formula. It's very bad. Quite barbaric. For the taxonomic department of the fish. The fish department of the South Australian Museum. Yep. And the reason I went to the museum is that I was spearfishing in at that time in South Australia and what these big sharks with black eyes were coming and pinching my fish. I didn't know they were white pointer and I didn't know that white pointers actually ate people at the time. They hadn't started eating people two years later. The first Rodney Fox was the first victim to a white pointer in South Australia. And so that I became very interested in these great big. Great big sharky things that came along and pinched my fish and I went to the. I lived very close to the museum and I started asking questions about that so that the pivotal. The journey is beginning. You see. You go on this journey. They invited me on the trip. I met a fellow called Ego Oak who's the pioneer underwater photographer of South Australia. Quite famous now for it. And he handed me a camera and I took my first picture of a silver fish and thought nothing of it. I was more interested in collecting fish for the museum and been seen as a hero and spearing fish for the table. That was. I was. I was the hunter. I was actually an apprentice gunsmith. My first job of all things. [00:51:31] Speaker C: Wow. [00:51:32] Speaker A: Yeah. I started my life as an apprentice gunsman. Only lasted 18 months. We won't go into that. Everybody had guns. Was gun shops on every corner in Adelaide. I'm talking the 50s here. [00:51:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:51:44] Speaker C: It was a normal, normal career, normal job. [00:51:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I worked in a gun called Sportco in Adelaide. It was full of ex Nazi stormtroopers. The gunsmiths. And we weren't getting on Will. Half the factory was Nazis. Ex Nazi. When I say Nazis they were German soldiers. I'll be kind to them. And in the tool and cutter department they were Polish Jews would you believe so. Well, long after the war my father had been in scene in Europe. He'd Been to these camps. So I was brought up on all of that stuff. And one day there was a scuffle and I bonked one over the head and I got, I actually got sacked for bonking him on the head and went off and joined the Navy. So anyway, that, that, that, that was, that was the journey. Now I've gotten lost. Where was I? I was heading. Heading. Yeah, back to the museum. So being introduced. Introduced to that. And then we all got together again. And I remember Ego put my first picture up on the screen and they applauded it. And I was a young kid with no self esteem. You know, I actually, my mother was a Pentecostal preacher, so I don't need to say a lot more. Grew up in this very right wing. Yeah. Judgmental house and wasn't a happy lad. And so that, that was, that was the opportunity. And I came east, just joined the Navy as a young trainee diver. And while I was in Sydney, I joined a group called Underwater Research Group and they were researching and collecting and photographing for the Australian Museum. And I was introduced to a fellow by the name of John Paxton. He was the curator of fish. He's quite famous. Anyone that knows the Australian Museum, he was the curator of fishes for the Australian Museum for 46 years. Wow. And he had done his PhD on the luminescent bacteria on the lower lip of Clodopus gloria maris. This is a deep water fish that has light organs. And he did his PhD on the bacteria, not the fish. [00:54:01] Speaker B: Wow. The fish was just the vessel. [00:54:05] Speaker A: The fish were the. Was the vessel. It's a true story. It's, it's absolutely. And I found three of them in Sydney Harbour, which they weren't supposed to be because they're supposed to be deep water. And I collected them and took them to the museum. That was the second pivotal moment because when I gave him those fish, I became an instant friend for life. He could study those fish in an aquarium alive. And he introduced me to, would you believe fish, Ichthyological taxonomy. So the taxonomy classification of marine fishes. I was fanatical about photographing marine fish, nothing else. And if you weren't into fish, even if I was married to you, I wasn't into you. Fish, Fish, fish, fish. And they drafted me to Jervis Bay and I started Fishes of Jervis Bay and working with a museum. And that brought me to the concept of science purpose, science, creativity. Add human emotion to that and you've got connection. So that, that, that triangle, if you will, is what has become the basis of my entire Career. Okay. Nothing more, nothing less. Yeah. So when you, when you, when you, when you connect those to get, when you connect that together. I'm just going to scroll down and have a conversation about that because that's the pivotal. In other words, where are you getting your source from? Wherever you get your source from, if it's factual information and you add that to your own creative life, your own creative journey. Here it is. Science plus emotion plus authenticity equals connection. So what I mean by science is factual information, whatever that topic happens to be. It doesn't have to be natural history, it can be the galaxies, it can be botany, it can be whatever the topic is. In other words, you're using factual source material, whether it's geology, ecology, sociology, zoology, botany, you know, all of the sciences. And you add the creative mediums, multimedia, photography, creative writing, animation, typography, design, music, spoken word, all of those what I call creative mediums, and then you add that to the project outcomes. In other words, what am I going to do with my creative life? I need, I need fuel for my creative life, otherwise it dies. So many photographers that I meet that do the courses and they do them because they start off by saying, I'm a reasonably good photographer, I'm very confident with my cameras, but I'm starting to lose interest, you know, And I said, well, what you need is a defined permit. It could be a very simple purpose. And then you can, you can, you can embody that in. Into some projects, whether they're creating ebooks, what you guys are doing, camera life, podcast, you know, there's your project. Your authenticity is to reveal who you are, you know, kill the ego, be yourself, you know. Yeah. Etc. Etc. And then you look at fine art, decor, bloody multimedia, public talks, blogs, books, displays, games, educational products. So now in my 81st year that I've just rolled into, I'm devoting the rest of my life to developing educational products that can be used by others. I won't be around, right? And so I'm working, I'm working with a whole range of people in developing, that encourage young children to see, connect and express. That's really what it is, the same stuff. So science plus emotion plus authenticity equals connection. And for me, it's equaled roughly $600 million in my career. Yeah, Gross turnover. I ain't got a lot left. But that's about the gross. That's about the gross turnover out of. Science plus emotion plus authenticity equals connection. Yeah. In every, in every facet. So doing the master class was for me, the healing Process. So when you, when you run into that. Oh, getting emotional, when you run into that challenge in your life and if your listeners haven't run into it yet, they will. There'll be health, there'll be a major accident, there'll be the loss of a loved one. You know, I've crashed in helicopters, been swept out to sea. A dear friend of mine, he might be watching us, actually went to sleep behind the wheel and we left the road at 140km an hour, 100 ride off, and I walked away without a scratch with a back seat full of cameras and drones. Your life can end, your life situation can change in a flash. Yeah. So my, my teaching is. Don't waste a bloody minute of it. Right. [00:59:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's go. I'm sorry. [00:59:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So bringing your vision and your expression together and creating a working formula that works for you. Yep. And I used to go to my, my partner, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? Oh, God, you don't need my opinion. You already know. So in my teaching, I, my mantra is be your own art director. Be your own art director. In other words, you know, you guys, and I'm sure you did. John, Greg, Justin, Greg, you know, we're going to do a podcast. You know, you probably knew nothing about podcasts, but you had a passion for doing what you wanted to do and so you just go and do it and you work and you build it and you build it and you build it and you build, you build and you connect with people and you bring people there together. It's a, it's a platform. And of course podcasting now globally is I go to bed every night and watch them. I mean, phenomenal amount of information. And you know, the nice thing about going to bed with those is you can turn the visual off because you, you've been looking at a screen all day. [01:00:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:00:43] Speaker A: You can wash your brain with positivity and learning and, and at the moment, I'm sort of besotted with natural history documentaries. There's so much phenomenal stuff out there. [01:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:00:55] Speaker A: And of course, the tools, the tools that people have got now with their drones that they can zoom and, you know, hidden cameras, some of the, some of the natural history filming filmmaking, all pioneered by our darling 100 year old David Attenborough way back. Some of the stuff that's coming out young film, it's just absolutely stunning stuff. [01:01:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:20] Speaker A: So, [01:01:23] Speaker B: no, sorry, I just wanted to jump in, you know, listening to you talk about, you know, not only your life but your career and how you've achieved that winning formula that has proven to be successful for you. What were your inspirations growing up that, that do you think connects to that mindset of searching for a purpose in life and using your art to dictate what that is? Who are the people that influenced you in that? [01:01:53] Speaker A: Well, I have to, I have to say that my principal influence was my mother's. Oh, I only forgave my mother. I disconnected from my mother at about the age of 9, 9 or 10. My mother was a radical right wing Christian zealot. And I thought of, I thought of her very negatively until I woke up, which was about 2010. And I, I, I was heading towards 2011 floods. I was going through a bit of a personal crisis and I started listening to Echo Polo and I started listening to this whole concept of the, the poor little me and et cetera, et cetera. So I carried this sense from childhood that my mother didn't really love me. Right. That she wanted me to become a replica of her. So I was raised. You won't find happiness outside of my philosophy. I don't want to divide the room because I have great respect for people that have religious. I'm not talking about religious faith, I'm talking about dogma here. [01:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:03:10] Speaker A: And so she raised me as a boy, a little boy, to believe that I wouldn't feel, I wouldn't be happy, I wouldn't find purpose unless I followed a protocol. And her protocol, we're seeing it in the United States at the moment. [01:03:26] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:03:27] Speaker A: Turning into a massive division. And that's what it's about. It's about the same thing. And so, so I divorced myself from her and then carried that wound that became the poor little me wound. So for me, when I started to see science, plus my creativity and my authenticity and my desire to express could be turned into a purpose. Forget the money. That was just a business, that, that was just accident. Entirely accidental. [01:04:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:04:03] Speaker A: A reason to wake up in the morning and get out of bed and feel you're rushing to another day that you feel absolutely excited about. And I get up that way every single day. Every single day. You know, I've had a triple bypass six years ago. I've had two strokes since. Maybe not a long time to go, but I'm absolutely blatantly positive and driven to work on this particular project that I'm working on. So you get into a project and, you know, I'm, I'm just, and I'm using all the AI tools and I'm using all sorts of ways of negating the fact I can't afford to hire editors and writers and all these people anymore because, you know, the payroll isn't there, but I'm using the tools that are available to us. And, and so, you know, this sort of swings around to people that are feeling, feeling challenged, daunted, fearful, frustrated, indeed, shall I say angry. I had a colleague recently visit me. In fact, he only left yesterday, spent a few days with me, Peter Rowland, who's a nature photographer, author, publisher, who'd just been speaking at a conference for writers in Sydney, in Brisbane. And they are paranoid about AI. Absolutely paranoid. If you use AI to create your book jacket, they won't touch a book. I mean, really. So, you know, overcoming these fears, these challenges, rather than saying, okay, these are the tools. Let, let, let other others worry about theft of images, etc. Etc. I mean, what are you going to do? I mean, my philosophy is they want to steal my images. I shouldn't be saying this on a podcast. I put them on, I put them on the Internet for people to use, to share. So sharing is freely, you know, if somebody clicks on my thing and puts it on their website because that triggered an emotion in them by looking at that image, which is what I do with my Art of Seeing workshops that I run. It's connecting the whole emotional journey that pre captured nothing to do with technology whatsoever. That emotional connection, bringing your story into your visual journey so that when you see the shadow of a leaf against the tree trunk, you see, you see its purpose, its connection to you and your story, and you capture that in a way that artistically expresses your particular journey. So it becomes personal, becomes uniquely you. I'm talking about a shadow on a tree. Could be a flying bird, could be something else. So it is uniquely your journey. So I, I, I, I. My mantra is, there's only one of you. You know, this is, this is Justin and Greg's podcast. It's your stamp, the questions you ask, it's the people that you invite into your community. It's, yeah, it's your vetting journey. So when I do social, people say, oh, bloody met her. And all this sort of. To me, social, I mean, I've been a bit lazy the last few weeks. I've been besotted with my little project with the kids. But I find, I find social an absolute joy. Joy, yeah. I've been on it since the damn thing got invented and I love the exchanges. I've not had a single on somebody stole the channel once and that, that got fixed. But I have that simple solitary. You know, I think people make smart comments. I see you've just discovered your saturation slider. [01:08:03] Speaker C: Oh, that's great. Oh, geez. The snarky photography comments. [01:08:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get a bit of that [01:08:12] Speaker B: and [01:08:12] Speaker A: I might come back and that is so Greg, Peter, whoever it was. Absolutely. And don't you just love it? I just love. I mean, rather than getting bent and angry and hostile and so the, the it's all to do, it's all to do with the aura. So when people want to friend me, I check them out. If they're into rage and anger and, you know, sharing the views of a negative element that is raging through the world at the moment, then I might, maybe that's not the person I need to connect with. [01:08:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:08:48] Speaker A: And I've done that with every friend I've ever connected. I check them out. All right. Yeah. And so my news feed, you know, some people have been doing the trumpy thing because they're angry about what's happening somewhere, but don't, don't allow yourself to buy into it. So social media is to me is a, it's a phenomenal opportunity. I mean, when you think we used to put brochures in sick bags in the back of airplanes to announce our products. I mean, you mentioned the book Photographing Australia that was published by a marketing company on the Gold Coast. They paid for the print run and that was the, that was the, that was actually the book that Rigby went broke on. That was the. Where I was interviewing characters. Gold miners, school teachers, railway settlers, all these characters right across the year of the blissful year, tracking down these absolute crazy Australian characters. And so I put that in. Anyway, that's how we used to window displays. Now you can click a little button that says there's an event running and I can say, I want