9B Blog – Page 3 – Two Degrees of Separation

Making video content – the 3 essentials

15 years ago I joined the public service.
I know this, because my eldest child is now 15 and I joined the public service when he was born, because I was sick of being made redundant in the video production world.
In 2009 I was lucky enough to start the video team at DHS…and by ‘team’ I mean ‘me trying to teach myself how to shoot and edit videos, while desperately pretending that I knew what I was doing’ (full disclosure, my time in video production had been as a Producer…so I was really good at organising things, but not so good at the actual making of things).
11 years and one department change later, I’m now the manager of a creative team with three visual designers and two videographers.
A LOT has changed in this time for video. In 2009 only a few government departments had internal video people…now pretty much every deparment has a video team. Video used to be the high-end tool that was wheeled out to launch only the biggest and most prestigous projects…now videos are part of a daily social media content plan.
But some things have stayed the same, and so I thought I’d share the three essential ingredients I believe every video should have…so essential, that my team won’t work on projects that don’t contain all three!

Essential 1 – A Story

The days of people watching a video simply because it’s there, are gone…nowadays your videos need to engage and retain your audience. The best way to do this is with a story.
You can list the benefits of your new project or initiative as much as you like, but people don’t connect with projects and initiatives…they connect with people. So if you want to connect with your audience, you need to tell a story about how your project or initiative has benefited a person, or a family or a community.
So for example, training and apprenticeships are a great idea and you can talk a lot about the levels of funding and courses available…but that’s not going to make for an interesting video.
Or you can show the story of someone who grew up watching motorsport with her Dad and asking what things were and how they worked…and who has now done training in motorsport and has her Dad asking her what things are and how they work

Or someone who was originally a florist, and is now driving heavy machinery on major projects:

Never underestimate the power of a story!

Essential 2 – A Storyteller

Once you have your story, you also need someone who can tell the story in a way that will engage with your audience.
Now I know that the first option most people think of is to get the head of the organisation, or the CEO, or anyone in a senior role to do the talking on camera. After all, these people can say ‘This agile project will deliver key outcomes to our stakeholders and offer synergies with the sector’ without even flinching!
Plus, nothing helps get a video approved quickly, quite like having the person approving it, also being the star.
But I can promise you that it will not resonate with an audience, as it just won’t feel authentic. What you need is someone with an actual experience of what your video is focussing on…and if they’re too nervous or shy to talk on camera, then you need one of their peers, or a frontline worker who has seen how they’ve changed. In short, you need someone who your audience is going to like and want to listen to.
If you go with the boss, you will get all the right words in the right order…but if you go with someone who is actually telling their story, you’ll get a little piece of unscripted magic that people will genuinely engage with.

https://vimeo.com/372272765

Let your story teller tell their story in their own language

Essential 3 – A Visual Element

Video is a visual medium. So you need to tell your story visually, and you need to engage people visually. If you look at any of the videos above you will see that only about 10-15% of the footage is the person talking to camera, that vast majority is footage that tells the story and engages the viewer.
So before you commit to a project, ask what is the visual element of this video. If the project is a consultation, or a roundtable or a mentorship…just be aware that the footage of people talking to each other will be engaging for about 6 seconds…after that, you’re going to be in struggle town. If you absolutely have to make a video about something that is ostensibly about peope talking to each other, then it may be better to keep your powder dry and make a video about what the consultation/roundtable/mentorship actually resulted in (as that’s much more likely to feature people actually doing something…rather than discussing the many somethings they may or may not do!)
Also, the reality is that if you’re posting your content on social media, there is a VERY strong chance that the video will start playing without any audio, so you will need some REALLY engaging visuals if you want to convince people to unmute the audio and keep watching.

Even if your footage is just people talking…you can still make it visually engaging.

Dance = easy to show visually,
Farming = easy to show visually
Psychology = not so easy to show visually

So there you go, the three things we demand are part of any video project we commit to creating.
Next week I’m going to talk about the challenges of getting a video approved…especially in a Government context.

iPhone photograpy …the follow up edition

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about using my iPhone on an overnight hike. Regrettably this did not result in Apple swiftly getting in touch and insisting that I take up a role with them as their official photographer. In fact all it did yield was some people asking me how I actually got the shots to look like they did.
Now clearly, only an idiot would give away their trade secrets…so here I go.

It’s not about the technology…no wait…it is!

Earlier this year I upgraded from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 12 Pro. Now I can promise you that if you have an older phone, then the tips I’m going to give you will help you get better photos…but I also know that if I had taken these photos on my old phone, they wouldn’t have looked anywhere near as good. And besides, the battery would only have lasted for the first 35 minutes of the hike.
Composition and technique help…but so does millions of dollars of Research and Development! So as with most things in photography, the more money you throw at your equipment, the more people say ‘How did you get that photo?!’
But telling people you can take better photos by dropping $1,200 on a phone seems like the sort of advice that inevitably leads to a global financial crisis (albeit one that is beautifully captured in photos on Instagram), so here are some tips that won’t cost you a cent!

Light bro

We’ve all had that experience of incredible light. Whether it’s the last fading light of a summer’s day, or the first golden rays in the morning, or that incredible light that comes after a big rain storm. You can take pretty much any photo in that light and it will look amazing. Why? Because the light is being diffused. Whether it’s because the sun is just rising or setting and so is only hitting you with about 10% of its light…or because the light is being reflected around by moisture in the air. The result is beautiful soft light.
The antihesis of this is pretty much any photo taken in Australia from 10am – 5pm, where the brutal sun just a makes everything look flat and unispired.
So the first step to getting a great shot on your phone is to get up nice and early when that light is at its subtle best.

‘I love the look of Pano mode in the morning!’

Setting the exposure

If you have your phone with you…bwah ha ha! Just kidding. Of course you have your phone with you! So seeing as you have your phone with you, load up the camera and find a shot where there is something bright (a window or light), and something dark (perhaps an open cupboard or shaded area), and then put your finger on either of these spots. When you put your finger on the bright part, you should see everything else get a little darker…and when you put your finger on the darker part, you should see that the everything gets brighter (to the point where the bright part gets really bright).
I know what you’re thinking ‘Cool story Chris…but how does this help me?’
Well, the reason this is happening is because normally your phone is looking at a scene and trying to find the right balance so that the bright parts aren’t too bright and the dark bits aren’t too dark. It’s a bit like making a decision by committee, you don’t come up with the best result…just the one that people hate the least. When you put your finger on the screen you are telling your camera ‘This is the part that I want you to get right…and everything else can just work around it!’ So for example with this shot, it’s the colour in the sky that draws you in.

But if I had just taken this photo as the phone wanted to take it, it would have tried to capture the detail in the shadows on the log in front, or the hills, and so would have added a lot of light…and in doing so, would have made the sky a white mess. So I put my finger on the sky, told the phone that this is what I want it to get right, and this is the result.
Tragically I have missed out on highlighting the beauty of the birdshit on the log…but these are the sacrifices you have to make as a photographer.

Similarly if you’re ever at a gig or a concert and someone is up on stage with a spotlight on them, press on the screen where their face is so that the phone knows to expose for that and it will make the background really dark, but have them perfectly lit.
There was a distinct lack of spotlights on the hike we did…but there some burnt out tree stumps…so exposing for the person’s face in the full light, made the blackened stump fall away to a perfect black background.

Stand in this burnt out stump son…Daddy’s taking a photo.

Composition

I think we’ve all had the experience of walking into an incredible natural scene, being overwhelmed and taking a photo…then thinking “Wait…that looks a lot more shit than I remember!” I call this the ‘Every phone photo ever taken of the moon’ phenomenon.
My non-scientific belief is that the experience you have is of feeling humbled by all that you’re taking in, but your phone can’t replicate that feeling (an iPhone 12 makes you feel many things…but ‘humble’ is not one of them).
My photographic approach to dealing with this is wonderfully contradictory!
First and foremost you need something in the foreground to give the grandeur behind it some perspective.

