My top photos of 2017

There’s nothing like scrolling through all of your photos for a year to make you realise how much has happened in 12 months; 40th birthdays, 66th birthdays, weddings, first days of school, international travel, trips to the beach, rain, sunshine, surf, posed portraits, spontaneous moments, and best of all…photos that make you sit back and think ‘Man, I’m really happy with that shot!’
So of the 3,447 photos that made it through the culling process of this year, and the 192 that were given the coveted ‘5 star rating’ in Lightroom, here are my 20 favourite photos of 2017.

Josh does his Felix Baumgartner impersonation

Josh jumping off the tower at Blairgowrie

There is a decent period after you’ve bought new camera gear, when you are absolutely terrified of getting it wet/dusty/cold/hot. So you miss shots because you’re not willing to take a risk. Then at the other end of the spectrum is when you’ve had a camera for so long that you’ll wade into the ocean and takes shots not caring what happens to it…but also knowing, that its best days are behind it, so you may not get the shot you want.
But there is also a wonderful mid-point where you a camera will take the photo you want, and that you’re willing to hang over your shoulder as you jump from one rock to another over waste deep water and then scramble up a rock tower to take a photo of your 11yo son jump from a feet-tingling height. I’m at that point with my Fuji XT-1…and it’s a very happy place.
I was also really happy with this shot, as the tide was coming in and if we stayed much longer in that spot we were going to get stranded, and so I knew I only really had one chance to get it. So no pressure…no pressure at all.

Danny Ross at the 303 Bar

My brother in law, Will, was playing drums with Danny Ross for a show at the 303 Bar in Northcote. I will never pass up an opportunity to take photos of a band, because there are always moments in a live performance that give you an insight into who the musician really is, and if you can capture them…they usually make great images. Also, guitars are cool.
Over the course of the night I shot, wide, I shot tight, and shot from up high and down low, from outside and inside (no really I did), but it was this shot that I took between two people that really worked. The two shoulders provide a perfect shadowy frame for Danny, plus the light is hitting him enough to illuminate his face under that distinctive hat…and he has an ever so slight rock n roll sneer on his face.
In truth, this photo is a mess in colour…but black and white really provides some focus!

Walkerville cave portrait

If you’re new to photography and want to try to create a quick and easy ‘arty’ portrait, get someone to stand somewhere where it’s dark but there is a single source of light (a recessed doorway, open garage door, or in this a cave with a hole in the roof), get them to look towards the light, and then expose your shot for their face (or just set your autofocus point for their face) and the resulting shot will knock out the background enough for you to make to their face really pop…but with just enough ambience to give some context.
Of course you do still have to convince someone to crawl into a dark cave that smells of rotting sea-weed…but that’s why you have kids!!

A440 (there is a prize to the first person who can explain this photo title…it’s GENIUS!)

If you have ever tried to take a photo of someone giving a speech, you will know that what looks perfectly normal in real-life can look mortifying as a still image. The blink of an eye, the movement of someones mouth, or a gesture with their hand can make them look drunk, psychotic, lecherous or constipated. The same can be said for singers, although to a lesser extent because they tend to hold facial expressions and emotions a bit longer as they hit certain notes…and because they usually want to be singing, whereas people who are making a speech would usually rather be anywhere else doing anything else. So taking a photo of a singer is easier…but then when you add another singer, the difficulty increases exponentially…now you need to capture a moment where two people look great…then you add another person…and then another…and one of them is your wife…and it’s her 40th birthday party.
No pressure…no pressure. Just capture an image in which all four people look great…and DO NOT STUFF THIS UP!

Fire twirling in North Melbourne

Spin those flaming balls…and drag that shutter

You know that feeling when you’re at your best mate’s 40.5th birthday and someone dressed in Polynesian attire starts doing tricks with two flaming balls…and you think to yourself ‘How am I going to get a good shot of this?’ Sure you do. It’s a predicament as old as time itself. Just go for 1/6 second, at f1.4 on a 35mm.
If you’re still saying ‘Wait. WTF is a 40.5th birthday!’ Then I think you and I can be friends.

