“ I was born in Albury and I find it quite amusing that I’m doing this interview. Essentially I’m a plain, vanilla, married, middle age white man with 2 teenage daughters. All these other people have really interesting backgrounds and I’m vanilla as vanilla can be. I’ve had no major health issues, my families all good. Essentially I’m privileged. I’ve never really wanted for anything, always had a roof over my head, never had to worry about where I’m going to sleep tonight. I think I’m really boring but I have done some interesting things in my life.
As a teenager I always wanted to get away and it’s only in the last few years have I understood some stuff about growing up and wanting to get away. Aboriginal people talk about the idea of being on country and only recently that I’ve kind of understood a bit more about that. Growing up in Albury I just wanted to be elsewhere. We’d been up to this area and we were coming back and I had this feeling of being home. There’s a bend in the road where the old highway would go near Tynedale. There’s a spot where south of that I’m not home but north of that I feel like I’m home. I think it’s somewhere in the divide of Bundjalung and Yaegl country.
I left school and went to NSW University where I did a degree in Material Science and Ceramic Engineering. I worked in the field for 3 years. That whole idea of the alchemy of changing something significantly still appeals to me. I then went onto IT building programs and websites in the early days of the internet. I was then working as an Engineer and prior to that I was in a position as a Federal Treasurer for a big national body for that industry. I got to meet lot’s of interesting people during that period including Jose Ramos Horta who won the Nobel Peace Prize at the time. I spoke to Keith Richards on the phone once (laughs). Some of the most interesting people are local people who you talk to. I don’t do that work anymore.
All the way through my life Photography was always there. I wanted to do Photography for my Art Major work at school and my art teacher said No, you are going to do traditional arts..drawing, painting, sculpture because you are fine at photography so this will help you with composition and light, shade and colour. I remember being really angry at the time but he was right. My parents encouraged me to go to Uni and get a degree and that was cool. I enjoyed my time there but Photography was always bubbling away in the background.
I had a side hustle when side hustles weren’t a thing. I had my normal job but I was also taking photos, writing magazine articles and selling them as packages to magazines. I ended up falling into wedding photography. My girlfriend (now wife) at the time and I went to a friends wedding and I took some photos. I took them to the lab that I went to and there was only a select few people on their books that they did work for. We would all go through everyone else’s photos and it used to get us in trouble all the time because we were seeing people’s private pics. They had a filing cabinet with photos that were under embargo from the big fashion houses. We all knew where the keys were so we’d go look through those as well. Long story short another top Sydney wedding photographer saw my photos from the wedding and said, Who shot these? He asked them to get me to call him. At the time wedding photographer was one rung cooler than being a school photographer. At the time everyone wanted to shoot fashion. He offered me a job with great money just to come and carry his bag, hand him lenses and hang out. The first wedding was a huge Jewish wedding at the Ritz Carlton in Sydney and they are the most off the hook weddings. There were 750 people, grandmothers in their 90’s going crazy dancing. I asked a guy there why Jewish weddings were so over the top. He said Jewish people have been treated poorly so anytime we get to celebrate something happy, we do it like it’s the last time. I was blown away. Gradually I started shooting with him. He was shooting all the formal stuff on a Hasselblad and I was shooting all the candid stuff in black and white. It just grew bigger and I started shooting my own weddings.
It got too much having a job and doing weddings so I stopped the weddings for a while. I never saw it as a career. By this time I was living with my girlfriend in Bondi and there was an opportunity for her to move up here to a family business. We both quit our jobs before we left, spent some time actually seeing Sydney and arrived up here Christmas Eve 2000. I didn’t know what to do so I thought I’d just get a job till I worked out what I wanted to do. I had some other business happening which was keeping us going but we were getting married and we were looking for a Photographer. We couldn’t find anyone who would do what we wanted. They wouldn’t change from their packages and it was in the film days. If you asked for a few extra black and white pics on top, the answer was Nup! This is what you get. There was one guy locally who shot on medium format and it was 12 shots for $1200 take it or leave it. That was for the whole wedding and reception, the ceremony, family, everything. He actually got booked quite a lot. I was blown away.
I decided to shoot weddings again so in one day I built a website, printed business cards and signed up for a bridal fair. My wife came home and was happy to hear I would be doing what I loved. I still love doing weddings but I hate the wedding industry where girls are being told what they should be doing rather than doing something they love. I’ve shot heaps of weddings in Byron where people have come so they can show off to their friends that they had their wedding in Byron. So many that couldn’t afford it, would go into debt and be stressed the whole time to have their Byron wedding. Compare that to a good old cashed up bogan wedding out in Casino. They are fantastic, absolutely the best.
The big crash happened in 2008 and literally overnight there was no more bookings from overseas people. It just stopped. A third who had booked went through with their wedding and the rest cancelled. That whole market dried up instantly. I was priced higher than most of the local market and digital cameras were in by then so a lot of people decided to become wedding photographers including people who shouldn’t. I started shooting stock Photography for iStock and Getty Images and that was getting bigger. I was doing some commercial stuff as well and ended up being at a bit of a crossroad. There was a stock photography conference in Berlin so off I went”