At the same time…going for the ‘Pano’ approach allows you to take in a larger portion of the scene, while getting rid of a lot of the sky and ground (I think as humans we can see a bit of sky and a bit of the ground and imagine how the rest of the sky and ground looked). Unless the sky or the ground is the part that’s interesting, focus the viewer’s eyes on what you want them to be looking at.

Also, speaking as someone who once had to ‘stitch’ 3 photos together in Photoshop (before this was an automated process)…the fact that you can just wave your camera around a scene and your phone will turn it into something comprehensible, is as much a modern-miracle as any life-saving drug!

Get low

We spend most of our lives walking around and looking at things from between 5-6 ft high. So if you want your photo to get people’s attention, try shooting from a different height. In particular…get low…especially if there’s water around for a reflection!

Getting high can also help your photography…but that feels like a different blog.

View post on imgur.com

Post-production

This may come as a shock…but I didn’t buy a special edition iPhone to take my black and white shots…I actually converted them to black and white in post-production! Similarly, I will almost always adjust the contrast, or pull back the exposure, or raise the shadows, or add a vignette to a photo before I publish them.
The person looking at the photo doesn’t get to smell what I was smelling or hear what I was hearing…so I’ll be damned if I don’t try my best to engage them visually!
All of these options built into your phone, and you can ‘undo’ any change you don’t like. So start experimenting and see what you can do!

If you have access to something like Adobe’s ‘Lightroom’, then you can have even more fun working on your photos…just try to get past the ‘add heaps of ‘clarity‘ to everything’ stage as quickly as possible. Like ‘instant noodles’ and ‘undercut’ haircuts, we all have to go through that stage…but it’s nothing to be proud of.

So there you go…some free tips on how to raise your phone photography game…for everything else, just drop a distressing amount of money on a new phone!

‘Get back to work Stewart!’

‘Are you back in the office yet?’ is now pretty much the follow up question to ‘So… what do you do?’
The world has gone through a seismic shift in how and where we work…and the push is now on to get things back to how they used to be. But I’m not going to be leading the charge back in to the office five days a week, in fact I think this is a once in a generation chance to tilt the balance back in favour of workers. So I’m no expert…but here are my thoughts on returning to the office.

A bit of history

The Industrial Revolution saw work move away from the home and farm, and into factories and cities. Employers needed people to work in their offices and factories, and workers needed money…so the happy relationship between employers and employees began. The employers would say ‘How about you work 7 days a week and we’ll let your children work alongside you for free?!’ and the employees would say ‘How about we go for 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest and 8 hours of play and we celebrate with a public holiday?!’ This happy game of tug-of-war has been waging ever since.
I think that over my career the balance has been gradually heading in the employer’s favour. Where it was once expected that people would do their best Dolly Parton and work from 9-5, that eventually became ‘look we’re not going to say that you can’t leave at 5pm, but we ARE going to create a culture that makes it frowned upon’…and then eventually, ‘of course you can leave at 6pm…but we WILL expect you to respond to emails at 10pm’.
The trade-off for this has been impressive wages growth…Bwah ha ha! Just kidding! Wages growth has been falling spectactularly over the last 10 years. In fact, unless you’re someone like a CEO or a politician who can vote on their own payrise, you’ve probably been working longer hours for little or no extra money.
Now of course these extra hours also come at the expense of time doing things you actually want to do, like spending time with your family, or doing exercise, or catching up with friends.
So are we doing all of this extra work out of the kindness of our hearts? Nah. We just have mind-blowing levels of personal debt (an average of $250K per household), and you know what’s a real-great motivator for doing whatever is asked of you so that you don’t lose your job? Knowing that you’re only just keeping your head above water with that full-time job…and that losing that job would probably see you lose where you live.

Enter the Pandemic

Suddenly the working world headed home. After years of being told that ‘we can’t have people working from home regularly as we don’t have the IT systems to support it…and besides we don’t REALLY trust you to work if we can’t see you!’, we miraculously discovered that in fact we could.
We also discovered, that just as in Industrial Revolution times, it was a terrible idea to have your kids with you at work, as they drain your broadband signal and ruin your Zoom meetings.

But a lot of people also discovered that not having to commute to and from work every day gave them a couple of extra hours in the day. For me this meant that I could get out for a good run or bike-trainer session, have a shower and still be ready for work at 9am.
When the kids returned to school, it meant I could do pickups and drop-offs and have those great conversations that only happen in the neutral territory between school and home.
It also meant that instead of only cooking decent meals on the weekend when I had the time, I could now cook a healthy meal from scratch every night!

As a human

So as a human, despite the existential dread that comes with a pandemic, I can’t remember feeling more fulfilled than over the past 15 months. The concept of work/life balance, has become more of a reality, with work having to sit alongside the little things that make you a good person, rather than dictating what little time you have to devote to them.

Now I totally realise that this is 100% my experience and is in no way reflective of other people. But outside of people with corner offices and a PA to do their photocopying, I haven’t heard a whole lot of people saying ‘I can’t wait to get back in the office 5 days a week!’
So I’m really hoping that we don’t just blindly go back to what we were doing before COVID-19, as I feel that we have been given an incredible opportunity to take stock of what works for us as people, not just employees.

*On the off-chance that there is any confusion…clearly these are my opinions and not in any way those of my employer. I am speaking purely on my own behalf.

The best camera is the phone you have with you.

There’s an old photography adage that ‘the best camera you have, is the camera you have with you’. In other words, it’s no use bemoaning the fact that you don’t have your $5,000 camera as a Yeti rides past on a Segway…you need to use whatever you have at your disposal to capture this moment!
For the last 10 years this ‘camera you have with you’ has been a phone camera, and over the last 10 years the phone camera has evolved from ‘if you squint you can kinda see what I was trying to capture’ to ‘this is only half as bad as I would have done with my proper camera’. But last weekend I went for an overnight hike with my family at Wilson’s Prom, and my iPhone got promoted to ‘this is the only camera I need!’
So I thought I’d write a quick blog post about how it felt to take my proper camera gear with me…and never take it out of its case.

‘So I just push this button?’

There is a very specific feeling of dread that happens when someone offers to take a photo with your camera. Invariably this will be when you’re taking a group shot, and someone will say ‘Hey, do you want me to take the photo?’ Sadly, societal norms mean that you can’t respond by saying ‘That depends…are you going to f*&# this up?’ So instead you will switch all your settings to ‘auto’ and say ‘Just press this button. No, not that button…this button’. Then they will hold the camera at arm’s length as if it’s a feral cat that’s trying to maul them to death…will press a button other than the one that you told them to…will frame the photo so that it’s only your upper-bodies and 3kms of sky above you…and when you look at the photo, while everyone else is smiling, you have a look of ‘WTAF are you doing?!’ on your face.
But put a phone in their hands, and people will happily snap a series of in focus, nicely framed images where you are actually smiling…like this one!

About to embark on our first family overnight hike

‘OK guys…just hang on a second, Dad’s just going to take a photo’

You had best believe that any time this sentence is uttered…the response is a series of groans.
Worst of all, these groans are 100% justified. Because the translation of the sentence is actually ‘Hang on for five minutes while Dad breaks any momentum that we’d generated so that he can unpack his camera, then decide he needs to change lenses, then get increasinly angry as no-one is able to re-create the happy scene that had inspired him to take out his camera five minutes ago’. But with a phone, you can simply take out the camera as you walk and get the shot.

Bowl of porridge…and a bowl of coffee. Camping done right!

Zero fear of wading through water to take the shot.

Yes, but Chris, I’m an artist!!

Of course you are! And you will not be able to take epic landscape shots that you can blow up and print for your wall…or take tack-sharp portraits…but DAMN you can get pretty close!!!

Wide-angled black and white. Would I have loved to have had a dancer creating a similar shadow next to this branch? Yes…but dancers were very thin on the ground at Sealer’s Cove

More early morning shots. Pano mode with the wide-angle

The old ‘get them to stand inside a burnt-out log and look towards the sky’ shot.

