One year on

Every single year I say. "Man that years gone fast." and everyone says. "Oh I know right?! totally." 

This time it's no different, the year really has gone fast. I've been at the Illawarra Mercury for ONE whole year now and 'how has it been' you ask? ---- It has been awesome, as simple as that. 

I'm grateful that I've been given so many fantastic opportunities at my work, I've been in planes flying over the Illawarra, I've been on boats cruising around in the lake, I've been up and around Sydney shooting random stories and I've had amazing opportunities to shoot sports like the NBA,   A-League, NRL, State of Origin and soon the NRL Grand Final. I don't think many photographers get the chance to shoot such big and important sporting events, let alone a cadet.

In Gladstone, I really had no one to look up to, my boss was a self taught photographer who had only been in the game a year longer than me and was too focussed on her wedding business. Here its been different, I have colleagues who collectively, maybe have over a hundred years of experience in the game. They've won Walkleys, PANPA's, shot World Cups, Olympics, Commonwealth Games, travelled around the country, travelled the world, you name it, they've done it all. 

These guys are people I really look up to, I don't tell them because... that would be stupid... but they are everything I always wanted to be when I was growing up. 

So basically, what i'm trying to say is, I'm pretty happy with my job. There's not many people who can say. "I'm doing what I actually studied at uni, I get to take photos every, single, day." I'm extremely grateful that I even HAVE a job, being a photographer is hard enough, a NEWS photographer.. they are certainly very slim pickings...

My first year has been a bit of a learning curve, I started off confidently, lost all motivation and confidence in my imagery halfway through, but feel like I've been coming strong for the last couple of months. Hopefully this upward trend continues and I can start to really spread my wings and get out there and do what I know I can. We'll have to wait another 12 months and see..

Until then,

Chris.

State of Origin - Game Two

I just spent the last hour or so trying to write a blog post about Origin and what the experience was like. It didn't work. I ended up writing real short sentences that ended abruptly and made no sense - like that. so... I just deleted it all and i'll start again.

I can't describe what shooting Origin was like, I can't describe what it felt like because it was just that damn special. I know there are lots of photographers who shoot sport all the time and have excelled in their craft and shoot events like grand finals, olympics, world cups etc etc, so for them, this is just another Sunday afternoon shooting sport.

For me, i'd never done anything this big, this momentous.. this exciting and definitely NOTHING ever that involved 80,000+ fans cheering and chanting in a deafening roar. 

It all went so quickly and felt like a blur, there was times I got overwhelmed by the enormity of the event and lost track of what I was doing and felt flustered and actually angry at myself. I've shot league before, but this was some other kind of beast, just faster and harder. Normally when I shoot league, I place myself at the end of the field and let the players come to me, i'm lazy like that. At Origin, we (photographers) were assigned positions and had to stick to them. No excuses. I'm not fit, i'm the first person to admit it, if it were up to me i'd eat all day and get super fat. Unfortunately, i'm also very vain and care about how I look, so I haven't let myself get that fat - yet.

I was stuck on the eastern wing and had to run up and down, all night. Not fun. It's especially not fun running up and down with two 1DX's, a 400mm and monopod. I'm sure I pissed off more than one of the other photographers when I dropped my 400 on them when I switched from tele to wide. My bad..

I was lucky enough to be there when NSW finally broke their 8 year losing streak. I knew it would be huge if NSW won, but I never expected it to be THAT big.

From watching my first State of Origin match two years ago in a pub in Gladstone, surrounded by a sea of blue and purple Maroon (mostly purple Maroon) I would never have imagined that two years later i'd be there shooting it.

Lions, bats, hawks and dragons.

Unfortunately I didn't shoot any of those animals, a dragon would be cool, maybe even cooler than a unicorn, but we all know how hard they are to find and shoot.