Can you just sit there while I test the flash?

Any time I set up the flash for a portrait I ask one of the kids to sit in so that I can make sure it’s going to work, my brief is always ‘Just sit there, you don’t even have to look at the camera’. The combo of a photographer who isn’t telling someone what to do, and a subject who isn’t trying to be anything but themselves…invariably leads to some of my favourite photos.

Channeling Alain Laboile

The old take a photo of a reflection and then turn it upside down trick

I shamelessly stole this from Alain Laboile’s ‘Reflexion autour du bassin‘ series where he took photos of the reflection in a pool of water, and then turned them upside down so that the photo looked like a distorted version of the real world. After a hefty downpour here in Melbourne, the lane out the back had some massive puddles…and the kids were dressed in rain jackets and gumboots. So I got may chance to create my own ‘Reflection around the puddle’ series.

Turin Brakes

Gale Paridjanian at the Northcote Social Club

While I’m really happy with this photo, this one made the cut because I only got it by having the chutzpah to call a festival promoter and ask for a press pass so that I could shoot it. So I got to spend the first three songs right at the front taking photos of one of my favourite bands…and this shot further assuaged my guilt about buying the Fuji 56mm f1.2 lens.

In the surf with Josh

There are few places I love being more than in the surf. But with young kids, going to the beach becomes more of a ‘let’s build sandcastles and wade in the knee-deep water’ than ‘let’s head out the back and try to catch some decent waves’ experience.
But the body-boarding bug has bitten Josh, and he’s now strong enough to venture out into the surf with me. In this shot we had made the decision to paddle furiously over a wave, rather then trying to duck under it after it had broken. It had been a close run thing, and we very nearly had the wave break right on top of us, but we’d made it and we were both very happy with ourselves…and the GoPro captured it.

Kids, France and trampolines

It took about 30 hours to get from Melbourne to Paris, and then a terrifying drive for 2 hours in the dark to get to our accom in Normandy. But when we woke up the next morning the kids discovered that there was a trampoline and took to it immediately. So this was among the first photos I took for our trip…and it was probably my favourite! Even though you can’t really see either of their faces…you just know they’re smiling from ear to ear. Because…well…tramampoline!

Normandy beaches

Holly atop one of the enormous walls at low-tide

I would love to claim that I saw this scene and said “Holly, quickly go over there and climb that ladder and then hang off the handle at the top as if you’re in a musical from the 1960’s!” But in truth, I was pretty much waiting for her to get down so that I could take a landscape shot…and stop worrying about her falling off!
But as is so often the case, a landscape looks a whole lot better with a person in it, especially someone who can inadvertently strike a pose like this.

Tuba flamethrower

Just a man, playing a tuba, with flames coming out the top.

It’s a man in a top hat, playing the tuba, with flames coming out of the top, in London…of course it made my top 20!

The test shot

Lady in red, with a blue bag, and blonde hair, surrounded by green walls.

The plan was to get Katie to walk towards me and I would get the shot just as she came through the doorway, so I was just doing a test shot to make sure my focus was going to be right…and it turned out to be a much better photo than the one I had planned.

Mont St Michel

It’s pretty hard to get a shot of Mont St Michel that hasn’t been taken a thousand times, so here’s one that hopefully only been taken 995 times. A friend of mine showed me this trick of holding a lens in front of the the camera and then taking a shot of what the lens can see.

A bird and an old man

A bird slowly circles through the fog on the Isle of Skye

We all got up early and made our way to the Old Man of Storr. When we got there we were one of 3 cars in the car park, so we knew we wouldn’t be fighting off the crowds. We were however fighting one 6yo who wanted to make it very clear, that he didn’t want to be there. The weather was also ranging wildly from foggy, to drizzling, to raining and all points in between. I only have one weather-proof lens and that’s the 50-140mm, and I was having to stop pretty regularly to explain to the angry 6yo that ‘No, this wasn’t a stupid idea. No, I’m not stupid. No, everyone isn’t stupid. No, we can’t turn around and head back. No, that’s not stupid.’
So this is a long way of saying that my photo options were limited…but when I saw this burn circling in the mist, I had a vision of a Tolkienesque image and was really happy with how it came up.