The morning sun was breaking through the foliage in this one spot, so exposing the shot for that bright light made everything else fall off into darkness…or I carried a softbox and strobe for the entire hike in the hope of getting this shot. You decide.

Photos on the run

There may be times when I decide that it’s worth carrying the extra weight of my proper camera on a hike or bike ride…but there is NO chance I’m carrying a camera when I’m out for a run. Because I simply don’t need to make that any harder than it already is. But at the same time, I tend to do most of my running in the early morning as the sun comes up, and there have been many times that I’d wished I had a decent camera with me. Now I’ve got the best of both worlds. Now I can carry my phone, listen to podcasts, and if hypothetically speaking, there were an incredible sunrise…or a wallaby…or I see that the rest of family are about to paddle of up a river…I can take a shot!

Never pass up an opportunity to get a photo of a wombat

So there you go. I don’t intend this to be an advertorial for any phone in particular…nor am I about to sell my Fuji gear. But what a time to be alive when I can get these sorts of photos out of the same device that I can also ignore your phone calls on!

My top photos of 2020

As I count down the hours until I have to return to work for 2021, I thought I should enjoy my annual trip down memory lane by putting up my top 10 photos for 2020.
Now I know that in the past I’ve done my top 18 in 2018, and my top 17 in 2017…but there is simply no way I can be bothered doing 20 photos for 2020. I tore the tendons in my ankle, Ruth Bader Ginsberg died…and I’m pretty sure there was something else that happened that wasn’t good. So in no particular order, here are my top 10, and you can just assume the other 10 are screenshots from Zoom meetings where I’m saying ‘You’re on mute’.

National Photographic Portrait Prize

Impressed with how many times I can work the fact that I was a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize (NPPP) last year into conversation? Well you should be…and you should be glad I now have to devote equal gloating time to this and the Ironman I did in 2015.
This is a photo that acts as proof that it actually did happen. I actually did get to go to Canberra, and see my photo hanging in a gallery, and get a lanyard with that photo so that people could decide if they wanted to come over and talk to me about it, and that the event where it was all going to be announced had to be scaled back drastically because of COVID restrictions…and I thought that this was DEFINITELY THE WORST THING THAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME AS A RESULT OF THE PANDEMIC!!!
Good times…good times.

Horsing around

The day after the NPPP, we took my daughter and niece to The Saddle Club where they learnt how to groom, feed, saddle, and ride horses. In my head this was going to be an amazing place to get some photos…in reality, it was bushland that was recovering from recent bushfires and was in full sun that made everything look ‘meh’.
But at the end of the day, one of the instructors was walking along a corridor inside the house and I saw this photo opportunity. So all hopped on the confidence that being a finalist in the NPPP (and also an Ironman) brings, I asked if I could take a quick portrait, and this was the result.
I love the colours, and the light, and the fact that Grace was rocking a hat that I could never dream of wearing.

Opportunities and bees

Abandoned shed on the road to Warrnambool.

The last couple of times I’ve driven to Warrnambool, Google Maps has taken me via Camperdown and past this abandoned house/shed. Each time I’ve seen it I’ve thought “That would be a great photo!” But each time I’ve also thought “I’m already late for whatever it is we’re filming in Warrnambool so I can’t stop!”
But late last year I was heading home from a job (there’s nothing better than driving to Warrnambool, doing a days work and then driving home at the end of it!) and I saw the shed, and I saw the wheat, and I saw the skies, and I realised I had to pull over and get the shot or I would never forgive myself.
So I found a spot where I could park, and waded my way through the waste-high wheat, keeping a keen eye out for snakes. When I got to the shed I could see a small swarm of bees by the door. I’m not particularly worried about bees, and have a strong belief in ‘If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you’. So I took a few shot in and around the shed. But the whole time, there were a few bees flying around my head…then they started landing in my hair, then they started stinging my head, then I started flailing my arms wildly and running at high speed through the wheat back to the car, all the while trying not to drop my camera or get bitten by a snake (although I did wonder if I got bitten by a snake AND a bee at the same time, would I get super-powers?)
Mid-scamper back to the car I looked back at the shed hoping I wouldn’t see a plague of bees coming my way…instead I saw this shot. I took one shot standing up, and then another crouching down to make the wheat the foreground.
I was really happy with the result…and it nearly made up for the long drive home with bee-stings in my forehead.

Just a test

If there were a theme to the portrait shots that I’m really happy with, it would be ‘people not smiling, but not unhappy, in black and white’. This is a case in point.
On the last day that I had the GFX (Fuji’s Medium format camera) I spent the whole day taking portraits with my softbox. Dad was the first cab off the rank and so this shot was literally a test shot to dial in my settings. The shot was badly over overexposed, but the incredible amount of data in the medium format images meant I was able to pull it back in post-production, and it’s one of favourite photos from the day.
It’s also a fitting tribute to Dad’s ‘Lockdown beard’.

They shoot piers don’t they?

As mentioned in the previous photo, I was lucky enough to borrow an eye-wateringly expensive camera from Fuji and play with it for a couple of weeks. During that time we went to Lorne and one morning Josh and I got up super-early to take some photos down on the Lorne Pier. I got some really nice landscapey photos of the pier…but I always much prefer to have a human element in my shots. We were just about to go when this old guy in a bright yellow jacket started walking down the pier, I took a few snaps…and this one with the bird just above him just really clicked with me. I liked to imagine that he was such a wily fisherman that he always got the fish, and the birds knew it…that’s why they were circling him.

Outfoxed

An extra from a Wes Anderson film if ever I’ve seen one

In that wonderful time in between lockdown 1 and lockdown 2, we were lucky enough to get to Bright. The place we were staying had a billabong, and so I got up to get some ‘sunrise over water’ shots. I knew that these were going to be purely landscape shots, so I put my wide-angle 10-24mm lens on and trotted down to the billabong. As I stood there trying to work out the best shot, I heard a noise behind me. I assumed it was one of the kids coming to see what I was doing, but when I turned around I saw this fox. Now I know that foxes are pests and eat native animals…and so I shouldn’t have been so stoked to see it. But in my defence…check out that tail!
The problem was, I was stuck on my wide angle lens, so unless I could get really close to the fox, it was going to be a very small part of a larger picture. I walked to a different part of the billabong, and noticed that it followed me the whole way. It always kept a safe distance…but was clearly interested in what I was doing. So I just settled into one spot and waited. Sure enough, it came in a bit closer, and then a bit closer still. If I moved the camera in front of my face it moved back, so this was taken from the hip and with a lot of faith in autofocus.
To be honest I just wanted a memento to prove that this really did happen…I didn’t need to hear ‘Dad’s seeing foxes again’ from my kids.

‘Bones’

At the very start of the year, Holly and Josh got surfing lessons from ‘Bones’. He’s an incredible character who has been part of Sandy Point for as long as we’ve been going there.
I was out of surfing action as I had done my ankle and was still in a brace. But after the lesson I asked Bones if I could take a few photos. I was so relieved when he said ‘yes’ that I really rushed through the photos as I was paranoid about taking too much of his time. As a result, the photos were OK…but I didn’t think I’d really captured him as I see him.
Fast forward 11 months and Josh and I are heading out for a surf and Bones is walking in front of us. I had the GoPro with me to take some shots in the surf…so I grabbed this shot. I love the clouds, the green and blue and the leading lines of the fences…but most of all, I had finally captured Bones as I saw him.

Advanced photography in the surf

Josh tearing up the waves at Sandy Point

A good photographer should be able to see the shot they want, compose for it and then nail the execution. What they should NOT be doing, is setting their GoPro for burst mode and taking 10 shots in 3 seconds and simply pointing their camera in the general direction of their subject.
So for the record, I knew that if I took this photo at this exact moment, then I would frame Josh inside the breaking wave as it crashed over me. Furthermore, I was not joyfully surprised when I looked back at the ~~dozens~~ one single photo and saw this.

