Will I see you at the Australian Garden Show Sydney?

Here's an article I wrote to help promote the Australian Garden Show Sydney. It's happening this weekend! I'd love to see you there; you'll find me at The Aperture Club's tent.

Big news - latest book!

An advance copy just arrived! 

Booderee National Park? Who's heard of that? Well, I knew it as Jervis Bay National Park when I was the photographer there years ago. It was so great to be working on this book because I got a chance to re-visit some of my favourite old haunts. And it was refreshing to discover that the beauty and wildness of the landscape has remained the same, despite hordes of visitors every year. 

I started to photograph this book ten years ago. And then disaster happened - the Park was almost eradicated by one of the worst bushfires ever. Nine years later I was able to complete the photography and this is thanks to the persistence of the chief scientist and organiser behind the project, David Lindenmayer. 

The book project is a re-affirmation that science and art complement each other and reach more people and achieve more goals together than working separately.

I am proud that the book has turned out so attractive. If you are one of those 450,000 annual visitors who go through the gates, call in at the visitor centre and buy a copy. Not only will you learn about Booderee but the nature and wildlife info also applies to much of our coastal landscape. 

Here are a few selected pages:

Preparing for a photo assignment - when you can't

When I photograph an assignment I do lots of research and preparation beforehand. But where an event is involved,  I don't know what the situation or locale will be like or what the opportunities will be. It's almost impossible to prepare. So I have a specific strategy. I say to myself over and over "colour + action" knowing these two types of shots will always liven up a printed page. 

The next part of the strategy is to remind myself: "a few broad scenes + lots of vignettes". You could almost call such vignettes "candid portraiture" - which is one of the things I teach in the Travel Photography workshops I do for Foto Riesel in Sydney. 

An album of the "outtakes" - the photos that weren't published for the Australian Geographic magazine article - are on my Facebook Page. To see the ones AG did publish, here's that link to their online newsletter. Magazines like AG do a fabulous job of layout and design; I just wish they had space to publish all the good ones!

An artful life: Scotland Island, Sydney

I photographed an article for Australian Geographic recently and it's now also online. If you don't have a subscription to the Australian Geographic newsletter, you can see it here.

Give a thought to the lead picture which is an overview of Scotland Island on a sparkling summer day. It almost looks like an aerial shot. Such an easy shot to take, right? Nope. It took me two tries to find the view. First, I studied maps looking for the highest elevation and best angles of the sun. I then slogged for a couple hours through a sub-tropical jungle looking for the track to the highest peak. When that failed I tried on another day, this time asking some locals, Tracy and Paul Smith. They were kind enough to conduct me to the overgrown track and even led me to the top. Of course Then I insisted on waiting for the sunset light as well, which meant descending through that jungle in almost darkness.

The article was originally published in the November/December 2012 issue of Australian Geographic (number 111). Isn't it great that once it's been in print, it can continue to live on via the web? Or is that not such a great idea - meaning that what some have to pay for is now available for free?

Suzanne Holman, go in peace

The artist, Suzanne Holman, at work on one of her first major artworks, the mural at the children's pool at Bondi Beach. I just had to write something to acknowledge this lovely, talented and community-spirited artist. She never stopped created murals and art installations along the whole eastern coastline.

What a beautiful woman! Had I known at the time of taking her portrait that our lives might intersect again. I heard this morning that she was one of the two people who died in a microlight crash a few days ago. They were flying over Tuggerah Lake on a joy flight. It turns out Suzanne was living in Avoca Beach, just a few kilometres from me. If I'd known, I probably would have looked her up, found out what other projects she was working on, maybe photographed her again.

I ran into Suzanne when I first moved to Bondi Beach myself - must have been around 1986. I was fascinated with the mural she was creating and I proposed a feature  to Good Weekend magazine. I got my good mate, David Hancock, to write the article. It was published with a photo similar to this one across a big double page spread. Too bad I no longer have that tearsheet but at least I still have a photo.

Well done, Suzanne.

What about you? Have you ever had the experience of having photographed someone who later died? How do you feel, knowing you have a precious recording of that person's life? Does it give you a deeper connection, or make you feel like a keeper of their soul?