Highland coo

I love these cows. The look like the bovine version of the guitarist from a 90’s shoe-gazer band. One of my goals for our trip up to the North of Scotland was to get a shot of one these fine beasts. But our drive from Glasgow to Skye, while offering some amazing potential cow action, was so fraught with traffic issues that the opportunity to just pull over and take a photo just didn’t present itself. Having done a lap of the Isle of Skye and still not got a photo of a Highland Cow, I had pretty much given up all hope. Then on our way to our final stop on the Isle of Skye we came across this fine specimen just next to the road. So I hopped out and grabbed this shot, and all was right with the world.

Steam punk

A steam train backing out of the NYMR yards in Pickering

There is something magical about trains, and I can see why they fascinate people young and old (by which I mean, very young and very old). From a photography perspective they are a dream. Everything is on a massive scale, there is polished metal, steam, light & shade, history, and some amazing faces. This is my attempt at capturing all of that in one shot.

The headless bass player of York

The Hyde Family Jam take to the streets of York

After pouncing on the first coffee place we found at 9am in the morning, we had been traipsing around York all day and by 4pm we were pretty keen on finding another coffee emporium. But despite having seen quite a few in the preceding hours, suddenly there were none to be found. As we left the market in the centre of town we could hear a band playing the opening bars of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take me out’. It’s a testament to how good these guys were that I actually chose taking photos of them, over getting a coffee (and people who know me, will know that I very rarely choose anything over coffee…least of all complete strangers). But with that late afternoon sun acting as a backlight, and their energy & enthusiasm, I knew I would get something memorable.

The Mae Trio

The Mae Trio’s ‘Take care, take cover’ was my favourite album for 2017…and that’s really saying something when this year saw new albums from The War on Drugs, The National and Iron and Wine. So I was pretty excited about snapping some shots of them when they played at the Wesley Anne in Northcote. Sadly the gig was actually a farewell for one of the band (Anita) and so there was a mix of celebration and melancholy on the night. I feel that this shot captured that. I also know that I manually set the focus and waited for a long time to capture capture Maggie looking up and getting that little bit of light in her eyes.
I got some photos from the night that I was really happy with, and deep down hoped that they might see them and feel so inspired by them that they immediately wrote a modern-day folk anthem called ‘Chris the remarkably good photographer’…but this hasn’t happened…yet…probably because ‘photographer’ is a really hard word to rhyme with.

So there we go. I’ve travelled the world, but taken some of my favourite photos really close to home. I’ve shot a fair bit of music, and clearly love converting them to black and white. I’ve tried new things, and refined some other things. I’ve shot three weddings, and quite a few corporate jobs. I’ve left my day job of 11 years, gone back to working 5-days a week in a new job, and started a podcast project.
So it’s been a big year, and I’d like to thank you all for your support…rest assured, I’ll be back in 2018.

Long service leave: Just a really good idea.

When was the last time you took a break from work? I don’t mean two weeks off at Christmas, or adding a day to a long weekend, I mean really took a break from work. To the point where you are so far removed from your daily work routine that you have to check your phone to see what day it is. Can you remember what that feels like? Can you recall that feeling of being able to climb out of the morass of deadlines, and performance reviews, and endless & unnecessary meetings, and take a look at your life as a whole? To capture what drug addicts and alcoholics refer to as a ‘moment of clarity’ and make it last for hours on end.
Probably not.
In fact our lives are geared in exactly the other direction. Our work follows us everywhere on our phone. We’re working longer hours and we’re not being paid for them. Most of us are only two missed paycheques away from defaulting on our mortgage or rent. And we’re so jealous of the lives that everyone else is enjoying on social media, that we are simply resigned to putting our heads down at work and hoping that it eventually all pays off…and that the family we have neglected in order achieve this pay off, still wants to spend time with us when it does.

What we all desperately need is an escape hatch, a get out jail free card, some time to focus on the things in life we neglect because of work…and we need to get paid while we do it. In short, we need long service leave!