women, I want on this age group and I'm going to target them from the Gold coast to so and so. I mean, really, I mean, people who were born into this don't realize or appreciate the opportunities for creatives today are absolutely phenomenal. But what you've got to do is really choose counsel carefully. Don't allow, don't give permission for people to bring negativity into your life. If you've got colleagues and friends that are constantly talking down, their language is down. It's down on everything. Down on the world, down on petrol, everything, everything. Everything they're saying they're very being is on the negative side of the scale. Delete Delete, crop it. I use the term crop it out because it's photography, you know. [01:10:56] Speaker B: Yeah. I like, I like cut the dead wood. [01:10:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [01:11:02] Speaker C: It's interesting you say that. I, I don't know when it was. I can remember it though. I made a conscious shift because I, I, I used to find myself and it was usually with trying to be, trying to be a bit comedic, but I used to find myself always being negative about things. Yes, always. But, but it was sort of, I don't know whether I thought I was a character on some crappy sitcom or something like that. But the, but the always negative, always talk, you know, making jokes down about stuff. And then one day I was like the most, the people that I most enjoy spending time with are the always positive people. They were always magnetic to be around and I was like, how do people be like that? And then I just sort of, one day I was just like I'll just try and be, be more positive. And it eventually I think worked and [01:11:52] Speaker A: it's, I can feel that way. I can feel it through the screen. [01:11:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And you're one of the most positive people I know, Justin. [01:12:01] Speaker C: That's good to hear. [01:12:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:12:02] Speaker B: And that itself is inspirational. That's why I keep coming back every week, otherwise I wouldn't be here. [01:12:07] Speaker C: That's a good point. [01:12:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:12:09] Speaker B: I'll pay me peanuts. I'm only doing it for you. [01:12:13] Speaker A: And let's face it, you, you go, you go to your YouTube and this one I'm on, I'm on Vimeo with my, all of my video videos are locked into the, that my travel, travel guide around Australia is another one. I converted my, all of my journeys into a, into a, you know, state by state circumnavigating to all the, all the, the bitumen and the sealed dirt roads. I don't take four wheel drive across country to all of the places and then there's a, there's long, long videos where I open the maps and we wander around transferring all what we had in paper product. We used to have all that in books and maps and all sorts of different paper products. But to convert that. When I had the triple bipartisan, I was Quite sick for 18 months and recovering and so on. So I started with the laptop building the Around Australia travel guide, you know that, that shares that philosophy and we've got a wonderful country, absolutely stunning country that you know, whether your interests not. And I cover street photography, candid photography, landscape photography, urban photography was a huge part of my career. You know, where, where's the Best. I mean Melbourne for instance, is one of the best street photography cities in the world. It's stunning, stunning, stunning. The multiculturalism of Australia. I'm sorry, Pauline, I'm, I'm into it. I mean, St. Kilda Pier. I, I learned very early while traveling that if I weren't going to publish destination products, you know, souvenir books and travel guides and all this sort of stuff, I had to talk to people and I. All of my travels, I want to look out way, you know, for instance, if I'm at the lookout at the Three Sisters, I'll be chatting to the people, you know, getting to know them, why you, where you're from, all of this sort of, you know, it's sort of, you call it research. But I loved all that stuff, all that wonder, wonderful, wonderful stuff that you can do. And, and Australia is very rich for that. I mean it is. And, and getting to know the geology, the botany and how it's all connected together, the natural history, that's one of the reasons I haven't traveled, I haven't been done. The Art Wolf thing, I mean it's amazing how many countries he's sort of, you know, conquered. When I say conquered, you know, I don't mean that. And also the social photography, absolutely fantastic. But apart from Brazil and my travels in the Navy and a brief trip to New Zealand, I'm just so besotted with Australian ecosystems. I mean, incredible. So I'm working on a chapter at the moment where I'm pulling apart each of the ecosystems, beaches, mangroves, coasts, deserts and trying to interpret them for. Interpret them in an ebook similar to the master class in an ebook for kids so that they'll get passionate about mangroves, passionate about wallam, you know, passionate about heathlands, passion. Passionate about all the different kinds of deserts and the crazy creatures that live there and then want to express it through the tools. We've got to go, you know, digital art, photography, you know, music, you know, and, and you know, I wish, I Wish I was 9 to 16 again. [01:15:55] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. [01:15:58] Speaker A: And I'll tell you what, some of those kids, I just had a 16 year old grandson here just left and I took him down, fellas, I took him down to do with an, with a, a Canon R5 Mark II pre capture 200 to 800 on a tripod. And I wanted to see the 16 year old kid who had never looked through a telephoto lens in his life, right? Because I'm doing a book for photo on photography for 9 to 16 year olds at the Moment and loving it. Yeah. Trying to break it down. Could kids. And so I went. I went to chat GDP and Gemini and said, you know, do kids master this stuff? You know, you can read that and say, okay, fine, it. It says they do. I'll take one with me and see. See if it actually, actually happened. So he's in there, he's back button, focus locked onto an egret, zoomed in and out, changed the composition. Clickety, clickety click, you know, hits the motor drive. I had to slow the motor drive down so he didn't fill the card up. Yeah. And we did that for about 45, 50 minutes. You know, we did all the birds in the pond. I've got a pond down here at B. Well, library that's got every bird but the kitchen sink in it. And I learned how to use mirrorless back button, you know, after watching Jan Wagner, a video. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great teacher. He and a few others around the globe. And because an old bloke like me, I mean, having. Having eye tracking. I mean, really. And pre capture. I mean, really. I mean, I was getting really good flying birds before, but oh, my God. You know, and. And anyway, he. He nailed it. And we did that for 45, 50 minutes. And then he wanted to go rollerblading. He'd done that. [01:17:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:17:50] Speaker C: All right. [01:17:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Something else. Yeah. And he gets seven books out of the library and he's read him in three. I mean, just kids today. Mind blowing. Yeah, mind blowing. Yeah. [01:18:03] Speaker B: They're savvier than I felt at that age, that's for sure. [01:18:05] Speaker A: And. And positive and joyful and happy and. But he lives in Vanuatu on an island with his mother on the beach. [01:18:12] Speaker B: I'd be happy too. [01:18:13] Speaker A: So, yeah, you know, over here, my partner's his grandma. I mean, you know, it's. He's surrounded by love and homeschooling. So he's not growing up in the. In the school system that I grew up in was teasing, bullying. You know, I had cross eyes, I had wide glasses, I had bands on my teeth, curly hair, and a preacher for a mother. So the kids. The kids at Rose Park Primary School, you know, gave me hell, you know. [01:18:43] Speaker C: So anyway, I'll read out a couple of quick comments and then maybe we'll dig into a little bit more about. [01:18:51] Speaker A: Oh, John Allen. There's a comment. Look. [01:18:53] Speaker C: Yeah, so John Allen has written in here. This was this. Hopefully he's still listening because this was about maybe about half an hour ago he wrote this comment. He says, nice to see you, Steve. My printing Company Prestige Litho printed the first of Steve's posters. Great memories. [01:19:08] Speaker A: They did. [01:19:09] Speaker B: Amazing. [01:19:10] Speaker A: Johnny Allen, my God. Yeah. [01:19:15] Speaker C: You know, the longer would that. When would that have been? [01:19:18] Speaker A: That would have been in the 80s. My first book was printed in 73 on a one color printing press in Melbourne. And would you believe the owner of the printing press and the publishing company which was a skin Diving in Australia magazine, was as blind at birth. Until I met him I didn't know he was blind. This is true. I mean you can hardly believe it. [01:19:49] Speaker B: That's really. [01:19:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Ian McNeil his name was and I, Barry Andrew Arthur was the editor of the magazine. They were the first people to ever publish my photography. They were Diving Stories from Jervis Bay. That was my first attempt. I was using Hasselblads and underwater housings in those days, would you believe? Wow. Yeah. Film, film, film, you know. Yeah, yeah. You know, 50 mil discodon lens, a wide angle and a macro on an 80. And I was shooting these animals and I used to go. We used to have an underwater symposium called Ocean Symposium and all the photographers, photographers from around the world, the art wolves of underwater photography in America used to come across. There's a big, big deal. And they, they were, you know, light years ahead of us. And anyway, he published that book and I came down to watch it get printed and seeing a blank piece of paper go into a printing press. Black, blue, yellow, red, four different times, it had to be one color at a time. And I stood in front of, I could smell the ink, I could hear the printing press. And it was like, it's like I guess going online for the first time and mounting your images and your brand new Facebook page or profile, whatever it is, and people start comment and it's the first time you've ever exposed your creativity and you're getting an emotional reaction from people possibly from around the world depending on what the image is. Well, it's a bit competitive out there at the moment and, and that's where the, the smell of the ink and that's where printing and publishing in the John Allen's wasn't that long after that I started to fall in love with printing companies and I started printing in Australia. John was the first person to print posters. Absolutely correct. Four billabong bulabong birds. They were from, all from Kakadu and I started to sell them. In fact my first product ever was post pack posters. That was before the publishing company and we did, we did Frill neck lizard, Spinifex pigeon. I was anti koala, anti kangaroo and anti Wombat because they were touristy pictures, right? Yeah, absolutely. I launched my 1985. 1985 post pack poster range and we put it in some shops around Brisbane. It was the first physical product and I had. I was so nervous. I had a friend go and check whether they were selling and they weren't. Nothing worked. And the following week I actually spoke to the owner at the Big Pineapple. He said, steve, why didn't you do kangaroos, wombats and koalas? And I said, oh, you know, they're boring, etc. Etc. I said, well, he said, if you do them, it'll trigger the sales and people will start buying the posters. Broadly. [01:23:06] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:23:07] Speaker A: So I did them and I think it was a hundred thousand over three years of those posts. You couldn't sell them, you couldn't give them away. Today, people print, you know, use their phone and then go and get their own posters printed. But Postback Pictures in a Cylinder was the first product. And so the concept of retailing and then going on, do markets. I actually encourage people that want to get into publishing to do a regional range. This is something. I'm talking to your audience. Do a regional range of cheap things like bookmarks, maybe time progresses, your annual calendar, you can do short print runs. These days, you get a little range of products together from your local region. If you live in Northern Tasmania, you do the platypus, you do the, you know, you do the landscapes, the Liffey Falls, the Cradle Mountains. You do the local landscape where people that are coming will see those as gifts because they go there, they go on weekends, they go on holidays. So identifying. You don't do animals that they won't identify with and you sell them in the markets. Now, the wonderful thing about markets is you actually get the person coming physically holding it up in front of you, chatting to their partner, putting their hand in their pocket and pulling out their wallet and handing you their bank card. And that little process, it's not about being hungry for money. And he said, that little process triggers. I experienced this. It's live. I didn't go into AI and say, give me a wombat. You know, I went out, I found a wombat cradled and I got down and down and dirty and I photographed it and I went through that experience and now I've got a, you know, a poster or a card or a placemat or a product that I generated and created myself. And I'm standing in front of the customer and I'm talking to them and look them in the eye. Got Colleagues now that, that are senior, they're, they're veterans this sort of stuff traveling around during the year and during from Cairns region North Queensland and they, they're making a killing during the market seasons. They'll do Port Douglas, they'll do Cairns, they'll do, do the markets is you know, being humble about that. I did, I did the Melbourne markets down there at Moomba, I did the, the markets up here in Brisbane. It's now called the River Festival but it used to be called Warana. I've done Floriade and I'm not bragging but I did $76,000 turnover in a month at Floriad in 19 in 2007. My last tent event right ever and we hide a hocker and we filled it up with exhibition prints. I even had on display some colleagues frame prints and we had framed posters and we had all my books and cards and kids books and etc etc in the middle of Floriard which has got a 350,000 person audience that flocks through Floriard. So what that does is that gives you the perspective of seeing your creativity physically handled by the public. [01:26:21] Speaker B: Right. [01:26:21] Speaker A: So you're seeing your audience, you're looking them in the eye, you're talking to them and they're responding to your creativity. This is a huge boost. Yeah. The people that are wanting to build a creative life beyond if you will, beyond markets, you know, they want, they're wanting to go into a wider enterprise. So when we first started Steve Barrett but we did, you know when we started in the, the, the World Expo in, in 88 in, in doing the markets we did Spring Hill Fair was the first weekend event I ever did with the Postback Post standing on a street corner and that's how it began. That gives you the confidence and the will and it's wonderful. Well, I mean I hope the tax officers and watching but it was during Paul Keating's reign I used to go, you know know one for Paul, ten for Steve, one for Paul. If you work for the tax office, you know current currently I don't do it anymore. [01:27:27] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. [01:27:28] Speaker A: You know people dealt in cash. You know it was, it was, was kind of blissful. That, that, that might sound corny in small time but you know it, they're real numbers. They're real numbers. So because when you go retail, when you go retail, souvenir shop wants 50% of the retail. So if your product is $10 they want to, they want to buy it after tax for $5. So it's 100% marker. So out of that $5, you've got your GST, of course. And then you've got to go backwards, manufacture, merchandising, you know, all of the cost involved in, in collecting the money, right. And then at the other end you've got, you know, 7, 8, 9, 10% of net profit and then that, that all comes together at the end of the year and out of that you've got, you know, your tax, if you've got staff, you've got payroll tax, you've got superannuation. So don't, you know, don't poohoo the markets because, because navigating all of that sort of stuff and the other thing that's very, very good for your listeners, if they wanted to get into that sort of direct contact retailing, their creative development of product artwork, frame prints, whatever