Caught by the rising tide

I know that for someone who spent a LOT of 2020 not being able to travel more than 5kms from my home…I sure do have a LOT of photos from the beach! Actually the majority of these photos were taken during that brief window between lockdowns. At the time it seemed insane to be travelling from Sandy Point for one weekend, then Lorne the next…after all, we had the rest of the year to travel!
Bwah ha ha! Bwah ha ha! Bwah ha ha ha!
I can’t begin to desribe the number of times Katie and I thanked our lucky stars that we travelled while we had the chance!
Anyway, this weekend at Sandy Point was meant to be the starting point of me borrowing the Fuji GFX. But in a magical example of the world mocking my best laid plans, the GFX body arrived in time…but the lenses didn’t.
So I was down on the beach, during an incredible sunset, cursing the fact that I had a $10K camera…but no lenses that would fit on it, when these two guys got caught out by a wave that came up a lot higher than its predecessors and I took this shot.
I was a bit filthy that I didn’t have the big medium format camera to get this photo, as the colours were so amazing…but in reality, this was such an instinctive shot, that I think I would still have been messing with the settings of the GFX as this unfolded before me.
As they say, ‘the best camera, is the one you have with you.’

2020 in a shot

2020 was a year of many things for our family. A lot of time inside, a lot time feeling that people outside were having fun and that we couldn’t be part of it, a lot of time walking ‘all of Brighton’…and a LOT of time being super grateful to have our Beagle ‘Marnie’ in the house.
I hope that after the front-line workers get their hard-earned thanks…the pets of Melbourne get some sort of acknowledgment for the work they did keeping us all together during COVID times.
So here’s to the dogs!

Uncle Jack & the iPhone

5 years ago I was lucky enough to work on a video shoot with Uncle Jack Charles. It was for an organisation called Malpa who are working to address the vast inequality in health between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. My job was basically to find a suitable location for the shoot (Malpa are based in Sydney, so they needed some local Melbourne knowledge). Never one to pass up an opportunity, I also bought along my camera to grab some stills during the shoot. I got some shots that I was really happy with…but this one haunts me to this day:

So close…but just missing the focus on the eyes.

This was taken literally as Uncle Jack was heading out through the house we were filming in. There was a light that just illuminated his face as we were walking and I quickly grabbed the shot. It wasn’t until I got it into Lightroom that I could see that I had hit the focus on his forehead instead of his eyes…I think I could have retired from photography knowing that I had peaked if I’d just got those eyes in focus!!!

Thankfully that sort of thing doesn’t stick in my head, or keep me awake at night, or re-surface any time I look back at these photos. So when Malpa got in contact again and explained that they needed to film Uncle Jack for a TVC, and that due to the ever changing COVID situation they didn’t think they could travel down for it, and so would like me to do it…I jumped at the chance.
I mean, had I Directed a TVC before? No.
Did I have a camera that could shoot 4K? Also, no.
Even if I could get a camera that shoots 4K, could I be trusted to shoot pictures and record audio at a quality that was acceptable for TV broadcast? No…again.
But, did this provide me with my best opportunity to get an in focus portrait of Uncle Jack Charles? Yes! So I took the gig.
Here’s how it went.

Location, location, location!

Malpa had said that they wanted a ‘grungy, Melbourne laneway’ for the location…but with $0 budget, there was no way I was going to find a cool laneway that we could section off for our use, and any other laneway that we tried to just rock up and shoot in ran the risk of traffic noise, people in their backyards, and of course if it was raining on the day, then we were stuffed. I also had some concerns about getting a man in his late 70s to walk along uneven cobblestones while looking to the camera delivering lines (the thought of the headline ‘Man who took out-of-focus photo of Uncle Jack Charles 5 years ago, now forces him to have a knee reconstruction after laneway mishap’ really didn’t appeal). But I found a few options near our house that had potential.

Then on my morning run one day, I found a location that offered both ‘native bush’ and some graffitied walls that could offer ‘urban grunge’…and more importantly ‘place to film if it’s raining’. I pitched the idea to Malpa and they were happy with it. So I now had two locations…this was going to be great!

As part of my rigourous pre-production, I headed back to the location in the mid-arvo, as this was when we were likely to be filming, to see if the light was ok. It turned out that there a significant difference in light between 8am when I had taken the photos…and 3pm when we returned. It was almost as if the sun had moved and become brighter over the course of the day…weird.
Unfortunately this meant that the graffiti just near the bush location was out of action as it was in full-shadow and was too dark. But if we just headed over the bridge (about 200m) and down to underpass on the other side, there were some great options.
We had two locations again…this was going to be great!

Timing’s everything

I got in contact with Uncle Jack to sort out a date for filming. Unfortunately, the first day that was an option for him was when I was going to be down at Warrnambool with the family, so I proposed a few dates in between when we got back from Warrnambool and when we headed to Sandy Point, but neither of these worked for him. Malpa were hoping to have the TVC’s ready for broadcast from Australia/Invasion Day, so our timelines were getting a bit tight. So I decided that if push came to shove, I could head back to Melbourne from Sandy Point to do the filming, and the return to Sandy the next day. The only day that didn’t work was Tuesday as that was when Josh and I were going to Tooraddin airfield for flying lessons, so I said to Uncle Jack “I can do any day after Tuesday”…and he said “Tuesday is great! Lock it in!”…and I thought ‘I think he’s messing with me!…but he’s somebody who has served time in Pentridge with Chopper…AND has worked with Hugh Jackman…I’m not going to risk it!’
So it was agreed that Josh and I would drive from Sandy Point to Tooraddin, have our flying lessons, then drive to Melbourne to film in the late arvo. I wasn’t going to be doing the edit, so I could just upload the footage overnight and we could head back to Sandy the next day.
Josh had been at the shoot 5 years ago…and I was keen for him to help out on this one as well.

Fuji comes through

I figured I was probably never going to get another chance to take some photos of Uncle Jack, and so decided to roll the dice and get in contact with Fujifilm Australia to see if I could borrow one of their Medium Format GFX cameras again. Against all the odds, and indeed against their better judgment, the magnificent Neil at Fujifilm made it happen! So I now had a confirmed time and location with an Australian National Treasure, a graffitied location that was going to make for an epic portrait, AND a medum format camera to take it with!
This was going to be great!!!

Can we shoot this on an iPhone?

Unfortunately the date I’d locked in with Uncle Jack didn’t work for the DOP (Director of Photography…cameraperson) that I had hoped to work with. This meant that I would have to shoot the video, and seeing as I didn’t have a camera that shot 4K (one of the requirements for the final product), I was going to have to hire a camera.
Now I CAN shoot on professional cameras, but in much the same way as I CAN eat an entire Tiramisu. Just because I can…doesn’t mean I should ( while both will lead to an amazing story to tell after the event…in reality, they will also lead to very high blood pressure, and no sleep).
If you’ve ever seen a film crew, you may ask yourself ‘What are ALL those people doing? Surely they don’t need all of them!’ And 90% of the time that’s true…but it’s in those critical 10% of times where you need a dedicated professional to get the best camera shot, or realise that that there was a background noise that ruined the take, or someone to say ‘you missed a line of dialogue here’, or to realise that the shot was a little out of focus…that can make a difference between the success and failure of your entire project.
With this in mind, I was a little wary of being the DOP, Director, Script supervisor, and sound recordist…especially if I was using a camera I didn’t know. So I asked to hire a friend’s camera that shot 4K and that I had shot on before…but promptly managed to miss this by a day.
So I suddenly had a script, an amazing actor, locations, a fancy stills camera…but no video camera that could shoot 4K!
Unless of course, I looked to use my new iPhone. After all, it shot 4K, did 10 bit colour, and had amazing autofocus & stabilisation. If I put my non-existent budget towards hiring some audio gear, and promoted Josh from ‘general dogsbody’ to ‘audio recordist’…and roped Katie into doing the clapper-board so that we could sync the audio, and using a reflector to bounce in light…then we might be able to make this work!
At the same time, who the hell turns up to a TVC shoot with a renowned Australian actor and says ‘Look, I’m a trained professional who clearly knows what he’s doing…now if you could just look at my phone and deliver your lines, that would be great!’?
So I did a LOT of YouTube research and eventually convinced myself that I could get the quality that I needed out of the iPhone…and acknowledged that one thing I do bring to a video or photo shoot is the ability to get people to relax and just be themselves. Could I do that while I was also trying work out f-stops and shutter speeds, and make sure I was in focus, and ensure I wasn’t moving the camera too much? Probably not.
Plus, if everything went to shit, I would at least have my phone handy to call my DOP and blame them for everything that had happened…or use Google maps to find the nearest deep hole I could throw myself into.