For those outside of Australia and New Zealand, long-service leave is basically 2 months of leave that you are entitled to after 10 years of working full-time for one organisation. It’s a throwback to when English people had to come and work in Australia. When they had worked for 10 years, they were entitled to sail back to England, stay for a few weeks to catch up with family, then sail back to Australia…all on full pay.
For any Millenials reading this, a full-time job is a bit like one of the three part-time jobs that you’re currently working, except that you work at it all of the time and it offers some security, which is good when you want to get a mortgage. A mortgage? Well that’s when you go to the bank to borrow money to buy your own home. Your own home? Well…sorry, that’s a figment of your imagination…and did you know that we have set up an economy that means that you will be the first ever generation to earn less than your parents? You’re welcome.
But back to me. Having being made redundant from two of the three full-time jobs that I had enjoyed after leaving Uni, and absolutely hating the third. I chose to take a job with the Victorian Public Service (VPS). I promised myself that I would only be there for two years, as I was terrified of becoming an ‘institutionalised public servant’ who would never be able to find work outside of the VPS.
10 years later, I was still in the VPS. Thus proving that I am truly a man of my word. But more importantly, I was now a man with 12 weeks of long service leave available to him.

Just hanging out in Bayeux, reading ‘Madame Beaute’.

Feeling the serenity of Chateau Villarceaux

In 2016 we went for a 3 week campervan journey through Queensland, and at the moment we are spending three weeks looking after a B&B in Normandy, before heading over to the UK for two weeks. I know that, just like Queensland, this trip is going to be an incredible experience for our family. The kids will be exposed to new cultures, new languages and new ways of life. They will get to see the versions of Mum and Dad that aren’t stressed out about work (I can tell you categorically that they are a LOT more fun), we will get to bond as a family unit, I will get to spend time taking photos and making videos, and Katie gets to see the fun guy that she married, rather than the financially neurotic handbrake that gets to spend her life with normally. In short, we get to be the family that we want to be, and we get to do this because of long-service leave.

Now I know that the more conservative voters amongst you will be saying ‘Well that’s just great Chris…but you know what? It’s not up to your employer to be providing you with this. They give you an income and annual holidays. That should be enough.’ To be honest, the Catholic guilt part of me agrees with this. Certainly the part of me that got made redundant twice, knows that a full-time job is something to cling to…especially if you actually enjoy it. But I think that these feelings are actually symptomatic of a bigger problem; we’ve all started to believe that our role in the economy is more important than our role in society. We’ve all borrowed more than we can afford, and now we’re at the whim of ‘business’. We can’t afford to be unemployed, so we keep working longer and longer hours, with no relative rise in income, while those at the top earn eye-wateringly large amounts of money, and it pisses us off. So we get angry in traffic, we retreat to our phones to see how everyone else is doing, and we see that, according to their Facebook posts, life is just peachy, and so we get pissed off again, and when the Government tells us that the real problem is refugees, we think ‘Yeah, that’s why my life isn’t what I want it to be’ and suddenly we have people like Peter Dutton in charge of Immigration and Border protection…and that’s pretty bloody bleak place to be.
But you know what could break this cycle? An extended period doing what actually makes you feel good as a human being. Some time travelling, some time following a passion, some time not in the 8-6 grind (we all know the 9-5 grind is ‘aspirational’). Some time being the person we want to be.
So yeah, maybe your job doesn’t owe you long-service leave…but you know what? You don’t owe your job all of the work you do outside work hours…but you’re still doing them. So let’s just call long-service leave a slight re-adjustment of the ledger.

Seconds later…important lessons were learned.

