Australian Photography April 2022

Recently I was lucky enough to hear photographers Jackie Ranken and Mike Langford speak at a small event in Dunedin, New Zealand. As two of the country’s finest photographers, the Australian expats have spent a lifetime perfecting their craft and they both continue to produce interesting and beautiful work from their home base of Twizel in the Mackenzie basin. One of the topics the pair touched on was the idea of the subject in photography, and how as photographers we can use the subject to ‘build’ our image. There’s a well-trodden expression that where painters create their image with brushstrokes, photographers must do the opposite – removing the superfluous from the frame to create the final image. This can be done through changes in composition, use of depth of field, or…

IAN KENINS Ian Kenins has been a professional photographer for over 30 years whose work has been published in a wide variety of books, newspapers and magazines. His favourite photographic subject is people, particularly those from rural areas. And, as his article in this issue shows, he’s someone not to travel with. See more at iankenins.com. LEE CLELAND Lee Cleland is an enthusiastic photographer and traveller with a love of the ocean and wild places. See more of her work at eecleland.wordpress.com SHREYAS YADAV Shreyas Yadav is an engineer, and a wildlife and nature photographer from India.He is also a writer and lifelong adventure explorer. See more of his work at shreyas-yadav.com DREW HOPPER Drew Hopper is an Australian freelance documentary photographer exploring ecological themes, landscape and place. See more of his work at drewhopper.com.…

This is a photo of Cockburn Island (64º 12´S) in the Weddell Sea near the Antarctic Peninsula. I captured it in 2021 while working as a photo instructor onboard the ship the National Geographic Resolution. It’s a photo that will forever remind me of a night when I was ‘asleep at the wheel’ and allowed a need for rest get in the way of my goal to make good photographs. Three days earlier I had embarked in Ushuaia at the tip of South America after a long charter flight from Miami. It had been a decent break from the job during the pandemic and I was excited to be on the ship and working with a talented field team of naturalists and Antarctic experts. But I was also very jet lagged. Our…

I bought my first SLR in late 1979. It was a Practika with three lenses. Within a year, I discovered that my love of nature could be reflected in my interest in photography, and with birds especially. The rainbow bee-eater was one of the first birds I remember as a kid. How colourful and how fast they were when trying to catch insects! However, I quickly discovered they were tough to photograph. Most cameras in 1979 were manual for both focus and exposure and limited to a 36-shot roll of film. My results were never great, and although I’ve photographed them since, I’ve never been able to capture them as well as I would like. This year I decided to turn my lens on a few subjects I have always wanted to…

PANASONIC has announced the Lumix GH6, which features a new 25.2MP Micro Four Thirds (M43) sensor, 5-axis IBIS, 10-bit 4:2:2 recording, up to 5.7K 60fps, internal ProRes, and slow motion up to 300fps. Over five years have passed since Panasonic released the LUMIX GH5 in 2017 and, despite iterative updates in the proceeding years (the GH5S in 2018 and more recently the GH5 II in 2021), it is the GH6 many photographers and videographers have been waiting for. Firstly, Panasonic has increased the effective pixel count of the GH6 by about 20%, which makes the GH6 the first M43 camera to offer a sensor larger than 20MP. The newly developed 25.2MP sensor has no lowpass filter, with Panasonic claiming that despite it being higher resolution, the sensor should have increased dynamic range. Powering the…

MARLEY Morgan, a photographer from the Wirad-juri, Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay nations, has won stock library iStock’s first-ever inclusion grant. Awarded in partnership locally with Australia Council for the Arts, the grant was open to commercial photographers, videographers and illustrators based in Australia, the U.S., UK, and Latin America. The photographer and mother of three has a particular focus on Aboriginal women, motherhood and culture. She said she was inspired to photograph Indigenous women, specifically mums, in a positive light after giving birth to her first child and not identifying with the women in the materials she was seeing in doctor’s offices. She said she plans to use the $5,000 grant to build a stock library that will address the lack of diverse and positive images of Aboriginal people in the media. “Use of Aboriginal faces…