they happen to be, is that you are in complete control of your creative journey, your creative life. You took it, you developed it, you created it, you merchandise it, you presented it, you interacted with, with the consumer themselves and in many ways, I guess you know, your listeners and fans that, that are running studios for, you know, or running event, event type businesses or commercial photography doing much the same thing. They're dealing with the retailer. And I know that digital photography came into being really threatened the studio portrait market quite considerably. I was told this by the AIPP people, the professional body, that, that a lot of the older men that were running studios and paying rent and staff, etc, quite threatened by the fact that young women, you know, were using digital cameras and being women. They were dealing with women getting married or women having live birth or whatever the style of commercial photograph probably they were doing and they were able to, they were able to, you know, basically live, live digitally and they were deeply threatened, understandably. Yeah. So rather than, rather than seeing AI as an enemy, how can I use AI? I've got a designer that's dementing the fact that where she was getting 500 for doing a particular job. People were saying, I just go to ChatGPT and tell it to design me a logo, you know, and so. All right, well I said a lot of people won't be doing that, say why don't you use chat GDP to design logos and say save yourself hours of work. [01:30:33] Speaker C: Yeah. Or yeah, figure out a way for it to go in with your workflow and also go find the clients that don't want that. Because I use AI a lot and I experiment with it a lot. It's just something that I like to put play with Just to see where the world's going. And it gets a lot of stuff wrong. And it's pretty bad with a lot of stuff too. So if you work with it, you start to see the holes and you go, okay. It's terrible at coming up with a logo. That is something. Well, I'll focus my energy into that world because AI can't replicate my, you know, knowledge and experience in that way. It's instead of just trying to go head to head and say, oh, don't use AI, use me. Find the thing that it can't do and do that and go after that and use it, use it as a tool to help every other part of your business the way, the way that you're doing it. Yeah, I think that's. [01:31:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, the other thing, the other thing that I've found out that, I mean one of the biggest downside is that chat GDP for example, will generate a 1224 pixel wide image. Right? Yeah, it's pretty small. Now the, the news is. And if you had a screen I can show you, I can, I can give you that Same file at 5000 PIN sharp. [01:31:50] Speaker C: Ah, PIN is, is that with an upscaling software or something like that? [01:31:57] Speaker A: Yeah, yep. [01:31:58] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [01:31:59] Speaker A: I've only been able to master it and I'm saying master it, otherwise I'd be stuffed. Because the program I'm working on, I want it to be screen projectable. So when I first started, I've been working on this for about nine months, constantly trying to convert. Like for example, I was able to upload my masterclass module 4 which has got a field craft section which has taken me 53 years to write. You know, it's got everything you could dream of from fish to photographing aquariums to photographing birds, birds on the. Every single animal group, landscape, social photography, candid photography, street photo. It's got it all in there. I can load that in there and I can with prompts and a lot of study and work and backwards and forwarding, I can get it to turn a page from my master class into a page for a reading level child of 6 to 19 or whatever the age group is and strip out the unnecessary language that is needed to, for an adult to wrap their head around. In other words, simplify. How do you simplify back button focus for a child in an ebook for tracking a bird on the wing. That's what I've just been going through. Right. [01:33:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:33:33] Speaker A: Is it, is it in, is it remotely possible to make that comprehendable and, and, and downscalable? At that particular level. And the answer is absolutely. So when it produces small print. When it produces. And I use Avenir Next, which is a great font for digital publishing. Everything I do have an nx, all of the files are live, editable. So what, what I do is I design the page, but I strip out the AI element of it. And I use high risk Keynote and I then put in live text so the live text can be edited. I'm working with a zoologist and I'm working with a very experienced woman in educational learning in, in science. Science. Science teaching. So it's, it's been vetted and criticized and dissected by two extremely professional people. Yeah. And, and, and so, so every image in it is an original image of mine. So I load my original image and I have to then prompt that original image to generate if, if it's something that's complex, like for instance, how to draw. How to, how to draw a Tasmanian devil. Right. How to how to draw color. And color a Tasmanian Devil is a project in the project book. And I want the background painterly and I want the animal to be clear. And I want steps one to six and I want natural history at the bottom. You know, I want, I want tips. It's a natural history learning product. It's not just a how to draw product. Right. So some of that font is small. How do, how do. How do I actually able to be able to generate it? And I had a deep conversation with my friend at Chat GDP about the future. What are you working on into the future? For publishers that are drowning in InDesign and want to be able to develop ePub, particularly ePub, this stuff is not at this stage destined to go onto a lithographic printing Press. But for ePub, there's nothing better than a high risk keynote. PowerPoint, you won't find anything. If you want to use the indesigns of the world, you've got to link all your files and go. And then go get a pistol and go shoot yourself because the links are broken. Right. And we've all lived that. I've lived it my entire career. Right. But when you're dealing with Keynote, you bring in a 3000 pixel long file into a 3000 pixel wide keynote and you've got resolution tablets online and projected in the classroom on a giant screen. Pinchang. Yeah. So you then upscale it, you take your 1024. What I'm giving away here is you should take notes. 1024, you go into Photoshop, you upscale it to. I upscale important pages to 5,5000 on the long edge. And then you scale them back, take them into lightroom, scale them back to 3,000. So everything's going onto the keynote. 3,000 at 3,000, right? Yep. And then I strip the text out and I do, I do pastable text, take the. Because you're always going to be editing, you know. Yeah, but where you're talking about animals, even if you put your own animal in there and you want to do something with it, turn it into a graphic or turn it into some, something in an edge. I'm talking educational here. This is not about art, photography or trying to fake the world that you took this phenomenal. That, that's another thing, you know, and my principles there, if I didn't personally experience it, I don't want AI to create it, but I might want AI to turn an image background into a watercolor effect for an educational product. If it's for my artistic work, that's a whole different ballpark. Yeah, in my artistic work I use my principle artistic tool is. Is no longer available. It's Topaz Studio 2. And I use textual textural overlays and, and I do all that sort of work. And if it's a montage, I identify it as a montage. Goes into the mont, my art library, you know, it. There's a montage gallery which in other words, that's a combination of different, different images to make another image. But the image, the end image is either highly creative and obviously manipulated or it's science based. Like I've got a, a lovely image of lorikeets bursting out of a tree. Now you can't get a single photograph of birds at different depths close to you bursting out of a tree in one picture. It's not possible, never will be. But you can photograph them and then etch them and rebuild that as a visual image and then, and then tab it as a, you know, an interpretive life experience. So on my website I, you know, in my, in my, where I talk about my art, I identify how I do it and why I do it. So it's open, transparent sharing. So it's not, not a matter of creatively trying to deceive people, which is what's happening unfortunately, where the birds have got more feet than they should have, more than they normally do. They're holding up a. Their wings and umbrella in pouring rain or all this sort of stuff and they're passing it off and people think they're real birds, which to me is kind of annoying. And I'm sure the Yarn Wagners of the world who specialize in, you know, fastidiously beautifully crafted, you know, fine, fine, fine art representation of the living creature would be extremely annoyed. You know, that sort of thing has been clicked on. It's not that the clicks or that you're losing something, but it's, it's deceiving. But you know, people interested in nature with untrue information, that's the stuff that sort of gets my iri. But you know, there's nothing you can do about it other than sort of when you scroll down and you look at the comments, there's sure to be AI rubbish comments, you know, that sort of thing. So yeah, for people out there that are feeling threatened by it, remember the threat is a story. It's a story you're telling yourself. See it as a tool and it's like buying in on global politics. I mean, if you're bought into what's happening globally, like in the US and all of these sort of things, you'd want to shoot yourself. I mean, it's incredibly depressing. I haven't got the power to manipulate and bring change to that. We as creatives can only bring joy to our own lives, to our own audience and to the people that we connect with. And that has to be the focus of our creative lives, really. Yep. [01:40:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I concur wholeheartedly. Yeah. Justin, there was a couple of comments there. I just want to roll back a little bit. I think Rodney made a comment about connection he had with. [01:40:58] Speaker C: Yeah, he said he's had some of Steve's card from the Australia Pavilion when he was an official guest for the launch of the book Australia's Best at Expo, which my gallery was featured in. [01:41:12] Speaker A: Oh, wonderful. Yeah. And I've got a collection of all the postcards I've ever published if anyone's interested. Oh really? [01:41:19] Speaker C: Wow. [01:41:20] Speaker A: I'll happily sell them. [01:41:29] Speaker C: Rodney goes on to say, I was offered a stall at the Australian Pavilion back then, but to produce a range of cards and posters money wise was a scary thought. But I love hearing Steve's story. Makes me smile. [01:41:41] Speaker A: Yeah, some of the bills were just frightening. I was, I was into the bank for 3 million when we went broken. [01:41:48] Speaker C: I was, I was gonna say and, and even Aries, that that obviously was, was a huge sort of huge event in the business. But even in the lead up to that, a lot of people probably don't realize and correct me if I'm wrong, I've never, never been around a business of the scale that you built. But physical products business that are growing quickly, have a huge issue with cash flow because you're having to produce twice as much now as you did three months ago. And you still haven't been paid for what was shipped out three months ago. And. And that just. That wheel keeps turning and cash. You need more and more money to buy more and more stock and print more and more. [01:42:32] Speaker A: That's why I was in the debt for 3 million. See, when we started with Australia Post, and you're going to love this for cash flow, if I'll just take a date. Say it's the 1st of March and you delivered some product and you invis. It was on the 21st of March, they paid you when you first started. [01:42:50] Speaker C: Oh, wouldn't that be so wonderful? [01:42:52] Speaker A: For about six years. [01:42:54] Speaker C: Yep. [01:42:55] Speaker A: And then somebody. Somebody woke up. Yeah, yeah. And I think you'd be. You'd be holding for 120 now. Yes, yeah. Cash. Cash flow. Cash flow. And of course, if you're selling images online, and I still do, I just got an order this morning from America, of all places. [01:43:14] Speaker C: Oh, that's cool. [01:43:15] Speaker A: For seven pictures. And I normally sell them for 80, but I decided they were in America, I'd double it. So I made it 160. It's been ticky. Although I did Google to say, you know, what are people selling now for this sort of market? It's a science online too, by the way. But, you know, one doesn't, you know, stock libraries. Selling through a stock library. Did we, did we get onto that topic? It's selling through a stock library. That's a. That's a lot harder publishers, and I won't say who, but there are publishers that would be not buying. Now, if you know zoology and you know anatomy, the biggest problem AI has got at the moment is feet. You cannot replicate feet. If you want an echidna, and I'm talking about my photo of an echidna being turned into a line drawing for kids to color in. Right. So I'm not cheating anyone. I mean, it's not, it's not, I'm not trying to create. In echidna, it'll turn the feet around and have them pointing forwards, but echidna rear feet point backwards and they've got an extended claw for scratching between the spines. Okay. So if you're prepared to be a naturalist and use these tools and study the anatomy of the animals you're creating, you might be able to get away with some things. But if you want a gliding possum with an opposable thumb on its rear, feet Dream on. You can't prompt it. You can't prompt it. And I talked to Chat GDP about why it can't. And it actually admits it. [01:45:14] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:45:15] Speaker A: It doesn't like word search for kids books. It doesn't. It doesn't like jigsaw puzzles. It doesn't like crossword puzzle. [01:45:26] Speaker C: Do you ever. Do you ever get in arguments with it when it intentionally, like, not intentionally, it does something wrong and you've specifically asked it to do something and then it. And then it does something different and things. And then you go back and forth a little bit and you find yourself typing something where you're like, why would you lie to me? And then you're like, what am I doing? [01:45:46] Speaker A: Worst dealers, as I said to a friend of mine that was with me yesterday, thanking it for doing something. [01:45:53] Speaker C: Yeah, I do that all the time. [01:45:55] Speaker A: Yeah. My designers. And if any. I don't doubt that anyone will be listening, but my dad, I had, I had one design of the entire period, you know, the whole 36 years she was with me and she even went across to the new company. Absolutely one wonderful, wonderful, wonderful woman. But it's not going to replace. I did ask it the other day, when will Chat GDP produce files in layers for publishers? You know what its answer was. And if you're a designer, put your fingers in your ears. We're working on it. Yeah. [01:46:33] Speaker C: Yep. Yeah, they're working on a lot of stuff and it's scary. [01:46:37] Speaker A: So I, last night did a. How to draw for a giant clam. How to draw a giant. I've got in the project book that goes with the. I've got a book on photography and I've got a book on thinking and creating as a naturalist. It's quite unique. It's. It's. It's very personal. Every image in it, apart from some images of people doing things. Original images. I've actually, I actually import into Keynote the original image. If you're an experienced photographer, you'll pick it and pick it straight away with its AI. And I've got a clarification in the book and if the image itself is a regeneration of a living person, I've got one. And the reason I did it was the. The gentleman I'm with is now passed and he's a Les hall, the bat photographer, the bat scientist that I did all my bat work with and I wanted a shot talking about collaboration at the end of the book. I'm talking about. One pathway forward for a creative naturalist is to collaborate. My career is based on collaboration work with the bat experts, geological experts. We did amazing facts about Australian southern skies with. With a ex NASA employer from Canada. So you're working with all sorts of different people. Yeah, collaboration. So I wanted to finish the, the book on the concept of collaborating with. Collaborating with musicians, artists, poets, writers, all sorts of different people. Collaboration is just fantastic. You know, it's a wonderful way forward for people like you