Now before I start to sound too much like that annoying 2nd year Uni student who has just discovered Marx. There are of course myriad reasons why taking a long break actually makes you a better employee. If you’ve travelled, you may have picked up a new language, if you’ve followed a passion, you will almost certainly have developed new skills, if you’ve spent 6 weeks painting the outside of your house…well…you’ll be a lot less likely to complain about whatever work you come back to. But I can guarantee that by doing something different for an extended period, you will have created new neural pathways. In short, you will be able to think differently, and you will be able to problem solve better.
Sure you might spend the first few days back at work weeping at your desk as you wade through a sea of unread emails…but after that, you’re going to be a better person, and therefore employee, than you were when you left.
Also, don’t ever underestimate the value of your ‘organisational knowledge’. In any organisation there is ‘the proper process’ (ie ‘what they tell new employees’)…and there is ‘the way to get things done’ (ie what you know after 10 years of working in an organisation). I know that over the course of 10 years at DHHS I have learnt how to get in contact with most of the key decision makers…and most importantly I have forged good relationships with all of their Executive Assistants, so that if I need something done in a hurry I can at least get an audience with someone who can make it happen. There are hundreds of these little communication channels that only open up after you have served your time in an organisation and shown your worth, and they save your organisation large amounts of money every year…so just see long service leave as your organisation’s way of saying ‘Thanks for making us more efficient’.

In an era of fewer and fewer full-time jobs, and of people moving jobs more frequently, the number of people who are actually going to work for 10 years in the one organisation is no doubt dwindling. But for those of us who do have it, for the love of God use it! You will never regret taking a holiday. You will never be as; young, energetic, enthusiastic, adventurous and capable as you are right now. Don’t put it off. Don’t sit on it like some bizarre nest-egg. Don’t worry that your job wont be there when you get back. Just do it! Book that holiday, go to that place that you always wanted go, do that thing that you always wanted to do. Be that person you’ve always wanted to be!
You’ve earned it.

Life begins at 35mm

There’s a great moment in an episode of the Simpsons where Groundskeeper Willie solemnly whispers to his tractor ‘Were it not a violation of God’s law, I’d make you my wife’. Such is his love for this inanimate object.

Without wanting to scare you too much…I’m starting to feel the same way about my Fuji 35mm f1.4 lens.
But why?! I hear absolutely none of you ask. Well here are a few of my reasons.

Form

I am quietly confident that whoever designed the X-T1 was doing it with the 35mm lens in mind. It just looks like it’s meant to be there. Whenever I have another lens on the body, it looks like exactly that, a lens on a body. But with the 35mm it just looks like a perfectly balanced camera.
It’s also wonderfully unobtrusive. If you want to swan around announcing to the world that you’re a photographer and quite a big-deal, then a 5D with a 70-200mm does a wonderful job. But if you want to just blend in with your surroundings and keep people at ease, the 35mm is sublime.
It also lets me live out the fantasy that I’m James Nachtwey or some other old-school photo journalist, trying to take that critical once in a lifetime shot, with only a few frames of film left on the roll…when in fact I’m just another Dad taking a photo of his son riding a BMX down some stairs, and if any of the 38 photos I took didn’t work…I’ll just make him do it again.

Function

Want to shoot some portraits? The 35mm will knock them out of the park.

Want to shoot some landscapes? Again the 35mm will do the job.

Want to take a photo of your wife and son running on a giant hamster wheel at night time? Ok…that seems a bit left of centre…but sure!

If you are after a travel lens, it is the one lens that I would take with me anywhere. If there’s such a thing as a ‘desert island lens’, this is it for me.

But what about the 35mm f2 with weather sealing?

Good question. If Fuji would like to send me one I’m happy to run a comparison…but until then, I’m happy as a clam with my f1.4. As Zack Arias says ‘There’s a little bit of magic in this lens!’

In conclusion

If you’re looking to make the move to Fuji, then this lens should be on your list of initial purchases. If you’re already a Fuji shooter and you have this lens, set yourself a challenge of shooting on it all day (you won’t be disappointed), and if you’re a Fuji shooter who doesn’t own this lens…well you need to take a long hard look at yourself…ideally through the glass of a 35mm f1.4 lens…that you’ve just purchased.

Life's tough in Noosa — Life’s tough in Noosa

France vs Melbourne

Having returned from my recent jaunt to France, I’ve realised that there are some things that the French do very well…and some things that the French could learn from us. I’m quietly confident that they’re not listening to me, but here is my list anyway.

Things the French do better than us.