The shoot

Josh and I left Sandy Point at about 9.30am and arrived at Tooraddin airfield in time for our flights. Any day where flying a plane for the first time is the second most scary thing you will be doing that day, certainly makes for an interesting life.

We then drove back to Melbourne, picked up the audio gear, learnt how to use it, waited for Katie to finish work, then drove to the location. On the way there I saw someone driving a scooter with grey hair billowing from under the helmet…as we drew alongside, I realised that it was Uncle Jack. The man knows how to make an entrance!

Once we are all at the location, we did a full run through of the script with a static camera…then did a variation with some camera moves, and took some stills.
We didn’t really have enough to make a strong TVC with, but we still had our hero location under the bridge to do, so everything was going to plan.
But as we were walking to the next location, I realised that 78 year old men don’t walk as fast 45 year old men who are running on adrenaline and anticipation. By the time we had passed the midway point between location one and two (the bridge between the two locations), I was starting to realise just how insane my idea of getting a shot from the top of nearby hill was. By the time we had crossed the bridge and I had explained that we just had to walk down the hill to the underside of the bridge…Uncle Jack said that he didn’t think he could make it down there.
So what could I do?! Explain to a man who had fought against great injustice and who had overcome greater barriers than I could ever understand, yet was still willing to donate his time for a charity…that it was really important to my sense of artistic closure that he should suck it up and press on? Or come up with an alternative location and realise that it’s not all about me?
So we improvised a second location…and it looked like balls…and then we filmed on the bridge as another option, but there was too much wind, and if we looked one way we had too much sun behind Uncle Jack…and if we faced the other way, we could see a housing development, that sort of ruined the vibe. But we got it done, and when the video came back from the editor, you’d never know there was a problem in the first place. Why? Because Uncle Jack Charles is a freaking genius, and the level of energy he brought to his performance could have carried any TVC…and because I wasn’t a jerk and insist he worked an Olympic distance cross-country event into a video shoot, he still returns my emails!

So what have I learnt?

Always take on projects that challenge (and scare) you
Plan meticulously…but make sure you can improvise if you have to
Trust the technology and play to your strengths
Fujifilm Australia really do support their photographers
Katie and Josh are the best video crew you could hope for
Uncle Jack Charles is a genuinely amazing person, and I’m incredibly lucky to have had the chance to work with him

The TVC will be on SBS from today…and here are some stills from the day:

20 years in Preston

I’ve been pretty disappointed that the media seems to be fixated on the 20 year anniversary of the Sydney Olympic games…when something of equal importance happened in September of 2000, Katie and I moved into Preston. So to celebrate, here are my reminiscences on the last two decades in Melbourne’s North…based on the numbers.

$166K

In much the same way as I laughed maniacally when my parents spoke of buying a house for $40K…it now seems surreal to think that we were able to buy a house in Preston for just $166K…and we got it in this delightful colour!

According to the computer at Bunnings, this paint colour is called ‘Whose idea was this?’ green

2000 – Some beautiful concrete in the backyard

2020 – Believe it or not, we planted those two gum trees as tube stock when we moved in

Joni Mitchell metaphors – 0, Carparks – 2

While Joni Mitchell may have sung ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot’ as a metaphor for change, she only ever had the courage to sing about it. Preston, on the other hand, has put this into action!
This is the Bingo hall at the Preston market

In a rare moment of clarity, this hall was transformed into a little hub where brewers and food vans could sell their wares. There was amazing food, great beer… and you could even get your haircut upstairs!

They even got local artists to paint the walls

It was the sort of place that those of us on the Northern side of the hipster proof fence (aka Bell St) were crying out for! On a Summer’s evening you could head over, have dinner, have a beer and the kids could frolic freely! Unfortunately they opened it during the middle of winter, when no-one wanted to venture out to a carpark to drink beers…and by the time Summer rolled around…it was gone, and so was the Bingo hall.

We did gain some precious car spaces though!

At the TAFE we also decided that despite they’re being; a train station, 2 x bus stops, and tram stops all within walking distance…and a bike path right out the front…it was probably time for some more car-parking spaces. So we lost a full basketball court and a tennis courts.
Yay progress!!

2 + 1 = 21

To the untrained eye, this equation may look wrong…but NOT if you’re a property developer in Preston. Here you can see 2 houses and 1 hundred year old tree:

By the power of Preston…I give you 21 townhouses in their place!!!

We also converted a lawn bowls club into a multi-storey apartment complex…but the Trugo club and Girl Scout hall have remained derelict. We don’t like being predictable here in Preston.

100% increase in songs written about us

Yes, yes, yes, I know…”the house in ‘Depreston‘ by Courtney Barnett was actually about a house in Resorvoir”…I don’t care…’Dereservoir’ would have been a stupid name for a song.

50% reduction in lawnmower shops

There is a strip of shops on Murray Rd, just across from Preston West Primary School, that has retained its charm over the last 20 years. When we first moved in, of the 8 shops that were there…two were lawnmower sales and repair shops. Now admittedly I had seen other shopping strips that may have had two hairdressers…or perhaps two restaurants of the same nationality and not really batted an eyelid…but the fact that there were two lawnmower focussed businesses within 20m of each other always made me wonder what the back-story was. Had the two proprietors conspired to establish a lawnmower sales and repair hub in Preston that would draw people from near and far…or had one of the owners arrived at work one day, looked a few doors down and seen that a new shop had opened and was selling the exact same niche product that he was, and thought ‘Oh for F$&*s sake! Why here?!!”
Sadly one of the lawnmower emporiums is now gone, and with only about 6% of the population still having a lawn, I don’t know how long the other one will remain. But back in the day when we used to have a back lawn that justified the owning of a lawnmower…I wheeled my lawnmower through the streets of Preston and got it serviced there and had the blades sharpened…and it was magnificent!!!

The remaining mower shop…and the cafe that was originally called ‘The old lawnmower cafe’…despite not being an old lawnmower shop

I love that this old-school milkbar still exists. It’s been a rite of passage for my kids to head up here and buy milk (and usually get given lollies by the family that run the shop!)

There’s only 1 Preston Market

My Mum used to take me to the Preston Market every Thursday as a kid. So there are shops at the market that I’ve been going to for over 40 years.
I freaking love the Preston Market!
Whether it’s homemade sausages from the butcher, or wallaby shanks, or the ‘Royal mix’ from the nut shop, or fresh fruit and veg from Paradise Fruit, or pasta, or cheese, or coffee, or felafel or legit French pastries…the Preston Market has it. And I will fight to the death to keep it!

100% improvement in coffee

For some reason Preston resisted the urge to provide decent coffee for quite a while. There was always coffee on offer, but it tended be at a strength that would appeal to interstate truckers…and a temperature designed to invite a lawsuit. But about 13 years ago it began to change. The first place to start making the coffees I had been travelling to North Fitzroy to purchase was ‘Tasties’…then ‘Pomona’ started roasting and serving their own coffee, then Pam Lane opened at the market and ‘Himalaya, Heralaya’ achieved caffeine perfection.
But I will throw in an honourable mention to the coffee and biscuit place at the Preston Market (Coffee Central) whose lattes and Italian biscuits got this guy through a LOT of painting and renovating.