guys. Greg and Justin are collaborating. [01:48:41] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:48:41] Speaker A: It's a lonely journey is a lot more fun when you've got a buddy and you're spinning ideas and you know, brainstorming and hey, what about this? And challenging each other. I find that, I find that being alone, that is like a whole. I really want, I really want the collaboration. It's not about money or whose name is on the front cover. It's about the joy of. The joy of the day. You know, really, it's. [01:49:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:49:10] Speaker A: So you're getting 50 years of his experience and 50 years of his life experiences, both of them different put together. You got 100 years of, of collaboration. Anyway, I wanted both of us in the cave together, but what I did is I, I captioned it AI Recreation. You know, that's. That's all. Yeah. [01:49:31] Speaker C: As a part of this. Telling the story and, and getting. Yeah. As opposed to this. This is what happened kind of thing. [01:49:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:49:39] Speaker C: I want to quickly. We've got a lot of topics that we haven't covered yet and we're, we're coming up on two hours. I want to quickly. There's a good question in here. There's a few questions actually. I will try and get to all of them before the end of the show. But no, no promises. But there's a good question here from Nathan is a wonderful photographer says question. What would you just say to someone who is regularly told they should make a coffee table book in this day of digital age? I've had a body of work that I'm continuing to work, work on called Packed Lunch. And I was wanting it to be my first solo exhibition, but maybe a small publication is the go. [01:50:17] Speaker A: Fantastic. I. I am toying with the idea. I'm still touring. My last book sort of thing. Absolutely. And I think that. What was his name again? Nathan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nathan. What I would do is look at, look at the People love the physical exhibition. I think my Last 1 was 2015 at the powerhouse in Brisbane. Absolutely joyful. Bound to go down and be with people and walk around and talk to people and exchange with them. I didn't have a physical book at the time. But to have that, in that case, it was a month long exhibition. To be able to launch a book and focus on your reef. You live on the Sunshine coast, you get on the ABC radio, you do all your promotions, you focus. If it's regional, you'll do much better than trying to gobble up the whole of Australia. Right. That's the way to go. But short run, physical. Beautiful books. I've got colleagues do that. I just bought one of Doug Porter, a Melbourne based. You should have him on the podcast. Wonderful photographer. I've actually got four or five pages of him on the masterclass. We've never met but we've met online. He's a collage fine art photographer. His work is original and very unique. He did a limited edition book, he announced it and he pre sold them. I bought one, I bought a beautiful limited edition book. So he, he wasn't trying to make a fortune out of it. He was probably, I don't know whether he's had a margin on it or not. And he pre sold the entire print run before he did the print run. But you are really tied into doing an exercise, Nathan, where you're having an exhibition and a book, an adventure like this, you, you're going to need a profile of some kind to pull the people in. That's the, that's the challenging part. [01:52:26] Speaker C: That's it. Having, having a little, a bit of an audience to be or unless you [01:52:30] Speaker A: do it at Floriard where there's an audience provided. And that's why I used to do the Moombas, the Waranas. There was all it cost you, nothing to do. When I did Moomba. Sorry, when I did Floriad, I didn't spend one cent. I don't, I don't think we even put anything on social media. Probably did but the people are coming in the gate anyway. So that's the best place to have your exhibition and launch your book. I'm not saying it has to be Florio, but there's some events where they have tent stalls that have thousands of people go through who might be watching. She's from north Northern Tasmania. Katrina Joy's got a wonderful, wonderful body of work. She just had an exhibition in Hobart. I just spoke recently. Wonderful photographer, very talented and she's, she's working at doing all the sorts of things. We're currently talking about developing her commercial activities, trying to get some cash flow. Cash flow to buy the new, you know, the new zoom lens. [01:53:36] Speaker C: Yeah, that's what, that's what we need to talk about. Quickly, is your. Your new gear? But first, a quick comment from. From Peter says at Monash Uni in the Biomed Library in the 1970s, I used to look at Steve's book with his underwater images from Jervis Bay instead of completing my projects. [01:53:55] Speaker A: Ocean of Life was the first book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought I'd sell millions. We printed 3,000 and I assumed everybody would be interested because. But what I learned from a marketing point of view is that because people weren't diving and weren't looking at temperate marine life, there's no, there's no identification with it. You can still buy. Ocean of Life was set with Litraset printed on a one color press. Very anthropomorphic. I was attributing human emotions to all the fish I was writing about. I still love fish. Fish are underestimated. They're not slabs of meat in a fish shop. They are highly intelligent. They can remember you. They. I mean, I could talk for hours about fish. Love fish. [01:54:44] Speaker C: That's so cool that it. [01:54:46] Speaker A: When I do subject. [01:54:48] Speaker C: And you still love it. [01:54:49] Speaker A: Yeah. When I do my cognitive tests for my license, being 81, you've got to do that every 12 months. I say to them I can remember the Latin names of at least 150 fishes, including the spelling that I learned 65, 60 years ago. Yeah. [01:55:11] Speaker B: I had a question, a question, but just a quick question about that before we turn to gear. I've noticed throughout our discussion you have a remarkable capacity to reclaim facts from quite distant past. Is it? Do you think that you have a photographic memory of sorts for facts and that sort of information? How do you retain so much? [01:55:33] Speaker A: Well, I. I'm having. My wife challenges me on short term. Sometimes I get my wife. My wife's name's mixed up. I call her Jan sometimes. That was the one before her [01:55:47] Speaker B: terrible mistake. [01:55:50] Speaker A: I love. I've loved all the women. I think people get carried. I won't get on to separation. That's not a good topic. Sorry, what was the question on camera? [01:56:01] Speaker B: I was just. I was just more commenting on your remarkable memory. But I think Justin's got some gear questions he's keen to get to. [01:56:09] Speaker C: I do. [01:56:10] Speaker A: Just on that note, the more you exercise your brain, the longer you're gonna, you know. And by the way, I saw a podcast where they'd done analyst analytics. Globally, people with passion, purpose and direction live longer. [01:56:25] Speaker B: There you go. [01:56:25] Speaker C: I believe that. I would believe that. [01:56:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:56:32] Speaker C: So speaking of exercising your brain. So you've just switched to mirrorless now at 81. Well, well, at 80 before your birthday probably. [01:56:42] Speaker A: I started, I started with R3 in 84 and I went to R5 Mark II last year and I ditched all the prime lenses, the big heavy, heavy ones, and went to long zooms. I mean the 200 to 800 which a friend just bought for $1800 secondhand. And I've shot primes my whole career with the tools that are available. There's no difference. And what are you doing different? What are you doing with your files? Putting them on social. I mean you're dumbing them down to, to 2,000. I do 2,000 on the long edge on social. So when you click on it, it blows up, right? Not little. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, I'm sorry, Canon, but you know, at 21 grand I can't afford, I'm not, I'm not going to live long enough to justify. Yeah, there is a. Look, there is a beautiful bokan, you know, there's no doubt about that. But I can give you any bokeh you want through Photoshop. Yeah, yeah. [01:57:53] Speaker C: And so the benefit of these new lenses being so much lighter and cheaper just significantly outweighs. [01:58:00] Speaker A: That's not why I bought it. I bought it because my Nikon cameras, all of them, I had a truckload of them, D8 hundreds were full of fungus and dying. You know, they were, they were. I'm not very kind to cameras. I don't live in the wood, I don't lust for cameras. Although I did go through a watch many podcast type thing. There's some wonderful podcast. I link high tech stuff in my master class. The best teachers in the world and I review their posts to make sure that they're teaching on the 2025, 2026 models. I update my master class annually. It's just, just had a major upgrade. So all of the tech is current. I use very few Photoshop tutors. There's only two or three of them that are. I couldn't possibly teach Lightroom as well as them because they're professional teachers. That's what they do to earn their living. No fluff, no, you've heard me ramble for two hours. When I, when I do my videos I, I get, you know, I gotta shut the up. I put a little sign up here on the computer. That's awesome. Videos I link to it. Sort of the fine art, the philosophy, the things that, you know, you, I, I, I, it's my teaching. But when you, when you're talking tech, there's some fine teachers you know, really know exactly how to teach. And teaching and show and tell are two completely different things. Completely different. [01:59:54] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:59:55] Speaker A: So killing, killing the fluff and just getting down to, you know, this is how we do it. One of, one of the things that, that I would encourage your arty people using this tech is, you know, please keep, please share on your posts and I encourage this and I demonstrate in the masterclass what language and posting the difference can make. Like I can show you one picture of peeling bark at 240 interactions and I can show you another one at 14,000. Same picture, same audience. Right. Difference is no hashtags. Hashtags are a killer. No external links. Like 2 or 3 External links in a post will kill it. Meta doesn't want you to leave. Expressing personal connection and emotion and authenticity is number one. And the good news is that Facebook pages now are favoring long form writing. So Instagram, Instagram hates long form, doesn't want links unless you're paying for them. So I don't tend to do a lot of Instagram, even though you'll get more buttony. I'm not interested in the likes. I'm interested in an exchange, a comment, or more importantly a comment, a comment from my post that's generated a private communication. So one of those is worth a thousand people liking the picture. It doesn't, it doesn't translate. So I've used, and I'll be honest and open, I've used chat GDP to analyze and study how social media works. And if you think it doesn't know, it's, first of all, listeners, it's got to know you. You can't use, you can't open a chat GDP account and expect sound advice when it doesn't know who the you are, right? So I've loaded the entire travel guide, all the master classes, I've loaded my entire soul in there. And it knows exactly what I'm on about, right? So the language and the advice and there's also me reminding it, I don't want to be complimented, I don't want, I don't any of that. And it's giving me some of the most astounding reviews of direction and moderation and particularly in relation. And so I've started, started moderating. It doesn't mean your likes and all your interactions are going to necessarily change, but for me, quality of engagement, right? I want authentic people to connect authentically and to communicate authentically. And one of them is worth 5,000 of the other, right? So when people go on tick tock and Get a million. I mean, give me, give me a break, you know? [02:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:03:09] Speaker A: Yeah, it doesn't, that's my personal opinion. [02:03:12] Speaker C: Take it all that, that is, that is very sound advice from everything I understand about, about both AI and social media and the way everything works, particularly, I think anyone that's, that's new to AI and if you don't want to use it, just don't use it. But if you do want to use AI, Steve, your advice about giving it context about who you are and what you want, about interacting with it, giving it background, that's everything that, that I've done. And then also telling it what you don't want. You don't, you don't want it to just agree with you or, or which is pretty easy to do. You can get, you can get your, you can confirm your bias pretty easily with any of the AIs. If you argue with it from an intelligent point of view. You can get it to, you can get it to agree with your point, even if it starts off disagreeing with it. They're pretty agreeable. [02:04:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And use. I use Gemini to double check. I can only afford one. I paid, I think $30 a month. Yeah. For what it is. And I've put 16amonth into Adobe and we all know about Adobe. I've got, I've got no complaints about Adobe. I mean, you, you've got to be kidding. Complaining about a monthly, a monthly fee for what would cost you 4 to 500,000 in wages to run that sort of skill level across your business. I mean, you know, I've never spent one second complaining about paying $112 a month or whatever it is for all those apps. Extraordinary. Extraordinary ability. [02:05:03] Speaker C: Were you paying back? I'm just trying to think of the timeline of this stuff. You would have been paying for licenses. Multiple. Yeah, multiple licenses for Photoshop and stuff. That would have been a fairly hefty bill with upfront costs of. What was it, 1200, 1500 or something like that for. [02:05:24] Speaker A: I can't remember what it was, but one of the, one of the, one of the greatest tools that I find as a publisher is Generative Expand, because if you're publishing, particularly if you're publishing, you know, four, three keynote files and 16:9. I mean, 16:9, we all love 16:9, but it looks shitty on an iPad. I even thought with the teachers I do 169 and 4, 3, but that's too much. I want teachers to be able, I want people to be able to use these new products that I'm developing at the moment I want teachers to be able to use them, I want licensed. I'm going into a partnership with a zoologist, a local woman. I've known her and her father for many, many, many, many years. She's, we're coming in, she, she's going to outlive me. You know she's only 43 so she's going to, she's half my age but she, she wants to use it, she wants to, to use it as a hub for a business to be able to go around to schools and teach. So that's what it's been structured. There's lots of project content, there's lots of all of that sort of stuff. So, so, so to, to be able to develop that I'm using hard worked on adult level field craft books that I've written. Content that's been reviewed, you know like 19 tips for photographing frogs, you know with an entire chapter on all the different kinds of approaches, habitat, Wendigo, seasonality, all of that sort of stuff. Trying to break that down into you know, eight pages for a 16 year old kid or 12 year old kid to get excited about frogs. Right. Yeah. You know, trying to strip away long paragraphs and long sentences. So you're not going to it and saying give me a kids book. You're feeding in huge amount of stuff. Some of, some of the upload Gemini one picture at a time, one video under 100 megabytes chat GDP will take the kitchen sink. Yeah, it, you know it, it's, it's, it's the amount of upload that you can put, put in there. And I, I, I then have to write prompts. I've got prompts that go from here to here. You know, huge prompt. [02:07:46] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:07:47] Speaker A: And so you've got to have to be prepared to take that on. Is it a walk in the park? No it's not. Yeah, no it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not. And the only way to learn it, there's no manual just to, is to do it and not be frightened of it. [02:08:05] Speaker C: That's exactly right. [02:08:05] Speaker A: And I'm only using it for education. I'm not using it to, you know my fine art is, is my, my own little toys and playground. And the principal tool I use was invented and went out. You know Topaz Studio Studio 2 was discontinued before AI became invented. It disappeared six years ago unfortunately. [02:08:29] Speaker C: Do you, can you still use that