Behind The Picture

I’m tired, cold and smell like a tin of cat food. This is my first taste of life as a deep-sea fishermen. Twenty-four hours on a fishing trawler outside Sydney Heads with Paul Bagnato, a fourth generation skipper.

The Bagnato family have run six trawlers out of Sydney since the 1960s, delivering Sydney’s freshest seafood to the Fish Markets every day of the week.

“We are on standby 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” he says. “It’s a tough life out here.”

Continue reading "Trawling for photos down the East Coast" »

By all accounts this election has been really boring and as a photographer I wanted to do something different to get people interested again. I wanted to shoot it in a different way than the way we always cover elections in newspapers.

If I can borrow a phrase from this election campaign, I wanted to be seen to be “moving forward” with technology and doing something new and fresh. So when I got the call up to shoot the final week of the election last week with Prime Minister Julia Gillard I decided to shoot everything on the iPhone.

A simple no frills camera (weighing no more than a can of coke) with a fixed lens, and using the Hipstamatic app bought for $2.49.

Continue reading "An inside view of the last days of the Gillard campaign" »

These two young people and their dogs were camped out on the pavement of the busiest street of central Paris opposite the Town Hall.

They were lying on the footpath around dusk time completely oblivious of the throng of people going past them.

They were surrounded by all their paraphernalia – backpacks, sleeping bags and so forth - and two of their three dogs were frolicking around.

Continue reading "It was like they were the only two people in Paris" »

October last year was the beginning of a bikie war and my introduction to the characters of Sydney’s underworld. My assignment: the funeral of Notorious crime gang member and former Nomad bikie Todd O’Connor at St Mary’s Cathedral.

Along with a small media pack, I took up a close-in position for the arrivals, soon finding out that we were not welcome with a family member performing a one-finger salute. As the service began I managed to get some shots from the back of the cathedral of the coffin in place with O’Connor’s mother to the side, sitting wheelchair-bound.

After capturing a few frames, we waited outside till the coffin was carried out, usually the time of highest emotion. For this funeral, emotions lead to threats of violence. The Notorious foot soldiers formed a protective ring around the mourning family, facing up to the photographers, and hitting one snapper in the back. I repositioned to the other side of the road enabling a few frames of Kings Cross identity John Ibrahim surrounded by his men…

Continue reading "How to photograph a bikie funeral, and live" »

Silence was broken one night by sirens and the whirring of a low flying helicopter. The police chopper, with searchlights blazing, honed in on the lake-front park lands at Wattle Grove.

I grabbed my Police scanner and camera and went to see what was unfolding. The police chatter on the scanners told me the guy they were chasing was last seen in the lake waters and a mention of the nearby shopping centre.

Moving closer, I noticed a person creeping from the bird island bushes and into its murky waters.  Click, click, I had the shot, but the drama was far from over…

Continue reading "When a photographer has to get involved in an arrest" »