Driving

Now admittedly as you approach, drive through, or leave a town you will be met with a bewildering number of speed limit changes (they even put 30km/h signs in front of speed humps), but once you are out on the highway it’s 130km/h (or 110km/h if it’s raining). 130km/h! That really makes a difference on long journeys. Plus they don’t sit in the fast lane and hold other people up…no, they just sit in the lane that they’re comfortable with, and if they have to pass someone, they do and then move back into their lane.
Plus they pretty much all drive manual transmission, which means they actually have to pay attention when they’re driving. Chapeau France!

Cheese

I had always thought of myself as relatively knowledgeable about cheese. I wasn’t scared of blue cheese, I’d cooked with Taleggio, I’d tried Rocquefort. But arriving in France made me realise just how much I didn’t know. Over here, Chevre is pretty much a one trick-pony (or goat as the case may be), but over there, there are dozens of types of Chevre. Not to mention sheep’s milk cheeses, local specialities like Neufchatel and a dazzling abundance of all of the cheeses you already knew. Best of all, everything I tried was delicious.

Drivers vs Cyclists

The French appear to have taken an unusual approach whereby the cyclists aren’t jerks, and the drivers aren’t arseholes…and in a complete surprise, the ‘Drivers vs cyclists’ problem is non-existent. The two groups just co-exist. All it really takes is people being willing to forego 10% of what they want in order to accommodate someone else…but unfortunately with our new found national sense of entitlement, any time we don’t get 100% of what we want is seen as a calamitous loss. So I can’t see this happening here any time soon.

Mountains and chateaus

One of the downsides to having a nomadic population up until about 1788, is that we didn’t have thousands of years of people constructing buildings to basically say to anyone who was looking ‘You want to know how I rich I am? I’m this rich…and I’m so French that I built this one for my mistress!’

Also, as a photographer, you’re always struggling to frame a nice shot that has a good material in the foreground and background. But in France, if you’re in the Alps, then you only have to worry about getting the foreground right…as having those mountains in the background makes every shot a winner!

Just place flowers in the foreground...and voila! — Just place flowers in the foreground…and voila!

Things we do better in Melbourne

Coffee

On our last day in France, as Katie and I sat drinking a cup of black, plunger coffee I said ‘You know, this really isn’t that bad’. But I now see that it was that bad…it’s just that over the course of two weeks my standards had fallen so substantially, that what previously would have been considered a ‘coffee flavoured hot beverage’ at best, was somehow being passed off as coffee.
Now I know that you seem to put 98% of your milk into cheese and butter, and so need subsist on long life milk…but come on France, even your espresso was crap! Stop using crappy little machines and get something that can actually extract a decent shot. Don’t leave the group head in the machine after you’ve made a coffee until the next customer arrives, and get the grind right so that it doesn’t just look like a cup of warm coke.
With that said La Pommetier and Le Petite Atelier, you will always have a warm place in my heart for the coffees you provided.

Cheese

Ok, so I am already on record in this blog as saying that I love your range of cheese. But cheese should be enjoyed in refined moderation. It should be like that person at a dinner party who knows how to drink just enough so that they’re interesting and entertaining…but not so much that they become a bore. France, you are currently like someone at a 21st birthday party, drinking wine from a funnel! For the love of God, show some restraint!
Every time I didn’t know what a menu item was, it was invariably cheese. I had a pizza that looked like it had been on fire and so someone had tried to put it out by smothering it in cheese. Another time, my entree turned out to be a pot full of cheese, with occasional bits of ham and some bread to dip in there. If you’re going to serve fondu, at least have the decency to admit that it’s fondu!

Breakfast

For the first week of my stay in France I was riding at least 80kms per day, up some of the steepest hills I’ve ever seen, and in 40+ degree temperatures. The breakfasts provided were, a selection of pastries (3 days) and a croissant, tub of yoghurt & container of stewed apple (4 days). Now this is OK as a breakfast, provided it is either Mother’s Day in 1994 or you’re a 3 month old. But not if you’re an adult who is hoping to get something done that day.

Conclusion

So there you have it. France has more things to recommend it…but Melbourne has better coffee. So let’s call it a draw.