or, or is it no longer possible to use. [02:08:34] Speaker A: Here's the tip in 202027 computing will block, be blocking old applications, the upgrades. You know what's happening and what the reason Topaz now I think they've just sold, haven't they to Apple or somebody. So no, they're sold to Adobe. To Adobe. [02:08:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:08:55] Speaker A: Adobe just bought Topaz. I knew that would happen and I'll tell you why it happens. And Luminar Neo, which is a fantastic company from Ukraine, I've talked to them. The fact that they're based in Keefe, you know, right in the middle of a war one day we'll sell and I'll tell you why you can't afford. And the challenge for software companies now is to keep their software systems validation when computing systems change. So when Apple turns around and does a new operating system, the poor old software companies have got to scramble away in the background. If they haven't got Adobe's budget and cash flow and revenues, they can't afford to put on the people to make the algorithmic changes or whatever it is they do miraculously in there. Yeah, so, so, so yeah tech, that sort of text dying. So the. How do you overcome it? I've got Photoshop 2025 which I guard fiercely not to be overwritten. Yeah I can you. I can use that on Topaz Studio 2. Only on Topaz Studio 2 do I use 2025. The other thing is to keep an intel computer on another disk. Intel for Apple went out what, four years ago. I've still got one. Yeah, same. Yeah. And, and keep your old applications running but you've got to go with the flow. But I have a, I have a ethical principle that when you go into that I discuss in the master class but I'll, I'll take a plunge and discuss it on Open Communications. Here's the thing. Using AI to create digital effect layers, not images effects. So let's say I photographed a. A beautiful pale headed rosella sitting on a branch and I want a watercolor effect. Now there's a million ways presets. There's a lot of ways of getting without going into AI of getting a watercolor effect. Very, very laborious, very difficult to fine tune. What I am discussing with students in my masterclass and weekend workshops is the ethics. And these ethics are always personal in my opinion. Always personal. I'm talking about creative ethics of putting yourself forward as having been the creator of this style and you didn't have artificial tools created. Now you can do all of that manually. Topaz Studio 2, all of the old Topaz textural things. Also. Also there is other presets that people sell. Lots of people sell, as you know, hundreds of different kinds of preset videos and still photography. So they've created those digitally. How they've actually created those effects, God only knows. What I'm saying is what is the ethical, personal principle about creating that effect using prompts, having Chat GDP or Genman, I create the fronts I don't type in, I talk to it. Okay, I will talk to it and I'll say this is the effect I want and I'll describe it in absolute finite detail. I'll also say the principle. This is for children's how to paint a frill neck lizard. Do not touch the lizard. Do not touch the texture, the color, the anatomy. I don't want you to affect the lizard at all. What I want you to do is turn the background into a soft watercolor effect that I want to stimulate the child that's just drawn the lizard copying your photograph, which is an actual fact, an edge. But I want them to also bring that to life by softly bringing in the rainforest or the desert in the background. And I've used Chat GDP or Gemini, Gemini will develop it. Or Photoshop, because by the way, they're all using the same tool, Nano, Banana or Flux, and they're all linked to it. So it doesn't matter whether you, doesn't matter where you are. The advantage of doing it in Photoshop is that you can do it in high res. If you do it in chat GDP, it's 1224 on the long edge, end of story. That's it. Okay, so you do, you do it there and you tell it what to do and bingo. And I look at it and go. That took me 12 seconds to talk about it. And I would be going into Topaz and this and that and fiddling and playing, still creating the effect digitally. But so, but you still had the experience of seeing the lizard, photographing the lizard, sharing the lizard, inspiring the child, Maybe not a photographer to draw and paint. And the thing about drawing and painting is that, is that the naturalist journal, it's the physicality, it's the looking closely. You can, you know, and there's little prompts, little stories all around the picture saying, you know, look closely, look at the toes, look how the middle foot on the glider on the left hand side is long and protruded. It uses that to pull grubs out of the hole. So you, you're getting the child to not, oh, it's a sugar glider, but to look at the anatomy and talk about the. That's what I'm using these things for. Right, yeah. So, so, so, and, and you using them in an artistic sense, do you need to put underneath the photograph? I use this software and that software and this software, you know, you do what Doug Porter does and he, he puts photo montage. [02:15:12] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:15:13] Speaker B: Keeps it simple. [02:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:15:14] Speaker C: And it's not really relevant what, what software was used to create that photo montage. [02:15:19] Speaker A: So in terms of, in terms of analyzing that and going through the journey. So I've spent 18 months reflecting on all of this and looking at the ethic and, you know, how do. First, first of all, I've got to feel right about it. Yeah. And if I'm going to share it and teach it to others, I've got to explain the backwards and forwards when you look at things this way. I'd go to talk to 85 people in Brisbane recently and they were all two camera clubs. And I could tell by the silver gray hair that I'd have some people in there that may be a bit anti still anti Photoshop and anti this and anti that. And I put forward these, these discussions openly and everybody, everybody sort of. I sort of hadn't quite thought about it like that. So it, it's, I think a lot of our fear, a lot of our judgment, harsh judgment is based on fear. I know that. I know that there are people that hate Photoshop or hate image manipulation because they haven't mastered it and it's overwhelming them. I mean, you've opened Photoshop for the first time. When I first went to Lightroom, when I lost the library people, we were using Quack Express for our publishing and you know, this is old stuff. And what was that old Apple software that, that was around before Lightroom? Aperture, anyway. Yeah, Aperture, we were all aperture. And so when I went broke and had to start again, I downloaded Lightroom. And my first reaction, everybody's reaction is, oh, Jesus, give me a pistol. I'm gonna shoot, you know, all those buttons. So I download this fantastic little program that just said, look, just settle down, settle down. And that's what I do. In the mask, I take people. Every one of those panels, there's a video for it. And just step by step by step and, and most important, put on your computer, have fun, you know. [02:17:28] Speaker C: Yeah. Don't let it stress you out. [02:17:32] Speaker A: Yeah, Play. Play. Yeah. And so, you know, playing is, is. And digital art for me is a, is a emotional release. In the evenings, I do my etching manually. I use brushes, rubber brushes. I sometimes take three days, four days to etch a Bird, you know, in wing with their wings. Because you've got soft feathers on the end of the end of the wing. You've got harsh lines around the bill. So you've got, you know, in using a AI cutout, very difficult to get that finessing. Because I want my artwork to be able to be blown up, you know, really big. Yeah. And. And so when people look at it, there's this beautiful blending of the edges and the feathers and the. And then I put textures over the shop top of it and. And my judge, jury and court martial for me is me. Does it please me? Do I feel excited? I've got, you know, I've got Sandman, Metallica playing on my headphones full volumes. So it doesn't drive the family nuts. Yeah, I'm a headbanger from way back. [02:18:46] Speaker C: I love that. That's. [02:18:48] Speaker A: That's Metallica turned. They light my fight. Have you seen the one from Russia [02:18:52] Speaker C: where he had ah, in the rain. Is that the one where it's raining [02:18:56] Speaker A: 2 million people and they sent the troops in to moderate them. This is Sandman they're playing. And the troops came in and they took off their uniforms and threw their hats in the air and joined in. Yeah, yeah. And it's good. I saw him interviewed. He said it's the, it was the most exciting audience ever. That that's the sort of thing. And that's my evening entertainment. [02:19:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:19:18] Speaker A: You know, creating that. And I, I sometimes put him on social or sometimes I don't put them anywhere. I just did them. [02:19:25] Speaker B: Yep. [02:19:26] Speaker C: Maybe we should have a, a little bit of a look at your. I know. Also, if you've got to go, let us know. We're 2020in, but we've, we'd keep here all day if we can. [02:19:36] Speaker A: We won't. I'm not going anywhere. I'll just have a drink of water. [02:19:41] Speaker C: Yeah, go for it. I just thought maybe we would bring up your website where You've got the 80 images for 80 years and I don't know, just, just have a look and if there's any, anything that comes to mind about any of the images, we can, we can bring them up and you can tell us about them. But what, whatever. It doesn't have to be. You can tell us anything you like a story about, about the capture or how you, how you did the. Oh my God work or whatever. [02:20:08] Speaker A: That's, that's interesting. See that one? Oh, you can't see my cursor, but next to the 80 images is this black and white one. Of the spoon bills. [02:20:17] Speaker C: This one. [02:20:18] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. Now if you, if you click on that, you can go to full part. There you go. Okay. So that, that, that's the same bird. That's me leaning out of a car window at Murray Bridge National Park. Park on a rainy afternoon. And it was raining hard enough for me not to get out of the Land Cruiser. So I just put the. It was right at the end of the day. I just arrived and I was photographing this royal spoon bill in the head. Feathers, by the way, are a sign of excitement. It's a male and they raise the crest and they get all excited when they're courting a female. Okay. So I called it a state of play. So if you open up that caption. [02:21:02] Speaker C: How do I open the caption? Oh, there it is. I can't quite. He's got this one on her wall. [02:21:10] Speaker A: The spoon builds pruning conditions. The initial capture of preening was driven by the naturalist within. In other words, I'm interested in the naturalist natural behavior. However, in the creative expression, I was implied, inspired to play. I reside in a state of play when the artist within takes over. So it begins with the natural history story. So there's a, there's a backstory. Okay. With all of these artworks, there's a backstory and then there's a playful, playful experience. I had that in the Powerhouse. I did an exhibition with Bush Heritage Australia and Mental Illness Fellowship. And by the way, if anyone wants to enter one of the most fantastic global photographic competitions, it's called out of the Mist. I'm going to put an ad for this out of the Mist. If you Google out of the Mist Mental Illness Fellowship Australia. I became an ambassador for them in 2015 and it now attracts a massive global audience. And people are submitting video and still photography that represents a, an episode in their mental wellness challenges in life. And there's four of us judge it. You have to hold your breath when you're judging it because they write about the experience, but the photography is mind bending. So if you go onto that website, you'll see images from the past. I have to plug that. It's just started to advertise for it. Nothing to do with commercialism. It's purely a promotion. Get people express, expressing the pain and, and, and, and, and also joy and recovery, all that sort of stuff. Yeah, so, so yeah, that, that one, if you click on the right hand side, it'll go on to the next one. [02:23:16] Speaker C: Yeah, or we can. Hang on, I'll bring. Do you want to go through from start to finish, or do you just want to point out. Oh, no, no, that pops to mind. [02:23:24] Speaker A: The one there of the underneath the frog. That's. That's an interesting backstory. This, this one. Yeah, that's it. It's called Tenacity. That's a, that's an interesting one. So there's an example that is a. That they are the roots. That is a melaleuca tree growing on a windswept cliff at remarkable Rocks. Kangaroo Island. Okay. I actually used it the before and the after in a demonstration in the master class. So basically what's happening there, that is the reason I've called it the Tenacity is that that tree, rather than giving up being in a windswept, salty environment, I mean, you're talking about very strong Southern Ocean winds. It's chosen to grow horizontally. So it grows horizontally, so that it's absolutely superbly artistic. Now, what is fantastic now, as an extension to that story, Kangaroo Island 2, three years ago was completely burned out. The south, the, the western end and the whole of the Malaleuca. You call it a, you call it a forest, even though they're growing horizontally to the ground. It's right beside remarkable rocks. You walk right past it was all burnt out. But now, three years later, it's recovering. Had some friends recently, went there. This concept of facing adversity and facing life's challenges and using your own creative life, passion and your purpose to, to face that adversity even in the strong winds and fire, you know. So that, that's the sort of story behind it. Yep, yep. Beautiful. It's. I've got a hanger on the wall. It looks stunning blown up. [02:25:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I can imagine as a. Oh, [02:25:21] Speaker A: by the way, that bow bird there with the look on its face, that's the COVID of seeing like a natural. It's the kids book. I'm just working on this one. Yeah, look at that. [02:25:34] Speaker B: That's great. [02:25:35] Speaker C: Look at those eyes. [02:25:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Looking right at you. So I've, I, I've developed that as a 4, 3. And it's got on the COVID it says seeing like a naturalist workbook for young naturalists. So that's, that's a beautiful. [02:25:54] Speaker C: Gosh, I love the color. Yeah. Whoever's making comments about your saturation slider is misguided, out of line. [02:26:06] Speaker A: Comments are fine. You know, they're all fine. But yeah, the, the, the. By the way, that jabberoo flying is the first. It's my sort of iconic. That's a male. Females have yellow eyes. That's the first time I use the digital camera ever. Oh, camera. And I went up to Kakadu and I went out to Fog Dam and the light was fading and. There am I photographing. And I'm thinking to myself, under normal circumstances, with the Kodachrome 64 ASA, I would have been home in the motel having dinner. I'm photographing under incredibly low light. Yeah. And so, just for your artistic people. So what I do in the Topaz studios, create that sort of watercolor effect in the background. And that's just. That's just using my own, by the way, what makes Topaz Studio too. So if I was a multi millionaire, I would have bought it and kept it. By the way, a lot of very creative artists have used it for years and they were very annoyed when Topaz stopped generating it. By the way, you will be able to get access to it if you've already bought it, you know, ongoing. It's a legacy software. You can download it with a license. [02:27:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:27:34] Speaker A: What you do is you create that effect right across the whole image. And you might do it on a. On a. On a dense setting, so you've got lots of lovely watercolor effect. And then you lay it over the original. And then you use brushes to brush out the higher resolution of the animal, bird, subject, flower, whatever it is. And so it's all manual, it's all using brushes that you can determine how thick, how dense, what's the shape of the brush. It's not much different because I started my career as a boy as a oil painter of working with a palette and using brush. Physical brushes. Right. And that's one of the lovely things about this, doing it this way. What AI will do is it won't do regional. Okay. So it'll do effects, fabulous effects. They will be in low resolution, lower resolution, and they won't be controllable. Regionally you have. Sorry, you won't be able to do elements