Chinese new year just passed earlier this month and they sent me down to Crown street mall and the Nan Tien buddhist temple to shoot some lunar new year celebrations. Nan Tien is beautiful, it's the largest buddhist temple in the southern hemisphere I hear, architecturally very beautiful with fantastic gardens as well. Having spent the last couple of Chinese New Year's in Gladstone it was nice to come to a city where they had a lion running and jumping around. Obviously it's not Melbourne, Sydney or Asia but hey, it's better than nothing.

Sometimes in my job I have to go and photograph things that are pretty confronting, things that make me feel uneasy, usually i'm not too bothered by things, i've been to my fair share of fatals, sure they're bad, I don't enjoy seeing people die, but i'm usually pretty distant from it. I'm an observer just documenting what's happening in front of me, however this time it was different. 

I wasn't at a fatal shooting someone who had driven into a truck and killed themselves at 100km/h, or someone who had been murdered by their significant other, it was a bat, a grey fruit bat. We covered a story about people putting nets over their fruit trees because they didn't want birds or bats eating their fruit, sounds fair enough, when I was growing up my uncle would always put nets over his apple tree to deter the birds - and it worked - however I never thought about what would happen if they got trapped or if they ever injured themselves on the nets. 

The job description for this was pretty basic "meet such and such who is a carer of fruit bats." in my head I had the perfect shot, she would be smiling at me and her arm would be out with some bats hanging off her. Brilliant photo, lets go. 

I walked up and introduced myself and prepared for my shoot, I asked to see the bat we'd be shooting. She scurried off to the other room and pulled a bat out of a cage who'd been severely injured when caught in nets. 

It was not what I expected, he was dying, practically dead. She pulled him out slowly and he let out what seemed like his final breath, the smell of rotting fruit is what struck me. Here was this little creature about to die, dying right in front of my lens. 

I'm usually not bothered by these things but anything to do with animals hits me right to the core. We shot him for about 10 minutes and when we put him back, Sandra, the fruit bat volunteer told me. "He's gone." She slowly put him back in the cage and covered him with his blanket. 

Feeling pretty despondent I asked to see if she had any bats which were on the up, not so.. dead, to be blunt, luckily she had some.

Speaking of 'on the up' the Wollongong Hawks won their 4th game in a row last week against the New Zealand breakers. The hawks have been pretty up and down this year, unfortunately NBL is no where near as big here as it is in other countries, there are rumours of clubs shutting down due to lack of funding and low ticket sales, but the Hawks are one of, if not the only original club left since the inception of the NBL in the 70's. They're playing for their 5th win in a row tonight, fingers crossed they get there.

Last week I shot my first NRL game, I don't know anything about league but being in a stadium with thousands of fans cheering really gets the hairs on your neck to stand up. I've shot league before but never at a professional level. I don't know any of the players, hopefully I can learn them within the next few months so shooting them and identifying them will be a LOT easier. 

End of an era

When I drove into Wollongong for the first time nearly 6 months ago, the first thing I saw on the horizon was the Port Kembla stack. It's hard to not notice it, standing nearly 200m high it was the tallest thing in the Wollongong skyline.

Within my first few days of working at the Mercury, I was told that the stack was going to come down, it was going to be blown up. How could you not be excited about that?! I'd never seen anything get blown up or demolished before, so as you could guess, I was pretty excited.

However, the months passed and the stack was still standing, I grew to really like the stack. As a non Wollongong local, it was always reassuring to drive into Wollongong and see the stack standing so high in the skyline acting like a beacon to navigate your way back.

When the date was finally confirmed as to when the stack was going to come down we went in a frenzy shooting everything and anything stack related. As the weeks went by it seemed that we shot something stack related everyday, safe to say, we were all pretty relieved when it was all over and done with.

On the day of the stack demolition I made sure to wake up nice and early, 5am early, to get some sunrise shots of the stack for the last time. Unfortunately where I was situated I had a pretty average sunrise, the skies were pretty washed out and the light was in a less than ideal place to get nice colours in the sky. I set myself up with a 200mm lens with a 2x converter to get in tight enough to see the stack but not so tight as to cut out the lake and houses on the horizon.