Those eyes contain defeat…but that white paper bag contains delicious Italian biscuits.

Other key metrics

18 yrs of marriage
3 kids
3 dogs
2 renovations
9 jobs
2 redundancies
1 burglary
7,300 coffees consumed (citation needed)
1,560 trips to the market
0 disputes with neighbours
$16,500 The money my Mum convinced me to put towards a home deposit…instead of the modified Honda Civic I wanted to spend it on
1 Street party
17 early morning hot-air balloon spottings
2 fox spottings
23 Huntsman spiders escorted off the property
1 person who described training greyhounds as being ‘better than having a yacht and taking it out to sea and having it sink’. Which continues to be the single best reason for me not training greyhounds…or sailing in yachts.
5 geckos discovered in our shed

A hell of a lot has happened in 20 years…and yet Preston hasn’t changed that much. I can still say hello to our 90 year old Greek neighbour Peter…and then use a combination of sign language and smiles to get through the remainder of the conversation. I can still head up to High St and get some amazing Chinese and Vietnamese food, it’s just that now I can also get gourmet pizza with bone marrow…or a tofu burger. I know that no matter how hard Vicroads tries to convince people NOT to drive through the red light at the corner of St Georges Rd and Cramer St…they will continue to do so. I know that even though I’ve tried to ‘walk all of Preston’, there will still be little laneways that will reveal themselves for the first time. I know there will always be a roaring Northerly to ride into along the St. Georges Rd bike path. And I know that I will be able to tell when it’s Ramadan by the number of cars parked outside the Mosque…and when it’s Chinese New Year by the dragon dancing in the market carpark…and when it’s 11.55pm on New Year’s Eve by all of the illegal fireworks being set off at Zwar Park.
But most of all I know I’ve spent the best 20 years of my life here in Preston, and until I can work out how to permanently retire to a secluded beach shack with enough power for a coffee machine and enough wifi for podcasts, this is where I want to stay.

Of ankles and pandemics

On January the 16th this year, things were looking up. I’d worked through Christmas and New Years acting as my Director while she was on holiday, and had achieved my lofty goal of not destroying the DET website or intranet. So now it was time for two weeks of holiday, starting with a trip to Sandy Point with the family. But first we had the weekend at home to tie up a few loose-ends, including working out what the hell was wrong with the pump on our water tank.
As such, I was at the top of the ladder looking into the tank and having one of my patented conversations with a tradie, where both of us desperately wish that I knew more about what I was talking to them about. We had finally established that the pump was cactus and that we would have to get a new one installed, and that it would be about $1K, and that ‘no, it wasn’t covered by the warranty’.
I’m not 100% sure what happened next, but as I went to take the final step down from the ladder, I think my shorts got caught on a wire frame in the garden next the ladder and instead of putting the flat part of my foot on the ground (as had been my traditional approach), I put the outside edge of my foot on the ground and applied all of my weight.
There was a magnificent ‘CRACK’! from my ankle and I fell to the ground. When I was 17 I broke my collar-bone playing football and I remembered a similar sound…so I was pretty confident I had just broken my ankle. To add an awkward social angle I was still on the phone to the plumber through my headphones, and from his perspective he had just told me the price of a new pump, and had then heard a grunt and then guttural swearing. I said I’d have to call him back, and secretly he hoped that he might have thought that this was an elaborate bargaining move on my behalf and knock a few hundred dollars off.
He didn’t.
I took off my shoe to assess the damage, and was dazzled to see just how much my ankle had swollen up in about 15 seconds…and despite knowing that I was about to become a ‘middle-aged man falling off ladder’ statistic, it was off to the Emergency department.

On crutches for the first time…the novelty wore of REALLY quickly

‘Good news’ can be quite a subjective term. But for me the good news was, I hadn’t broken my ankle…but I had torn a couple of tendons. So I wouldn’t need a cast, but I was going to be on crutches for a while…and running was off the cards for a lot longer.

Are you going somewhere with this?

Yes, I was just providing some narrative setup…and don’t you go pretending you’ve got anything better to do with your time!
You see, something really unexpected had happened, and I was having to face the fact that I was suddenly going to be inside a lot, that I wasn’t going to be able to just travel wherever I wanted to, and I was going to have to give up a lot of the things I really enjoyed doing.
In short, I had a sneak-peek into COVID!
Now I know what you’re thinking…’He didn’t just compare a global pandemic to an ankle injury did he?!’ No…clearly that would be insane. I’m comparing a global pandemic to MY ankle injury…which I think we can all agree is a lot closer to being equitable.
Plus there were a few lessons that I learned from my slow recovery from my ankle that I’m trying desperately to apply to life in lockdown.

Be warned…the next photos is pretty gross.

Get help

When I did my ankle, I knew it was serious and so I went straight to hospital. When I needed to talk to someone about how I can get better, I went to the physio. I had absolutely no shame about talking about this to friends, family and my employer. After all, it’s just common sense to talk to the experts when you’ve got a problem. As a result, I was back to running within 6 weeks.
But during the first lockdown I was sleeping in self-imposed exile on the couch, because I was apparently having violent hypnic jerks that were so frequent that I was keeping Katie awake for most of the night.
I cut back on my caffeine, and was still doing plenty of exercise…so the only real reason left for these nocturnal adventures, was ‘stress/anxiety’. Which meant that I while I was able to paint over the cracks of my mental health during the waking hours…it was all coming out while I slept. So what did I do? Well thanks to my experience with my ankle I was 100% comfortable calling a mental health professional to get some techniques I could use to deal with my anxiety, and as a result I…Nah! Just kidding! Of course I didn’t do that, because I’m an idiot! I just kept intermittently sleeping on a couch because that seemed somehow easier and less embarrassing.
As is so often the case, please do as I say and not as I do. If you’re struggling with mental health issues, reach out and get help.

Focus on what you can do

When facing a sudden restriction, it’s only natural to focus on the things that you’ve lost. If you’re living in Melbourne at the moment, there are a LOT of things you can’t do. You can’t go and see live music, you can’t go out for a drink, you can’t go for a long bike ride, you can’t go for a holiday, you can’t even sit down at a cafe and a have a coffee with someone.
It’s all a bit shit really.
Similarly, when I did my ankle I couldn’t walk, let alone run. But I could swim (albeit without pushing off at each end)…so I did that. Once I could walk, I could also ride my bike (although I couldn’t clip myself into my pedals) so I started spending more time on the cycling trainer in the shed. Perhaps most importantly, I really needed to take a proper break from running. But the guilt I felt about doing this, and the sense that I was going to lose all of the gains I had accumulated while training, had meant that after doing the 50km version of the Surfcoast Century…I hadn’t taken a proper break. But now I could finally do that…guilt free! (although it was telling that when I finally got back to ‘light-jogging’, I started having dreams where I was running, fast, gracefully and without effort…the trifecta of things that do NOT happen when I actually run).
So during the imposed exile of COVID, what can you do that you wouldn’t ordinarily do? Perhaps you could archive off your old photo and video jobs…or re-negotiate your mortgage…or transition from dairy to oat milk for your coffee…or grow a beard…or start writing your blog again…or use the time you would have spent commuting to work to do something you actually want to do…or start getting take-away one night a week and claim you’re doing it to ‘support a local business’…or get to a point where your dog growls at you when you go to take them for a walk because
“THEY.ARE.SICK.OF.ALL.THE.WALKS!!!!”
There are still heaps of things you can do, and fixating on the things you can’t, won’t make you any happier.
Perhaps even more importantly, if you suddenly find that not having to attend social events, or your kids’ activities or having to commute to work has left you with time to relax, catch up on the last decade of missed sleep, and just do nothing…that’s OK too.
I would probably accept doing lockdown once a year if it meant that for the rest of the year, people were actually relaxed and happy instead of screaming at each other in cars.