like. I could do the foreground in one density and I could do the background in another density. [02:28:49] Speaker C: I can. [02:28:49] Speaker A: I've got complete control over it using layers in Photoshop. And it's laborious and it's time consuming and it's not much. Well, it is a bit different than using a brush, but I love the. I love the physical journey of creating that and having the. The control. I can do it, do it in all different ways so it's more emotion. It's not really about the jabberoo is a natural history lesson. I'd be using courting, egg laying. I'm A jabberoo. Fanatic. Black Knick stalks. Correct name. The only trouble is they've got, they've got purple necks. But anyway, chat GDP keeps correcting jabber. It's not a jabberoo, it's a black. Next off, [02:29:40] Speaker C: tell it, tell it. It's trying to tell Steve Parrish about it, about Australia. [02:29:46] Speaker B: Now listen here, junior. [02:29:50] Speaker A: Scroll to the next one. That, that, that's, that's how, that's how I, that's how I generate them. Yeah, and that's done. That's done. Similarly, they were just a couple of albatross there. That's a montage. So they're flying in front of the wave. But I've, I've, I've. What I've done, I isolated the birds and then texturize the wave at the background. Okay. Now, you know, for you, for your listeners, the, the, the. I mean, my audience are not necessarily photographers. You know, photographers do come to my pages, but naturalist artists, I've got 72 countries. Visit my website because it's huge visit visitation, lots and lots of traffic. And so they're coming for different reasons. So for people that are watching this and tempted to play with their images and do artistic things, remember that, you know, your audience are not your peers. So the people you photograph with in the club are not necessarily the people that would ever buy or relate to or connect with this kind of style of work. So it's a very different audience. And it comes from me using digital art to recover after I lost everything. I didn't start doing this until 2012 when I, when, when I went broke, when I had time and the tools were available and I started playing with them and I was, I found it to be a beautiful healing journey. And it's the frustration artist, the frustrated physical artist within me. I've got some of the most beautiful Australian wildlife artists as deep, close friends that, that, that connect with me and I connect with them and, and so, so, you know, I can, I can move that albatross to the left. I can do what an artist can do. You can move elements around and, and I'm not trying to say that, that, you know, it's not a, a montage or a collage, whatever it happen. Not, not always. It depends. [02:32:05] Speaker C: Do you use just, just one technical question. Do you use a, a tablet to do the brushing or a mouse? What, what to do? [02:32:14] Speaker A: Oh, dear. I've got a little tablet that I, that I'm looking at for my kids book, but procreate. Have you heard of procreate? [02:32:24] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [02:32:25] Speaker B: My kids use it for illustration. One of my kids is an artist and she uses it on her iPad extensively. [02:32:32] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I tell you what, I, I done research on the number of kids using it and it's massive. Yeah, right. Yeah. I've introduced it into my creative pathway in, in, in. In the module one in the new that I'm working at the moment, which may or may or may not be out for Christmas. And, and no, I, I do everything on a computer. I don't do it on, on tablets. So that photograph on the bottom left of the birds I was talking about earlier, is that this one? Click on that one. [02:33:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I was looking at that yesterday. [02:33:08] Speaker A: That's called Chasing Rainbows. They're all individual birds and, and that happens Medirenca Macarenca fruits around about late September. And our first wave is lorikeets. Thousands of them. You know, we've got right off the veranda and they get scared by the other birds. Come in, frighten them, Mickey. Birds frighten them. And I wanted to capture this explosion of birds in, in an artwork. So I use that in the master class for, you know, this is an example of a science based montage. In other words, it's not something that doesn't happen. It happens in a split second, by the way. And I've wanted to create an artwork that represents this explosion of color and noise, you know, whoa. You know, we all see all the time. And so it's a science based creative montage. And all of my artwork are science based. In other words, the. They actually happen. It actually happens, but it's discussed openly and you don't get, you know, you're not deceiving people. [02:34:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, I think that's the, it's the only reasonable approach to this sort of stuff because otherwise you end up coming up. As you said, ethics and things like that always come back to personal choices. And personal choices are great. But once you start saying, well, that's not a photograph based on my personal choices, you're trying to impose that onto other people. Your opinion starts to become. And then you draw a line in the sand of what's appropriate for you. But then someone else that might only shoot on film says, oh, you're using digital. Your photos aren't real. Where's the line is the thing that always comes into my head. And I think it's just important that you come up with your own framework and not, not worry about what other people's frameworks are unless they're trying to deceive people. A Little bit. But even then, like you said, you can't. Can't really stop it. You just. [02:35:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:35:20] Speaker C: You know. [02:35:21] Speaker A: Well, this is. This is a. The conversation we're having now is very valuable because a lot of people are struggling. The one that. That blue one on the left, on the. On the third row down on the far left, just click on that. That one is about. That one is about lost. Recovering from loss as well. So that's a watercolor. That's again, Topaz. Nearly all of this is Topaz Studio. That watercolor effect, that is. If you're driving down towards east coast Tasmania, you're driving down towards. What's that old prison called? What's that peninsula called? [02:36:03] Speaker B: Port Arthur. [02:36:03] Speaker A: You mean Port Arthur. Yeah. If you're driving down there, you go past this and that. That's the. That's the. That's an estrogen. Mud flat at low tide. You get this beautiful stripes. And anyway, I took the photograph. I took it as a natural history illustration many years ago. And there was a. Within three days later, there was a fire that wiped out everybody's home and life, livelihood right throughout the entire region. And I'd already gone home and it happened. And so I actually talked about that in there as a. Yeah. And. And the caption talks about using this as a reflection. Is there always. There's always a stairway out of an adverse situation available. There's always a pathway for you, whether it's a health, personal tragedy, loss of job, you know. Yeah. These things that particularly as you age, you're going to confront, you know. Oh, yep. Yeah. The end can come. Well, I was. I was out working, walking with eight people three months ago, and halfway through the walk, I had a straight stroke in the middle of it, and I lost mobility of the bottom half of my body, you know, and had to put me in a. Put me in a little thing and wheel me off to a hospital. So, you know, your life can come to an end and there's always a pathway. There's always a. So that's what that journey is about. So it's. It's personal and. And people can take it or leave it. [02:37:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:37:45] Speaker A: Artistically, they can take it or leave it on me. Yeah, agree. So I've chosen these. This section last year as representative of journeys. That's a famous picture there, that one with a tree growing out of the rock. You can see there at the bottom. That's it. I've called it Mesmerized Walking in the mist. This is 1973 in the no dams conflict. In Tasmania, 1963. 1973, Bob Hawke was being elected as the Prime Minister. 73 sounds right, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. I spent, I spent a month or six weeks in Tasmania and when I went on the. Anyway I was Mount Field and it was very misty and I went and got lost in the midst. This is a 15 mil film photograph with a nick on the big, the beautiful 15 mil wide angle. And I found that rock with the gum tree growing out of it. And I'm, I'm talking there about, you know, again, it's, it's, they're all reflecting, you know, life's challenges. Yeah. Being strangled by a rock. Anyway, I went back many times trying to find that and Joy Kitchener, the artist that I want you to look up on Facebook from Tasmania, she's wonderful friend. I sat with her and I, I, I worked out on the map where approximately it was. But I couldn't, I wanted to find it like 30 years later. I wanted to re photograph it with a similar perspective to see how the tree was faring, you know. Yeah. Being, I mean it's grown up inside that rock. I mean it's just incredible. Yeah. And she went out, the bugger went out first time and found it and photographed. Quite jealous about that. [02:39:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:39:53] Speaker A: But anyway, and that's now part of it. She, she did a beautiful exhibition of tree photography. So mesmerizes. [02:40:01] Speaker C: It's, it's so you, A lot of this, this work that you're doing, you're often digging into your back catalog, your archive of images. I've just had the unfortunate pleasure of setting up a new giant backup drive for my work that my ever growing archive. No, I understand it's hideously expensive. How do you, how do you store and catalog your images so that you're able to think, okay, I know I took this image at some point, I'm going to go and find it. Then I'm going to, you know, do this sort of recreation or whatever. Yeah. How are you storing and managing everything? [02:40:41] Speaker A: Okay. I use Lightroom catalog which is unbeatable. You can talk till the cows come home. I've got 383,000 images in one catalog. I only use separate catalogs in the field and I use them when I'm teaching and I like to use them standalone when I teach. Because when I teach I don't teach with my photos, I teach with the student. They submit photos or they take them and we load them and we go through all the different things you can do. So the principle is to excite Them, you know, and then there's YouTubes and things they can watch to, you know, know to, to do it. And I talk about. We're not just manipulating it for the joy of manipulating, we're manipulating it to enhance a story creatively. Okay. [02:41:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:41:28] Speaker A: But I use Synology. I've got a. An eight bay and I've got two eight bays sitting side by side. One duplicates the other. Oh, okay. [02:41:40] Speaker C: That's the dream. I bought, I bought, I bought it. I had an eight bay years ago when I was shooting weddings and I went away from that for a while and went to just a normal direct attached drive. But yeah, I just, that's what I set up yesterday was an eight bay Synology. Only five bays filled so far. You know, hard drives in there and. [02:41:59] Speaker A: You're a young man, Justin. [02:42:02] Speaker C: Yeah. There's plenty of time to fill it up. [02:42:04] Speaker A: And by the way. Yeah. You can get people to help you review and manage it. You can get people to manage it, help you manage it online. [02:42:14] Speaker C: Oh, interesting. Okay, that'll help you. [02:42:16] Speaker A: Yeah. I've fortunately got someone that lives 10 minutes away that I can ring. And, you know, I've had a panic here and there, as we all do. And catalogs, catalogs are backed up constantly. I back up everything on my desktop every 24 hours to the Synology. [02:42:35] Speaker C: So is that how you. [02:42:36] Speaker A: No, no, no, that's what's on the desktop goes to a standalone, which, which means that if anything happens, I can grab my hard drive and the small standalone and take it up to the computer people who live 15 minutes away. I've got really good, fantastic support and I encourage people that if they've got a local computer shop or service, I'm prepared to pay more rather than buy cheap somewhere else. [02:43:06] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:43:06] Speaker A: So I really support my local company. They're. They're in there in Maloney and, and I, I know the struggle of running a small company and he's the only Mac facilitator on the Sunshine coast. And he looks after me, I look after him. Deals, deals with all sorts of problems and if I've got a really nasty. They can deal with it online. So you can deal with it online, but when you've had your library flooded and you've seen the sludge and mud right through the bottom one and a half drawers, you know, you become a little bit. But I don't take it off site because there's always someone here. [02:43:51] Speaker C: I was going to ask that. So. So at the moment you're, you're backing up because that is, I was about to say that's the dream is because now I have to manage backing up this, this, this, this big drive. I'll probably for now have to manage backing it up to multiple smaller drives until I could afford potentially another system. But that's not in the cards for me at the moment. So I'll just use a few big hard drives to sort of. [02:44:14] Speaker A: Yeah, what you can do, Justin, components isolate inside Synology's software. You can isolate it to only back like my art libraries backed up. Yep. I work, I work with brown trap calendars. I do 16 calendars for them every year. I have done for eight years now. I don't publish calendars anymore myself. So all of the high res files, all of the files that I've labored over, they all get backed up twice. They go to the main synology and then they go onto the backup synology. So the backup synology is only storing the very important files. [02:44:53] Speaker C: So only storing finished artworks or is it doing your all files? All files. Okay. [02:45:00] Speaker B: Okay. [02:45:01] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, very interesting. [02:45:03] Speaker A: The finished artwork. The finished artwork. I can fit five of everything onto this one hard drive. [02:45:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:45:13] Speaker A: So I can go to a workshop with Lightroom, loaded all the artwork, all their files, and plug it into anyone's computer. Yep. So it's 100 and. [02:45:26] Speaker C: And do you do that? You keep, you keep a small drive with all of your, I guess, finished artworks on it? [02:45:31] Speaker A: Always two of them. Two of them. [02:45:34] Speaker C: Okay. [02:45:35] Speaker A: And so I take this one to bed with me at night. [02:45:38] Speaker C: Oh, do you really? [02:45:39] Speaker A: I work at night as well. On a laptop. [02:45:42] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. [02:45:43] Speaker C: Okay. [02:45:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I, For a moment I pictured you stashing it under your pillow and wishing. [02:45:47] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, like a gotta run out of the house. Grab that one drive kind of thing. [02:45:55] Speaker A: When you sleep alone. There's no better sex than a laptop. And I don't mean for porn. [02:46:03] Speaker C: I was gonna say, spoken like a true photographer. [02:46:06] Speaker A: Continuing. At the moment, I'm so obsessed with my Kitties book. It's like reliving the evolution of. Because becoming a naturalist and to become a naturalist really means nothing more than being an observer. So the Steve Parish Young Naturalist program inspires young people and families to observe, understand, record, and creatively express their connection with nature and a story. So these snippets bringing us back to our creative life purpose. I have a snippet. What is the Art of Seeing Art workshop about? Art of Seeing art is the ability to recognize light, design, emotion and meaning in everyday moments and respond with creative intent. End of story. [02:46:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:46:59] Speaker A: That's all it is. That's not about having the latest mirrorless camera. I think there's a coming back to tech. There's a way overkill with, with, with, with the argument of, you know, that people, people can get in my, this is my opinion, all of this. You can get lost in tech and sometimes it's fun to be lost in. I got lost in tech, you know, when I went mirrorless and I found. The thing about mirrorless I found is the intuitiveness of manual. I'm 100 manual. I use auto ISO. I can denoise a 40,000 ISO file, no problem. Used