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In 2018, I marked 50 years of taking photos with an epic photo adventure on the other side of the world. It had started in 2017 on our return visit to Latvia to meet our newborn granddaughter. We were delighted and besotted, of course, and I took a lot of photos (I took the Nikon gear on this trip) even though she spent most of her time asleep. We had spent Christmas in Latvia’s beach resort, Jurmala, and we greeted 2018 in an icy village square somewhere south of Riga. But since we were that far north in the thick of the…

In 2017, we travelled to Latvia during the northern summer to celebrate the marriage of our son and meet his beautiful bride. This photo was taken at about 10pm during the long, slow sunset on their wedding day. By this time, I had yet another camera, a Panasonic Lumix, which I chose as a travel camera because the Nikon equipment (by now upgraded) was a bit heavy to carry around on a relaxed holiday. The photo invites comparisons to the 2006 photo taken at Woolbales shelter on the Bibbulmun Track, and to the bushwalking photo from 1981. In 1981 I was unable…

One of the advantages of having a few decades behind you is that, by luck or good planning, you may reach a time of life when you are more likely to be able pursue your own interests with fewer obligations to others. In recent years, I have often been able to take myself on a photo trip at short notice just because the conditions are right for taking photos. Sometimes that means sunny skies or the golden hour, sometimes it means a chilly dawn, sometimes it means a bitterly cold gale with a big swell at The Gap. I had visited Castle…

I took this photo at the monkey forest in Ubud, Bali, in November 2015. It grabs my attention every time I see it, and I consider it one of the best photos in my collection. I like its simple composition with a blurred foreground and background emphasising the main subject. The monkey’s eyes gaze directly at the camera, compelling the viewer’s engagement, and the face is a little tilted, creating tension. I also like that the photo is almost all brown, including the monkey’s eyes. Brown is one of the blandest colours in photographs, and it pleases me that I could create…

My highlight of 2014 was when I travelled to Europe to join my two sons at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival, a week of music and young fun. I was the odd one out, probably the oldest camper among about 80,000 Danes and other Europeans in their twenties. It was a peak experience. This photo is not a peak achievement. It was taken on a little travel camera that I could risk at the festival. The stage lighting completely blows out the centre of the image, and the rest is very noisy because of the high ISO setting. But the photo is flawless in…

I have a few street photos that I particularly like. This one has a story. My wife Marg didn’t see me take this photo, near the docks area in Edinburgh, Scotland. She didn’t know about it until we returned to Australia and I sorted through the photos. One night we showed our travel photos to some friends. She saw the photo and, at first, had no comment. But after a moment she saw the way the hand on the bag almost connects to the arm of the owner. “Oh, have you noticed that?” she said. “The hand in the picture on the…

By 2012, with a full-frame camera, I finally felt like I could capture digital images that could compare to those taken by any other photographer. I became more intentional. I now had a quality Nikon camera with a couple of Nikkor lenses, and I set out to make photos that would justify my indulgence. I started to work at creating photos, rather than simply taking the opportunities that presented themselves. As I paid more attention to what I was doing, I dredged up some of the old knowledge that I had put on hold during the family years. In the photo of…

At the end of 2010, the Albany Entertainment Centre opened, providing a focal point for photos at the town’s waterfront. From 2011, I found myself drawn back to the waterfront time after time, just to explore the possibilities of this striking piece of architecture. Early in 2011, I was lucky enough to spot a couple of dolphins casually cruising through the marina, and caught this photo as one of them surfaced. You would not get this photo today, because the marina is now full of boats. At this stage, all the pens were empty as the marina awaited its official commissioning. On…

When I got interested in photography and bought my first film SLR, I was in the minority. Most people in those days, if they used a camera at all, were happy with a Kodak Instamatic or similar. My enduring interest in capturing good quality images means that I continue to want quality cameras and lenses. Just as my first Praktica SLR was a stepping stone to better equipment, so the Nikon D50 was showing its limitations and I wanted better. By 2010, I knew enough about the digital camera world to know that I wanted to go to a full frame camera,…

Sorting through the photos for 50TTL, I was taken by surprise by the significance of this one. Back in the entry for 1983, I included the pic of the day our child Rachel was born, the first of four children to come into our lives. This photo, 26 years later, was taken at the moment that our youngest child, Nick, stepped into his car to drive to Perth, and became the last of our offspring to leave home. What an amazing set of bookends! Some people plan for records like this. They photograph their children every year against the door jamb where…