A little exercise is better than none

While I have managed to get myself into a good routine for exercise over the last 10 years…that’s not to say that I don’t wake up every morning hoping for an excuse to just sleep in…or head to swim squad on a Monday night secretly hoping that a meteorite has hit the pool…and due to NO fault of my own, I won’t be able to swim.
So when I did my ankle, part of me did see it as the ultimate ‘get out of jail free’ card.
*sigh* “Of course I would love to do whatever exercise you’re suggesting…but you know…my ankle” *insert look of disappointment*

But I also knew that if I just sat around for 6 weeks making excuses and feeling sorry for myself, I was setting myself up for 6 months of grief.
Similarly, while this second lockdown has seen my Netflix and podcast consumption increase exponentially…and on any given day there are at least 7 good reasons why not doing any exercise would be forgiven, I know that if I don’t at least take advantage of my daily 1hr of outside time, then I’m going to regret it when this lockdown ends.
So get out for a walk, or do yoga, or pushups, or if you’re one of those insufferably fit people on my social media feed, then use your allocated 1hr of exercise to ‘work on your 15km times’. Just keep that body moving. You’ll be glad you did when we enter the next phase of this pandemic.

Of course there are differences…

I mean at no stage did people suggest that my ankle injury was a hoax, or did I insist that having to wear an ankle brace in public was a contravention of the Magna Carta…or did former Prime Minster’s insist that I had to be comfortable with a certain level of ankle injury in order for the rest of Australia to enjoy a strong economy.
But perhaps the biggest difference was that both the experts and the internet agreed that if I just did the right thing I would be back to normal within 4-6 weeks…and right now the pandemic is offering no such consensus, timeframe or hope.
For a world that has become so used to predictability and control that we have taken to electing a procession of increasingly batshit insane leaders just to make life interesting…we’re suddenly having to deal with complete uncertainty…and I for one am REALLY glad that my ankle has recovered so that I can at least go for a run and enjoy 60 mins of escape.

Wear a mask, be careful on ladders…and if you’re in Melbourne, stay the course, you’re doing an incredible job!

The upsides to COVID-19

As Melbourne goes into week three of our second lockdown, it’s pretty easy to get mired in melancholy. Our movement is restricted, we’re wearing masks, and parents are once again having to pretend they understand Yr.9 maths. Where in the first lockdown, young children would occasionally appear in video meetings in cute and endearing cameos…they now crawl all over their parents yelling into whatever microphone the parent is using, and no-one bats an eyelid…because ultimately…who could really give a sh1t! And we’ve all come to the realisation that going on a holiday anywhere that involves a plane, is about as likely as ever returning to the office…with all of your co-workers…who have arrived on public transport and are just looking to book a meeting room.

So I think it’s my duty to focus on a few of the good things about these COVID times, because there have definitely been a few silver linings to all of this.
I will stress that these are MY silver linings, and may not match up with yours. For example, when you’re telling me how much you miss being able to just give your friends a hug when you see them, and I’m smiling and nodding as if I agree with you. Rest assured I am actually thinking that I feel like someone who is two thirds of their way through a conversation with a Genie that has already resulted in; not having to do that ‘kissing on the cheek’ thing with people you know, AND not having to hug people you vaguely know when you see them. I’m not sure what the third wish will be…but it will probably involve someone un-inventing social media.

So with that in mind, here are my upsides to COVID.

Exercise

Now I realise that for those of you who like to play team sports, this has been pretty tough. But for those of us who enjoy running alone for 1.5hrs listening to Neil Gaiman audio books, and sitting on a cycling trainer in a shed watching episodes of Snowpiercer on Netflix…this has been a true renaissance.
You may say ‘But Chris you could have done these things in pre-COVID times! This is not a win for anyone!’ But that’s just not true. With an 8.30am work start-time and at least a 40min commute, outside of waking at 5am everyday, there was no way I could work everything in. But now that I’m working from home everyday, I can get an hour long run or ride in EVERY morning and still get to work on time!

Cooking

At the other end of the working day…it’s only an 8 second commute from my workstation/dining room table to the kitchen. So suddenly it’s possible to cook dinner every night!
If we, as a family, want to spend our lunch-break making slow cooked Wallaby shanks, and smell them for the rest of the day…then damn it…that’s what we’ll do!
If we want to cook vegetarian meals for the week, then we’ve got the time to actually find some good recipes, rather than panicking at the end of the day and just throwing something together.
Best of all, with ‘after school activities’ severely curtailed, the kids are available to begrudgingly assist. There is no happier face, than that of a child who has been dragged away from their screen to cut up vegetables for a meal they didn’t particularly want to eat in the first place!

Wallaby Shanks…a great dinner…and even better movie character name.

We should never have let her watch those Gordon Ramsay shows!
So angry.
So much swearing.

Visit Victoria

Half way through last year, we were offered the opportunity to stay at our friends place in France again as we did in 2017, but this time it would be for Christmas 2020. By December of last year we were looking at airline tickets and biding our time to get the best price. By January I’d told my Manager that I would be taking some long-service leave at the end of the year. By the end of March we were letting our friends in France know that we were still coming over…but were just going to see how this COVID thing goes. Now…well I think there are only 4 planes left in Australia…and we won’t be going on one any time soon. So it was pretty awesome to get away during the brief lull in lockdowns to a few places around Victoria.

There’s nothing like necessity to focus the mind…and so if all holidays for the next year or so are in Victoria, I reckon I can handle it.

‘D’ya like dags?’

There comes a point in any lockdown (usually about day 3) when everyone in the household gets PRETTY sick of everyone else in the household’s shit. But do you know who doesn’t get sick of everyone else? Dogs. Do you know who will be excited by your return…even if you’ve just been outside hanging out the washing? Dogs. Do you know who will fall asleep in hilarious positions just to remind you that there is still fun in the world? Dogs. Do you know who provides the best reason to get up off your arse and go for a walk? Doctors, Physios, Life Coaches, OH&S reps, Personal trainers…but also, Dogs.
For a pack-dog like a Beagle, the idea of having all of her people constantly around her, and with 70% more baking being done in the house (and with all of the scraps that this entails)…Marnie couldn’t be happier!

Beards

I can pretty much guarantee that when you think of me, ‘Hirsute’ is not one of the words that jumps to mind. Nor ‘Rustic’, or ‘Rugged’…or ‘Man’. I think that at least 83% of this can be levelled at the fact that I’ve never managed to grow a beard (the remaining 17% is a combination of the very soft skin on my feet, my obsession with pronouncing both ‘d’s in ‘Wednesday’, and the fact that I quite like the new Taylor Swift album).
As this tragic video shows, I am simply not not designed for facial hair.

Well that’s not strictly true…I am capable of growing facial hair, it’s just that without the crutch of ‘I’m doing this for charity’, it’s very hard to withstand the humiliation of that first 4 weeks of looking like someone with a fake ID trying to buy a 6-pack of Vodka Cruisers from a bottle shop.
In fact the only way I could contemplate growing a beard is if somehow it transpired that I was restricted to only seeing my immediate family for 4-6 weeks, and everyone else saw me via a webcam that could be turned off…or set up with so much backlight that I may as well have been a mafia informant trying to hide my identity.
Well that has transpired!
And while I don’t think I will be confused for Ned Kelly or Gandalf anytime soon, I do think I have achieved ‘Detective from Scandinavian TV series who has seen too much of the evil that lies in the hearts of men, but dammit, that’s what makes him such a good cop’ level of beard. And that will do…that…will..do.

It’s oh so quiet

This September will mark 20 years since Katie and I moved to Preston. In that time there have definitely been some improvements; our ratio of $2 shops to cafe’s has definitely improved, Courtney Barnett has written 100% more songs about it, we now have 12 trees across the entire suburb (up from 9 in 2000), and bike commuting has become marginally safer as as result of traffic being in a state of perpetual gridlock. But one thing it has not become is quieter. Every time a house gets sold, it gets bulldozed and replaced with 308 apartments. So there are more people, more cars and more hard surfaces to bounce the sound off.
Plus the upward mobility of bogans across the board, means that the roar of a HRT/FPV V8 along St. Georges Rd, is now ensembled with the delightful sound of a Mercedes or VW DSG having the guts floored out of it.
It’s enchanting.
But the COVID times have lead to a LOT less people being out and about, and so while the Preston Market does now have a slight ’28 days later’ vibe, a walk around the streets of Preston is now so quiet you can actually hear the birds…or the podcast your listening to.