to be, it used to be 10,000, 12,500, you know, DXO, DXO6, the latest one staggering daggering the. There'll be a time when ISO will be irrelevant. It's almost irrelevant now. And, and, and, and, and so all you've, all you've got is an aperture to give effect and you've got a shutter speed to freeze. So this ability to be able to see and experience. So when we do the art of seeing, we get people to walk around without a camera, you know, and to see art, to see art at their feet, to see it horizontally, to see it looking up. And so it's a matter of being inside your own journey, inside your head, inside your entire creative history from the time you popped out of the womb. Like when I see a fig tree, it reminds me of me escaping my mother. I had a fig tree in the backyard. I had a tree house up the fig tree and I used to scramble up there when my mother was doing faith healing and exorcisms on people and frightening the shit out of me, right? So when I see a fig tree, I'm just using that as an example. We have memories. Memories of green, memories of the smell of eucalypt, memories of the light fluttering, backlighting. We have all of these things going on inside of it. This is why people say there's too many people doing it. But yeah, you're so unique though. So you've got to look at yourself. You are unique. Everything you've smelled, touched, looked at every page in a magazine, every person's picture, all the podcasts you've ever watched of Art Wolf's images or National Geographic or David Attenborough, you know, in the whatever. All of that information is all part of who you are. So it's a matter of seeing all that. If you've grown up in Asia, you've got minimalism. If you've grown up in Western Europe, you've got, you know, you've got the grunge, you've got the dark, you've got. That's the culture that you grew up with. You've got sort of medieval sort of tones and all that richness, you know, and so you've got a cultural element. You've got a personal life element, seeing and bringing that really exciting stuff. So I want people, people that do the workshops to be able to leave, get stuck in traffic and love it because they're seeing textures, reflections. They're seeing high rise buildings with the sun bouncing off the window. They're seeing and feeling and thinking. It's got nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with having a R5 Mark II with a blah, blah, blah lens attached. They're tools that help you capture. I mean, it's a wonderful camera. I mean, you know, pre capture. I mean, who'd have dreamt of it? [02:50:40] Speaker C: It's crazy. [02:50:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And in the hands of masters like the yarns of the world and others. Plenty of people doing it. Glenn Smith in, In. In. In Sydney. A mate of mine lives next door to Mount Annan into. Into the gardens every day, you know, and getting magnificent. So all of this stuff that's going out and it's, it's permeating the airways and people are beginning having their brains washed and their beings, all that positive stuff. I mean, what's not to get excited about? I mean, what, what, what, you know? [02:51:17] Speaker B: Yep. [02:51:18] Speaker C: Anyways, I love that. I love that so much. We're almost at three hours. I don't want to end up with you just. [02:51:27] Speaker A: You're kidding me. [02:51:28] Speaker C: Forming part of it. [02:51:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:51:30] Speaker C: Oh, it's. How good, how good are podcasts? [02:51:34] Speaker A: Oh, just. Just go down. You gotta. You gotta meet my kangaroo. Just, just go back down. No, back up again. [02:51:38] Speaker C: Back up. Sorry. [02:51:40] Speaker A: That little. See that little kangaroo in the middle, the black and white? Click on him. [02:51:44] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yep. [02:51:46] Speaker A: And go to full screen on you. I got it. I got. That's right outside my studio door. That's a kangaroo. Obviously it's a kangaroo. That's a western gray kangaroo that we had before we got a dog. We used to have the western plain. The eastern gray kangaroos, they're still on the block, but they'd sit right outside the studio. Just click on the. Enlarge on that. But that, that, that image is the. That's. That's a. Oh, geez. What's the Cam D2X? What's the camera? [02:52:28] Speaker C: That's as big as I can get. [02:52:30] Speaker A: No, it's the one dx. It's the. It's the Canon one dx, the film. [02:52:33] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. That's a beast. [02:52:35] Speaker A: Early digital, I love that camera. It's only 12 megapixel, but that's the middle of the frame cropped. Right. It's just tiny in the middle. But that posture, that, that coming towards me, that's not mirrorless, that's manual cropping that out, enlarging it, and then sharpening the shit out of it and then taking it in my sketch. I've got a sketch in Topaz Studio. It turns it into a sketch. Like a pencil sketch. [02:53:05] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:53:06] Speaker A: And you blow that up and it's just fabulous. So we're doing things and I noticed I just got an email from talking about young Wagner. He's just talking. He's just done a video on a favorite picture that his wife loved and he cropped it out and it's tiny and he really didn't think it would. Could possibly be enlarged, and he went ahead and enlarged it and he's done a video on it. So I haven't seen it yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing that. But what I'm getting around to saying is that in nature photography, sometimes you haven't got the right megapixels, you haven't got the right. So as long as you've got focus, you can take files that have got very, very interesting content. Like that lovely little kangaroo, the joy of being a macropod, you know, come out of the pouch and he's discovering, learning to run. I've watched them do it. First time I've. I've been with animals in care, where I knew the story of the kangaroo because I'm with. I'm with the person and. And it's first time it's ever hopped. Right. Can you imagine discovering that you could hop and you can run like. Yeah, yeah. They are the most incredible. I'm. I'm an ambassador for World Kangaroo Day, by the way. I'm making a plug. About to get a photocop going for that too. Well, it's already running. I do it every year and I do a video on the. The winners and I do the judging for them for the competition. So if anyone interested in macropods, which are one of my passions, there's 53 different species of macropods and I've got pictures of most of them, but they're absolutely fantastic animals. And the joeys, you know, getting out of the pouch for the first time and you can almost see them going wow. You know, I'm a kangaroo. I can hop, I can run. Yeah, yeah. [02:55:15] Speaker C: You know, there's a whole world out here. [02:55:18] Speaker A: Yeah. They're taking time to load at the bottom. Yeah. [02:55:21] Speaker C: I'll just, I'll reload it and see it come up. [02:55:23] Speaker A: So that's, so that's, that's. I just sold that one there, right in the middle there. That. The creek, the, the billabong. See the billabong? It's next to the black. Next to the kangaroo. It's on the right. [02:55:35] Speaker C: Oh yeah. [02:55:36] Speaker A: Karijini bulb. I just sold a great big one of those down into the Canberra. It's one of my favorites. It's sort of a texture. Well, that's one of the very early images. I sold it as a 101. One of one actually. It's the first time I've sold that one. [02:55:53] Speaker C: Really. [02:55:54] Speaker B: Wow. [02:55:54] Speaker A: So. [02:55:55] Speaker C: So you do that sometimes as a one as in. And then that won't get reproduced again? [02:55:59] Speaker A: No, no one. Everything's one of 50. Yeah. And I, I've priced my artwork on the basis of what I can, I could afford. You know, reason reasonable. I'm a lot cheaper than, than a lot of others. But I've got a very good printer and we post them wherever they go. I don't, I don't. I'm not anxious about sell. I mean these, this is, this is a website. Oh geez. I've forgotten the name of it, the brand of it. [02:56:33] Speaker C: I was going to ask like, you mean the website that you're using for this? [02:56:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Very, very fun. Very cheap to run. Having short term memory problems at the moment. I'm just trying to think. It's an America, it's an American site. I've had absolutely no problem with it. It's very, very easy to operate. You can scroll, you can do automatic and you build in all your pricing. I've got about five prices, one finish. I used to have a complicated one where you could buy framing finish. What I found was every time you add a click, you lose a customer. [02:57:15] Speaker C: Complexity and options definitely makes things a lot trickier. [02:57:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I'm doing it wrong. I do this for me. I mean it gets a lot of visitors and some years I do well and sometimes not so much, but it, it's, it certainly inspires people to do the workshops. I think that I'd say to your listeners, whatever you do creatively, you must put yourself as the prime benefactor. In other words, don't do your creative work thinking or imagining, you know, fame, cash flow. Picture frames, number of likes. Yeah, I. I grew up in the old school Desiderius or band. And your listeners should write this down. A little book called what is art all about? I read it in 1976. Was handed to me by a very dear friend. She's now passed, had a PhD in aesthetics. Irene Amos, abstract painter. And she wrote in the front of it, steve, you can either become a photographer or you can become a photographer. Love, Irene. I thought. I thought, what the fuck she on about? I mean, love. And I read the book and I thought, now I know the book. It's rooted in the philosophy of playfulness. And your creative journey should be your own personal, joyful experience without thought. And there's a quote at the front that says, there's more weight, there's more art performed by overweight businessmen doodling on their blotters while making international calls by the mentally insane and by children as yet unpolluted by society's norms, than hangs in all of the galleries of the world combined. Fairly sweeping. So what he's basically saying in his teaching is that the joy is in the journey. It's the. [02:59:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:59:24] Speaker A: And he's used to take students into the forest with a wooden frame, empty frame, and throw it onto the forest floor with the leaves and so on, the fruits, fallen tree, you know, fallen branches and stick insects and all sorts of things. And then he'd say, don't touch the frame. Get your pad and create the artwork inspired from within the frame. So what we do in our weekend workshops is we go for a walk and it's called the art of seeing art at your feet. Walk. There is a gallery in my gallery. You don't have to open it. You can. People can have a look if they're interested. It's called art at your feet, you know, which is artistic works generated by looking down at the floor, sand, tide lines, kelp, twisted, all sorts of artistic elements. And it teaches them to use a tripod, to use a tripod to reflect. So you're pointing the camera at the ground, you're standing back from it, you're looking at the textures you're feeling. You're moving around the moment. You manually that camera, everywhere you move, the perspective's changing, everything's changing. So it's considered reflective capture. Right. And so you're learning to look and you're learning to look at detail. You're ignoring what's above you, you're ignoring what's in front of you. That's why I love tripods. I love tripods. Reflect. [03:00:57] Speaker B: Amazing. [03:00:58] Speaker C: Yeah, great idea. [03:01:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [03:01:02] Speaker C: Like it's, you often talk about with macro and things like that, but it doesn't even need to be macro. It can, can be a wider scene at your feet. It's just, yeah. Great creative exercise. [03:01:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Perspectives. Yeah. Long lens perspectives. What extreme wide? Extreme long are my favorite. Yeah, I love, I love extreme wide. You know, it's fantastic. You know, landscape stacking, I don't do a lot of intimate stacking but there are photographers that do staggering insects stacking. You know, this beautiful, beautiful work. We have some of the finest photographers in the world in this country. And before we started talking I was sort of dropping hints for you know, have a look at ocean wide images. Gary Bell is water photography probably the, one of the, in my opinion one of the finest underwater landscape photographers. Now there's a kit on my, on my website, I've got a, a section there that's got all the reflective blogs and I've got in under photography I've got Gary Bill's underwater landscape photography. I don't do many other photographers on there. I wish I did. It's more time than anything else. And his underwater landscape photography is stunning, which is very common, very difficult to do, very complex. And he tried David Dublay Dublet, who's one of the world's greatest underwater photographers, most accomplished. He's sort of my veteran now. I don't even know if he's still with us. We're losing, we're losing a lot of people. Yeah, it happens. Dropping off the other end. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [03:02:53] Speaker B: Jay, do you want to maybe should we look at just a few comments before we wrap just to see if any folks have any burning questions or comments they want to raise. [03:03:02] Speaker A: I think you might have lost, lost a few people if we're at three. [03:03:06] Speaker B: No, they're still hanging in there. [03:03:08] Speaker C: They're just listening away. Felicity Johnson says integrate your marketing is on your website. Maybe it's something to do with that called integrate your marketing or something. The website system or. Don't know. [03:03:21] Speaker A: I, I'll, I'll click off this and let you know. [03:03:24] Speaker C: We'll. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Maybe we'll put it in the show notes for everyone interested. [03:03:28] Speaker A: I, I can do it. I'm just, I just. Oh, here we go. I can do it right at. [03:03:45] Speaker C: Let me read a couple of these while you're doing that. Phil Thompson says. I agree looking down can be very rewarding. Like the sand lines on Reti beach at Invercargill. New Zealand. Who else have we got? Philip Johnson still uses Topaz impressions when he feels painterly. [03:04:05] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It's a, it's a photo shelter. [03:04:12] Speaker C: Photo shelter, right, I've heard of that one. Yeah, very cool, Very cool. [03:04:18] Speaker A: Honorable people that answer your emails. [03:04:20] Speaker C: Well, that's nice. Yeah. When you're going to invest so much time into setting a system up, you want, you want a bit of support when you need it. [03:04:27] Speaker B: Yep. [03:04:28] Speaker C: And one quick shout out to Leanne who says, omg, I've made it to a live podcast. Hi, everyone. [03:04:33] Speaker A: Hey, Leanne. [03:04:34] Speaker C: Hey, good to see you. Sorry, that was from a while ago. [03:04:36] Speaker B: And what a live podcast you found too. [03:04:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I wonder. So, I don't know, we better wrap this up soon. But I had a quick question. Where was it? Here somewhere. Now it's disappeared. Oh, yeah, it's probably not a quick question. So, all right, you're reworking images with the latest technology. You're learning AI using Gemini and ChatGPT, finding out what they can do, what they can't do and how to best use it. You've just changed to. Well, you recently changed mirrors. It just got a new R5 Mark II. Like you've got, you've got two synology disk stations there in your studio. How are you keeping up with technology at this pace at 81? Like how do you stay on top of everything and keep learning? [03:05:33] Speaker A: Well, I probably. Ignore friends and largely ignore everything. And there's a price to pay for that, by the way I devote my life. When I met my current partner has been absolutely fantastic. She's obsessed with her own things, which is fantastic. I met her online, actually. I'd given up trying to find a partner. I remember warning her. I warned her that I was absolutely married. This to me was not work, it's not a business, it's a, it's a lifestyle and I'm completely devoted to it 24 7. So it comes from 247 and it comes from not having fear and seeing 7 year old kids doing layers in Photoshop and knowing that dealing with technology or being fearful of technology, if it's a fear based question is, is, is a story, you know, it's a story you tell yourself. Yeah, it's like, you know, I'm going to go into chat gdp. Oh, it'll