And just like that, it was over and done with. 4 years to build, stood high in Wollongong for 50 years, felled in 20 seconds. 

Natural light or flash?

Sometimes natural light is the best light, especially when it comes through a window or better yet, a window with some scrim over it. However, I like to flash the crap out of everything I shoot.

I never used to like using flash, when I was first starting photography I hated flash, partly because I didn't have a flash, but also because I didn't know how to use it, so I learned to shoot without it, using the available light, finding where the light was and moving my subjects into the light. Come Tafe and university, I still hated flash, refused to use it, I found that it got in the way of my shooting style and had to force myself to use it more and more. It wasn't until third year when I finally realised there was a reason for using a flash (obviously) and I made myself use it more and more.

Since working as a full time photographer I hardly never use flash on an assignment. The reason I use flash is because it is the easiest and best way IMO to isolate your subjects from the background. I've always loved lifestyle/editorial styled photographs and knowing how to use your flashes is the best way to do that - i've found.

There are often times when I walk onto a site and just stand there looking at the light. The old "put the hand in front of the camera and check the light" trick is used 99% of the time when walking into a room or out in the open. Often i'm looking at the quality of light, sunny, overcast, the direction it's coming from and how the shadows are falling from the light - if any.

Sometimes I come across a scene that I want to use and am too stubborn to change it even though the light isn't right. There are many times when I want to put my subject in a certain spot but the light isn't right, casting too many shadows, throwing too much light onto my subject - or not enough, that's when throwing in a bit of flash helps - a lot.

As you can see, I like using flash. I try to make it look as natural as possible, although you can tell there's flash in there I try not to make it look overdone.

So why do we go with natural light sometimes? Good question, I don't even know myself, but I normally go with natural light if i want a certain 'look'. The word 'look' is a pretty broad term, especially as a photographer but for me I will use natural light if the light is right. It doesn't really explain much, but just like when I shoot a frame and I know it's a good shot, there's something inside that lets you know "yep, that's the shot". Sometimes the natural light compliments the subject matter and I will often opt to use that instead of flash. The shot below, I didn't feel the need to have to isolate my swimmer from the crowd or from the beautiful mountains behind him, he is part of the image, a part of the story. The light hit the mountains perfectly and the sun was creating a beautiful rim light on the subjects.

Sometimes the natural light is SO good you have no option but to shoot it. The shot below in the steelworks was a natural light shooters dream. There was a BIG open doorway on left and a HUGE skylight 20m above the subject which lit up the whole area. The steelworks was under maintenance, so all the doors were open, normally it's dark and gloomy in there, however on this day everything was open resulting in a beautifully lit photo. The skylight above is what makes the photo, the light lit up enough of the steelworks to add some location and context to the shot. The beauty of soft light (like below) is that it almost creates no shadows, the light fades off gradually without the harshness which you normally see in broad harsh daylight.

 
Sometimes I mix flash with natural light. The below shot could've been replicated with flashes, but in this instance the natural light was perfect. I had my subject sit in her sitting area where the light streamed in perfectly lighting her up adequately. As my foreground subject who is a cleaner, was in deep shadow because I was exposing for the daylight outside, I added a little bit of fill flash to light up the inside of the house and her to create a more natural looking scene.

Like my point earlier, sometimes natural light is just too good to say no.

Relying purely on natural can be challenging sometimes as you need to make sure you're not putting your subjects face in complete shadow. Using natural light slows me down, it makes me wait for the decisive moment when the light falls perfectly on the subject, it's very much a waiting game, but when it works, it works very well indeed.

So what's my conclusion? I really don't have one, there is no right or wrong answer. Light is light, use what works best in your vision, use what works best to best tell your story.

Until next time..

Ciao.