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From late 1997 into 1998, my photographer friend and I focused our attention on a publishing project. We gained a contract to write and illustrate an oral-pictorial history of the Kalgan River catchment area near Albany. The resulting book, called Long Pools of Silence, was published late that year. Most of the photos were taken by my friend, and very well at that. I did the writing, but I also contributed a couple of photos taken at times when he was unavailable. One of mine tells a story. It is a photo of a wine press competition, taken at the Porongurup Wine…

At the end of 1995, I left my job at the regional newspaper and started a new life as a freelancer. For the first time since I started taking photos in 1968, my camera became a significant part of my work. I took photos that I would use to pitch for work in magazines. I wrote the articles, but sometimes I enlisted the help of a good friend who was a professional photographer to take the final images. The photo above shows Clive Malcolm, a well-regarded agricultural scientist in Western Australia. Clive has since passed away, but at this time he was…

The camera fault that I described in the last post is evident again in this photo. In this pic, the family is looking out over the Great Australian Bight, on a six-week road trip to the eastern states. I took a similar pic in 1989, and the scene would look almost the same if you took a photo there today, apart from the people. As I mentioned previously, tourist spots often frame the photo for you. I shot plenty of film on this trip, including a few tourist spots, but my main focus was my own family and our adventure together. I…

In the previous blog, I talked about the space we found for our family when we moved onto a rural property. The children had more space inside the house and plenty of room to play outside, not that you would know it from the photo of the three older ones squeezed inside the rabbit hutch. It is still a mystery how they got in and out. Photos like this can be problematic for modern cameras that tempt users to rely on autofocus. Any autofocus system you can find will want to focus on the wire in this pic, not on the faces.…

My photo output started dropping around 1993. No doubt this was partly due to the demands of family life, especially since we moved to a rural property that year. It took a lot of weekend work, but the property was a great place for our kids to continue growing up. The photo above expresses the togetherness of the family and the space of our two-hectare property, although this is only a small part of it. However, family and home duties became a significant focus for me, and photography not so much. In these years, I took a few rolls of film each…

In 1992, my photo output dropped. This is one of the few photos I took that year, as far as I can tell. It is a photo of our kids with their cousins. It was taken at Meelup Beach near Dunsborough in Western Australia. I include it in 50TTL because it is such a jag. When I organised the families into this group, I knew I wanted to take a photo something like this. I did not know it would turn out to look quite so intentional. To me, it has always looked like a photo taken in front of a studio…

Are the baby photos getting boring? This is the end of them, I promise … until grandchildren, anyway. But here I did not select a portrait of our new son Nick on his own, but in the arms of his older brother Tim, then five. It presages a future in which two brothers become great mates. For a time, as adults, Tim and Nick would eventually share a house, work as a team building flatpack kitchens, recreate together through slacklining, and mix with overlapping circles of friends. The photo shows good mates in the making, caught at the very beginning. I suppose…

Here’s a photo taken in the mist on a bushwalk in the Stirling Range. Three of us had decided to walk from Bluff Knoll to Ellen’s Peak. On a Friday night after work, we climbed Bluff Knoll in the dark and bivouacked at the top. On the Saturday, clouds clung to the peaks, reducing visibility to a few metres. We were unable to see the landmarks around us through the heavy mist, and we searched for hours for the right trail to lead us onto the ridge towards Ellen’s Peak. The first photos I ever took up Bluff Knoll were in similar…

Travel photography was not part of my repertoire in the early family years. I had a small taste of it when I hitchhiked around Europe in 1977 but for some years after that I did not have the funds to travel much. However, in 1989 my brother announced that he was getting married in Sydney, where he lived. Family members who lived in Western Australia decided to go to the wedding – and then the airline pilots went on strike. So we drove. Mum, my youngest brother and I set off to drive from Albany to Sydney and back. Another brother was…

In Australia’s Bicentenary, our daughter Louise was born. This photo is a cute baby snap from very early in her life. I don’t think new babies express their inner states on their faces very well. Discomfort is well expressed by a cry, but apart from that their face muscles seem to contract and relax fairly randomly as they work on developing control over their bodies. It seems to me that they start with their eyes and work their way outwards. Baby photography is especially hard when babies are only a few weeks old. It demands a combination of patience, luck and timing.…