steal all your files. It'll steal everything. It'll put it all over the Internet. And I say, well, my creative life purpose is to inspire others to connect the nature for mental, physical, well being. My intention is to flood the Internet. And if my name doesn't go with it, so be it. I mean, you know, I shouldn't put that in the podcast, but you know, I can't control. I can, you know, you can remove a, a copyright. I don't put copyright logos on anything. To me. And again, it's personal. It's personal. Don't take offense. You put a copyright brand, particularly a large one, it's simply saying, I don't trust you. If you don't, I won't look at your picture. I'm talking about people that put it in the middle of the picture or cover the picture. Like a lot of stock libraries, wallpaper their pictures. I could take that all off in two seconds. [03:07:52] Speaker C: Yeah. [03:07:52] Speaker A: And the ridiculous thing about it is you can nick a picture offline and drop it into chat GDP and say, change the background, do this, do that. There. I've got myself a photograph of a rare whatever. If that's what you want to do. Steal people's pictures, right? Yeah, yeah. And, and there are people that want to do that and. [03:08:14] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [03:08:15] Speaker A: Or will always be people that will take your ideas. So I chose after suing or trying to sue a very famous artist that used. I won't use his name, he's no longer with us. That pinched a few of my pictures years ago. I was 30. And when you're 30, your nostrils flare and you, you know, you, you feel vulnerable and frightened. And so I told my, I told the solicitor who lived next door to me actually to send the guy a nasty letter. And he sent his book back and signed it. Best wishes. So. And so I, I won't. He's a very famous artist. I should have kept it because the book would probably be worth money now. He basically took my images and out of a book called Wilderness Experience and tore them up and created collages and put his name on them, you know, and, and I got upset about it. Anyway, he turned the lawyer turned around and said, well, that I will take it on, but it's gonna, if, if it goes to court, It'll be about 30 grand. This is then, it could be more now. And it's a raw, it's a royalty based issue. Very, very difficult by the way, to get, to get a court ruling on five pictures today. No court would hear it and it would cost you so much money. And he said, well, what would you have sold the pictures for? I said, well, that. A hundred dollars each. He said, well, he stole $400 worth of pictures of you and you want to spend 30 grand. I mean, really. And that was the, that was the wake up call. And then we went into children's publishing and a chocolate company, Japanese, you know, all these people taking the sticker books and putting, putting them on their chocolate boxes, people nicking all sorts of stuff. And I decided that I had two choices. I could waste energy on the pursuit of naughty people, or I could say, well, at least they love possums. [03:10:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. [03:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [03:10:25] Speaker B: You know, you are educating them along the way. [03:10:29] Speaker A: I don't, I don't spend one second of any given period being concerned. I saw some yesterday people in a spearfishing podcast. They'd use my pictures of coral trout, which sort of annoyed me because I'm about people loving coral trout, not about spearing them. Yeah, but, but again, what do I do? Write him an email and get upset? No, no, no. So if you're prolific out there, guys, and people nick your stuff, you, you know, look at your creative life purpose and what it is, what defines it. And in today's world, you know, people, particularly people that have got high rent, they've got kids, they've got pressures, they've got husbands that don't miss them a lot. 70% of my audience are females that are trying to carve out a creative life. They've raised their children, they're in their mid-40s, you know, getting in towards 50. The kids have left and they're really wanting to. My partner's going, doing this at the moment. Everybody's gone. The business is the business. My business is quite small now. She's no longer attached to it. She can devote her time to the grandkids, to the block, to the, you know, her own creative life, which is very rich, lovely rich. Friends, a lot of friends. And that leads me to do be an old guy checking out tech if I need. [03:12:00] Speaker C: Yeah. [03:12:02] Speaker A: I found mastering mirrorless cameras. Thanks to several podcasters, I've got a free book. Book. If you go to my website, onto the bird photography thing, there's a download. Free book. Free book. And I've listed the podcast that I learned from only three of two Australian, one Canadian. [03:12:20] Speaker C: Yep. [03:12:21] Speaker A: And I give them full credit and, and, and links to their. Promote them. [03:12:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [03:12:26] Speaker A: And they're much better teachers than me. I'm not, I'm not good at teaching. Not good at teaching tech. I'm not really all that interested in it, actually. Although toys are fun, aren't they? I mean, they are, yeah. [03:12:41] Speaker C: Yeah, they certainly are. [03:12:43] Speaker A: And finding, finding the focus zips to the eye and the birds Flying, I mean. Yeah, yeah. [03:12:51] Speaker C: And you caught it before you press the shutter. [03:12:57] Speaker A: They're just toys. And as a naturalist, I want to, I want to tell stories about these things and to be able to capture all those behaviors, all those interesting things. But, but I also say to people, we do this in our with Dean Holland and I do our weekend workshop with three, three bookings left. Running the running early next month. If anyone's interested in Brisbane, fill those seats. We have a wonderful half day. Wonderful after. What I say to people is don't put these on Facebook and say my Nick on @F8 took this picture. You know, we're going to send you a list of the animals. We want you to research the animals, go to Gemini or wherever, find out about the animal, put its name in there and then put a note about how excited you were about meeting the brush tail gecko or the, you know, the green python or the jungle python, which is pretty spectacular. You know, something about your emotional experience and connection and the animal. And leave off all the hashtags and you know, trying to yell out to all your friends and see how many responses you get. They will triple, they will quadruple. Right? Yeah. And in the master class, I show how the same picture of peeling bark, one with commercial advertising links, hashtags and what's called marketing speak. Another one with pure art of seeing emotion. No links. 14,000 vis a vis 278. Yeah. I learned that through GDP. How to get response. I did, I did, I did, I did. And what it was saying to me is now that we've read your master class, this copy is not who you are. [03:14:55] Speaker C: Yeah. Your posts really line up with your personality. [03:14:59] Speaker A: Absolutely. No, don't line up with your life philosophy. [03:15:04] Speaker C: Yeah. [03:15:05] Speaker A: Everything you're posting, you're trying to flog something. Yeah. Be authentic. And of course that's what, that's really what it breath of fresh air, you know. [03:15:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [03:15:21] Speaker A: And when you shut your eyes and think about it, when you scroll down the podcast list at night while you're lying in bed with your laptop or your iPad or your phone and you've got all those angry titles screaming at you, trying to get you to click on them, particularly in American politics at the moment or global politics, that's the stuff that's triggering. But equally what is also triggering? I mean the highest selling paper books produced on paper, spiritual and self help. If you go to a bookshop, ask any retailer, what turns over, that's what people, people are wanting. Joy, positivity, learning, elevation. They're not wanting or some, some people are wanting their anger fed. They want to want their anger fed. Yeah. And so people use that and what you guys are doing is, is incredibly positive. That's the thing. And been a joy being with you. Greg and Justin. [03:16:30] Speaker B: Thank you, Steve. Incredibly kind of you to flip that. Usually it's my job to compliment the guest on everything, but I do love that you've made us both feel quite special with a handful of words. So thank you. [03:16:44] Speaker A: Bringing joy to the world is the, the charter of us all. Yeah. There's too much, too much negativity, too much stuff out there. And, and don't get into this. I say to participants that are looking for life change, don't get into that cycle, don't criticize it, don't judge it. Except that some people, that's where they, they live. But, but there's a lot of hungry people and I, I'm tipping that the, there's a, a major global change in the next couple of three years. [03:17:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [03:17:19] Speaker C: Yeah. Feels like, like that's coming. [03:17:22] Speaker A: Yeah, it's coming. [03:17:23] Speaker C: Be a shift. [03:17:24] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a shift. [03:17:25] Speaker B: Yep. [03:17:26] Speaker A: And we've had to, we've had to live through a little bit of nonsense, shall we say, and just a tad. And, and it, it's flipping people, people out a gut full. They want joy, they want peace, harmony. Yeah. And we creative with cameras, particularly with cameras. Cameras, a tool for expressing creativity. One tool. And write and speak. You know, join those three together as a triangle shoot. [03:17:54] Speaker B: Right. [03:17:54] Speaker A: Speak. [03:17:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [03:17:57] Speaker A: And express authenticity. Yeah. [03:18:02] Speaker B: I think that's an incredibly inspirational and poignant place to stop our discussion today. It has been almost three and a half hours. Steve, I, I highly respect, highly respect the power of your bladder. Mine is struggling. I think I had too many coffees this morning. But look, Steve, we will wrap up there. [03:18:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [03:18:23] Speaker B: I'm kind of a bit lost for words, but I always find a way, I think, you know, being able to spend time chatting to you and, and learning the authentic Steve Parish. Hearing you talk about practicing what you preach is incredibly powerful and motivational. And I know even just from my own personal small little family experience of marveling at Steve Parrish images with my own children and teaching them about the natural world. You know, when we sit in bed together at night and read a story, the people that you've influenced and touched in some way or another must be staggering. The volume of people. And just in these last three and a half hours here, I feel like I've got so much to evaluate about my authentic self. And how I present my work to the world. So, you know, on behalf of us, all of us here, like, thank you so much. It's been a true honor and inspiration to sit and spend time with you and chat and yes, I do wish we could go on longer, but I might very well leave a puddle on my office floor if we don't end up wrapping up. [03:19:31] Speaker A: I just like to put a caveat in there because please, credit coming my way. I, I accept, accept the compliment with grace. But I did mention the word collaboration. Yeah. You know, every, all of the retailers, the retail support, I mean retail support's been phenomenal. I'm still getting emailed. Where's your product? All my representatives, my staff, my writers, my editors, my. The naturalists, the journal the naturalists, the scientists, people that are freely given knowledge. It is a major collaboration and there's hundreds of them, hundreds of people. And I just happened to have my signature on the front cover of the. [03:20:20] Speaker B: Well, I think that's humble. I think, you know, you've talked a lot about the art of seeing and I think without that as the, as the, as the nucleus of all of that activity to get you to where you are today, without the, the art of being able to see, none of that would have, would have become true. So. But yes, I value your humbleness in, in supporting, you know, and recognizing everyone. [03:20:47] Speaker A: Yeah, everybody's credibility. Yeah. You know, you know, I mean camera life should be creative love. [03:20:57] Speaker B: Yeah. We're too deep in now, Steve. We're far too deep. 200 episodes. [03:21:01] Speaker C: Well, I tell you that the, the origin of the name, it really was though that the camera itself is, is a tool. [03:21:11] Speaker A: Absolutely. [03:21:12] Speaker C: To live, to live a more fulfilling life through adventures and, and exploration and connecting with people and things like that. And that's why I originally called the camera because it was sort of, you know. [03:21:24] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. The center. The center is the camera. There's no, no doubt about it now. I've seen a 16 year old wheeling a back button focus and tracking an egret. [03:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [03:21:38] Speaker A: And I'm going to post, produce the image and blow it up and give it to him. [03:21:42] Speaker B: Wonderful. [03:21:43] Speaker A: You know, these tools are enabling us now to photograph the private lives of those animals with and share them with the world. But and the other thing that's wonderful, particularly through things like Gemini and you can identify these animals, you can research the animals and I have to encourage people if you, if you actually prime your prompts with information supplied by Australian museums, csiro, if you actually put the head science institutions, you want Them to scan their papers, their information rather than picking up what somebody said on Facebook. No offense to people on Facebook, but. And actually direct the prompt if you, if you come prompt. Yeah. Open a Little Keynote or PowerPoint, whichever. Start cataloging your prompts because if you use prompts well, you will increase the accuracy of the information that you're being fed. Yeah. And I've got to tell you, it's pretty, pretty blame remarkable. Particularly. [03:22:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [03:22:50] Speaker A: I mean I can put in fish, you know, plesiops, bleaker eye, which is the long, long tip. Blue, blue devil fish from Jervis Bay. I put that in yesterday and I thought it won't know anything about these. Ah, breeding cycles, distribution habits, diet. Yeah. Links to studies people have done that. You couldn't find that information. These, these are fairly obscure, unknown animals. Very spectacular animals. But it's a, it's a really beautiful. I mean here we go again. [03:23:27] Speaker C: It's like the Internet all over again. [03:23:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it is, it is. Fish, fish, fish. [03:23:33] Speaker C: He loves fish. [03:23:35] Speaker A: Loves me. I get, I get a hard on with fish. That's amazing. [03:23:42] Speaker C: That's what I'm going to title this episode on YouTube. No, I better not. All right, should we roll the music and let's roll and read some of these. There's some great comments in here. Just thanking you Steve, for your time. You're welcome on the podcast anytime you want. [03:23:59] Speaker A: You can come back, I'll be promoting you. You're wonderful. [03:24:03] Speaker C: That'd be amazing. [03:24:05] Speaker B: Thanks, Steve. [03:24:05] Speaker C: Let's. Let's do it. Phil Thompson says, Steve, Incredibly inspiring images with great backstories and editing advice. You're a great dead Downsworth ambassador for Aussie wildlife and landscape. By the way, love the saturation. Philip Johnson says, many thanks Justin and Greg and guru Steve for an inspiring for inspiring photographers for decades. Who else? Rodney Nicholson. Thanks for bringing this enormously wonderful podcast that took me back and brought me forward. Memories and education again. Congratulations, Steve. Felicity Johnson. Thanks so much Steve. Your words are very powerful and help validate the importance of our creativity. Thanks Greg and Justin. Jeff Bird says, fantastic fellas. Thanks. And yeah, finally Phil Thompson says. Thanks so much for a fantastic podcast, guys. Very inspiration and affirming. My own photography. [03:24:59] Speaker A: That's right. Fantastic. Thank you. [03:25:02] Speaker C: That's it. That's what we're here for. Thanks so much, Steve. Again you're a legend. [03:25:06] Speaker B: Yeah. We'll be back next Thursday with David Imel. And don't forget we'll be online on Monday Night Live. 7:30pM Australian Eastern Standard Time with the random photography show. And we look forward to seeing you all then. Be safe, everyone.