New impressions of native flowers - Australian Geographic

At last all 31 of my artworks are hanging in the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney. You can read a short article and see some of the prints at this gallery on the AusGeo website.

 New impressions of native flowers - Australian Geographic

How Not to Prepare for Your Art Exhibition

Instead of travelling, doing assignments and workshops, lately I've been tied up in preparing my first 'independent' photographic art exhibition. I complained on my Facebook page as to how unexpectedly difficult it is turning out to be. Nick Gleitzman, a successful photographer in Hong Kong (and my former partner) responded to my wails with some great pieces of advice: 

1. Make sure you have 3 months with NOTHING else to do

2. Buy Valium

3. Prepare to haemorrhage money at a rate four times more than you planned for

4. At lunch on the day of the exhibition, drink an entire bottle of champagne. French. (You did hang the show the day before, right?)

This is exactly what I'm discovering to be true also. (Well, maybe not the part about Valium.) But most of what Nick said was valid and I thought I would expand on them in this series of blog posts. To start with his first point: 

1. Make sure you have 3 months with NOTHING else to do

Here's where I made my first mistake, not allowing a full three months of time to devote exclusively to the exhibition. The venue was booked for January 2013, a full nine months ahead. I decided three months was just the right amount of time so I made a note in my calendar to get started on October 17. Promptly on that date I downloaded a guide called "Exhibition-Planning" from the Australian Business Arts Foundation website and carefully scrutinised it. Woops, I had missed the opportunities for applying for arts grants. Many of them wanted applications a year or more ahead! 

Then I realised I hadn't allowed enough time to get press releases to magazines, especially the art ones. Most of the monthlies have a lead time of three months. 

Then something happened which was completely unplanned - I got sick. Even though it was just a flu, many days I was incapable of even being upright. So I had to let go of several projects, like the catalogue I wanted to publish. 

Then in early November, someone pointed out the Christmas holidays would be a big interruption. Most businesses in Australia close down until early January. (How could I have forgotten?) I quickly got cracking on locating a fine art printer as well as a framer so those jobs could be finished by the end of November. 

Now there were only six weeks left until the opening on January 16th. I still had a mountain of tasks: creating a dedicated website, designing and printing flyers, sending press releases to newspapers and other media, organising insurance, preparing CVs, bios and other publicity material. Even though I had carefully scheduled tasks in order of priority, they couldn't get done that way. Everyone I dealt with had their own deadlines and schedules. Many tasks couldn't be done until some prerequisite was done - which couldn't be done until something else happened first. You know the endless loop?

I can verify that Nick's #1 piece of advice is true: allow at least three months FULL TIME. I'm adding my own series of warnings:

• allow for the unexpected like illnesses, accidents and other surprises 

• realise that suppliers have their own agendas, not yours

• triple the length of time you estimate a task will take. For example, designing a flyer took much longer because my chosen designer couldn't produce the goods. I ended up doing it myself in order to meet the printer's deadline.

In the photo above, I'm madly signing my prints while at the framers. After I had delivered the prints and told him how I wanted the mats to reveal my signature, he said "What signature?" I had forgotten to sign them! Just another example of how your mind turns to jelly when it's under time pressure.

In the next post, I'll discuss how Nick's #2 word of advice was so true also. 

The Little Flea from Jibbon Lagoon

Who would have thought that little Jibbon Lagoon would ever have a claim to fame? 

If you are wondering where you can find this little creature from the black lagoon, Jibbon is at the north end of Royal National Park. Which as you all know is on Sydney's doorstep. 

Here's a photo I took in Jibbon Lagoon myself when I was shooting the story on Royal for Australian Geographic magazine. That's the writer Karen McGhee on the left and herpetologist, Ken Griffiths on the right. I doubt they're looking at a water flea. I had them pose that way because I loved the reflections. Karen was not too happy to be up to her knees in ambiguous sludge, but she was a trooper and did it for the story. 

You never know, maybe they helped the little water flea along on its survival journey. 

And it's always a wonder how, as a lifetime nature photographer, your work always seems to relate to something happening - somewhere. Sort of.