So yeah, it’s tough at the moment…and there’s no foreseeable end to it. But there’s still plenty of good in the world, and plenty of things that we can look to maintain once we return to regular programming.

Stay safe, and wear a mask.

Fuji GFX

Have you ever seen an older gentleman in a hideously expensive sports car and thought ‘That machine is capable of so much more than you could ever ask of it. That is such a waste of potential!!!’ Well me using Fuji’s Medium Format GFX is pretty much the photographic equivalent. But that didn’t stop me from borrowing one from Fuji try it out. Here’s how it went.

The camera

If you’ve come to this blog knowing a bit about photography, you will already know what a Medium Format camera is…and if you’ve come to this blog not knowing much about photography you really won’t care about pixel counts and sensor sizes. So I won’t waste any time throwing numbers at you.
In short, the camera I normally shoot on (the Fuji x-T1) has a sensor about the size of a postage stamp, and the GFX has a sensor about the size of a tea-bag.
Do I think for a second that Fuji want me making this comparison? No.
Do I think it’s very helpful for people trying to picture this in their mind? Also, no.
But it basically means that each photo has a lot more pixels and therefore a lot more information and detail. When I had my photo (taken on the x-T1) in the NPPP I had it printed as large as I could without it losing any detail…and when I saw it compared to the other photos, my first thought was ‘Why is my photo so small?!’ Part of the answer may have been that the other photos were taken with cameras with a bigger sensor.

‘Soooo…your Dad’s photo is pretty small huh!’

So part of me wanted to see just what was possible with a camera with a bigger sensor…the other part of me knew that I had purchased my entire Fuji kit (camera body and 4 x lenses) for $5K, and $5K wasn’t even going to get me the camera body of a GFX, let alone lenses. So were my photos going to be 4 times better with $20K worth of camera gear? Let’s find out! (Narrator’s voice – ‘They weren’t”)

The lenses

I was lucky enough to be sent 4 lenses; a 45mm, 63mm, 120mm and 250mm. Instead of banging on about them, here’s a snapshot of each:

The 45mm

I REALLY liked this lens. Wide enough for landscapes and architecture, but tight enough for an environmental portrait.

The 63mm

Hey, do you know what’s fun? Maths. So this 63mm on the medium format, is about the same as a 50mm on a full-frame and a 35mm on my Fuji x-T1. So this is a convoluted way of saying that if I could only have one lens on the GFX… this would be it.

The 120mm

The 120mm was probably my revelation as a portrait lens. I’ve never really done portraits where people’s hands are cut off, or heaven forbid, part of their head is cutoff. But I LOVED how some of these shots turned out with this lens, and I’ll definitely be using this in my future portraits…albeit with a LOT fewer pixels!

The 250mm

I added this to my list of lenses because I thought I was going to take photos of wildlife. I didn’t. So this lens didn’t get as much of a workout as the others. But I also took one of my favourite GFX pictures with it, so on average is was probably the best performer!

So what’s it actually like?

You 100% feel like a Pro with this camera in your hands. It feels solid and purpose built, the sound of the shutter is brilliant and it has the same functionality as my x-T1 so everything I needed was at my fingertips. The file sizes are enormous! I’m used to having my RAW files as 20mb files on the x-T1, whereas the jpegs that come out of the GFX are 20mb…the RAW files over 100mb! So on my first day of shooting I went to a skate park where I was shooting RAW+Jpeg on burst mode, and just about filled my entire 32GB card! There are a lot of reviews of this camera where people say ‘It really made me slow down and consider my composition’ which I had thought was a comment on just how much you can fit onto the sensor…but I now realise it was just code for ‘I can’t afford to buy another hard-drive to store these files!’

I missed SO many of these photos where I tried to follow the skater to keep them sharp while everything else is blurred that I almost cried.

I loved the amazing detail in the photos. I loved being able to shoot at f32 for a long exposure and not have to worry about ND filters.

f 32 and 7 second exposure at Kalimna Falls

I loved that even shots that were brutally over-exposed could be made to look amazing!

This was just a lighting test to set the level of the flash. Did I turn it down after this shot? Damn straight I did. But when I worked on it in Lightroom it actually became one of my favourite shots.

I had been taking photos on the other side of the pier and when I turned on the camera it still had the old settings. It looked so ethereal in the viewfinder that I had to take the shot.

I loved the results I got when using a soft-box or off-camera flash.

But most of all I loved the motivation it gave me to get out and take photos ‘You’ve got $20K worth of camera equipment for a short period of time’ is a VERY strong motivator to get out and shoot!

The photo prior to this didn’t have the bird flying through…the bird really makes it.

Photo of the photographer…with thanks to Katie!

But would I buy one?

Well first and foremost I would like to thank Fuji Australia for allowing me to borrow the camera. Outside of some bizarre ‘You’ve seen this camera in the hands of the best…now see it in the hands of the rest?’ angle, there really was no reason for them to take a chance on me. I can’t imagine there is a huge demographic of my readership with $20K burning a hole in their pocket just looking for a camera to spend it on. So I can’t imagine sales are going to skyrocket after me writing about it. But to Fuji, and in particular Neil, thank you so much for this. You were fantastic to work with, and I really appreciated this once in a lifetime opportunity.
But would I buy one? No. If I had the money would I buy one? Yes. Would I hire one to shoot a wedding or a proper photoshoot? Yes. Is Fuji likely to loan me gear again after saying this? Probably not.
But this is not a reflection on the camera, it’s a reflection on where I am with my photography. When I was training for the Ironman and the 3-Peaks, I could never justify buying a new super-fast bike, or super-light wheels to get myself some ‘free’ speed, until I knew that I had done everything in my power to make myself as fast as possible (train more, lose weight, race smart etc). Not surprisingly I never bought a new bike…because I never got to the spot where the only thing holding me back was my gear. Similarly, there are still SO many things that I can improve with my technique, my discipline, my willingness to approach complete strangers etc that will result in better photographs. I need to get them sorted before I can look to better gear to raise my game.
I have also had my x-T1 for nearly 5 years now. I’ve shot a documentary on it, multiple videos, weddings, award nominated portraits and even a photo where 9 children are all doing what I wanted them to at exactly the same time!
If, in the process of trying to get an epic shot, my camera got hit by an errant skateboard, or fell into the ocean, or was eaten by a surprisingly fast and aggressive turtle…I could live with it. I certainly wouldn’t be happy about it, but I could live with it. And that gives me a level of freedom that simply doesn’t come with holding a camera worth more than a family holiday to somewhere NICE.
Plus, if I take a photo with my x-T1 and the 35mm lens and it’s an abject failure, people think ‘Well, he only has that little camera that looks like it’s from the 1970s…what did you expect?!’ But if I take a great shot, suddenly I’m a genius who may get upwards of 7 or 8 likes on Instagram! Follow me a @sumo_21 😉 But if I take a great photo on the GFX people will think ‘Well yes OF COURSE he took an amazing photo…he has that amazing camera.’ Worse still, if someone sees one the of MANY crap photos I took with it, they’ll think ‘Why does he have such a fancy camera, when his photos are so average?!’
I. DON’T. NEED. THAT. SORT. OF. PRESSURE!!!

Plus, every photographer knows about Gear Acquisition Syndrome, you always need something to aim for, and if I had a GFX 50, what could I possibly have to look forward to after that?! It’s not as if Fuji are going to do a GFX 100 that has a 100 megapixel sensor…I mean that would be insane, and…what? They have made one?!

Oh.

Excuse me…I have to change the entire tone of this blog…and then make a grovelling call to Fuji!