Updated 18/12/2008

Kia ora tatou:

A number of you may remember a post where I drew attention to the fact that I had been challenged to pick up my film camera again.

The results were exciting and opened me to old/new possibilities in picture-making. I will restate that: it opened me to revisiting old school technologies and incorporating them into a new way of working. Can I try that again: it offered the opportunity to take old-school technologies and use old methodologies to make…O, forget it.

When I walked away from film some 3 years ago, I never thought I would return, and all that knowledge gathered over a 15-year stretch with fil would become redundant. For  some reason, I held on to my EOS 1vHS. Back then I could have got a reasonable amount for the camera. Today a camera (hardly-used) which cost me $4.5k to buy is worth, at best, $300 to trade. All that time it has sat there, forlorn and forgotten, in my gear safe. In the last few weeks, however, it has had more work than my 1DS Mk III.

And I am loving it (are you reading this, Doc? Stop sniggering). (more…)

When you come to my fights and I’m under the lights
and you see that my footwork is false
don’t count me out, at the start of the bout
I’m just doing the secondary waltz
doing the secondary waltz

- Mark Knopfler (from the Kill to get Crimson album)

I blame Mark Knopfler. It is all his fault.

Sometimes I am as influenced (read: informed) by music as I am by what I see, and sometimes music affects my perception of the landscape. Heaven knows what I will produce if I start listening to Metallica or ACDC while I am on the road!

Lately I have been giving myself permission to move beyond the representational, to move further into post-visualisation and expressionism. Let me explain. (more…)

Data: Canon 1DS Mk II, EF 100-400/4.5-5.6L, 1/640 @ f5.0, ISO 100

Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to
see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object
enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of
Heaven reflected in the shadows.
::: Claude Monet :::

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the
artist, not of the sitter.
::: Oscar Wilde :::

It has taken me 2 years to get back to this image, to finally understand the feelings I had at the time I made it, to realise what was in my heart at the time and bring it out into the light. My photographs are like that, which is probably why I have so many in my catalogue (>120 000) and why I only ever delete the duds. I never know when an image that has been sitting back there in the shadows, patiently (or impatiently awaiting its time, will stir restlessly out there on the corner of my vision, will shuffle grumpily in the darkness, raising a small cloud of dust and attracting my attention. (more…)