A life with cameras
I am, like most enthusiastic photographers, a sucker for shiny new cameras and lenses. During my navy days, I could buy a brand-new Hasselblad camera in Asia for a fraction of the price here in Australia. I was so proud of my Hasselblad cameras that I set them at the end of the bed and stared at them until I fell asleep. I almost always slept with them in the same room, much to the annoyance of my wife.
In those days, I used Ektachrome 64 ASA film. My biggest burden was that I only had twelve frames on a roll of film, no 220 (24 exposure) film then! I never would have dreamed that one day I would have memory cards that allowed hundreds of shots to be taken on a single dive. I had twelve frames, and treated each as if it were the last! I am sure this discipline made me more careful with focus, composition and exposure. I remember getting very upset if I squeezed off a shot of a fish too soon or too late and consequently wasted a frame. Such sacrilege.
I also remember the dreadful wait for the processed film to be returned from the lab 200 km away. When the processed film strip finally arrived, I would dash to the light box and, with immense anticipation, flatten the uncut film down and reach for the magnifying glass. The fleeting seconds between rolling out the film, seeing the colour, and magnifying the beauty (or the muck ups!) were the best, an absolute thrill. After all, in 20 m or more of water, only muted colour is visible to the eye; true colour is seen only for a split second when the flash erupts. On the light box the truth is revealed. These were the years from the beginning of my career until around 1974; after that, my “viewing” experience changed.
By 1974, I was exclusively using 35 mm film on land and a mixture of 35 mm and 120 mm film underwater. In this smaller format, the rolls of film rose to 36 and the film came back from the lab in little yellow Kodak plastic boxes. It took a while to get used to the smaller format. I am sure my back and neck have suffered damage from me craning forward to run the magnifying glass over those tiny frames of celluloid for so many years. By 1992, I began to photograph landscapes in a larger format, 6x7 cm, and then, by the mid‑nineties, 6x17. I was producing large format books and staging exhibitions, so I wanted to return to the large format when photographing static, complex subjects. I continued to photograph wildlife and plants in 35 mm format because the cameras provided a wider range of telephoto lenses.
By early 2000 I could see change on the horizon. I knew that once manufacturers developed equipment at around 12 megapixels there was a fair chance digital photography would get close to the quality of a scanned transparency, in smaller reproductions at least. By 2005, the labour costs of processing film, cutting it, bagging it, barcoding and then scanning each frame so that it could be used digitally for publishing was costing my company several hundred thousand dollars each year. There had to be a better way to operate, not even considering the many benefits digital photography affords to a photographer who shoots and publishes as many varied images a year as I do.
I took my first tentative steps towards digital photography in mid‑2005, and soon found a reasonable quality reproduction comfort zone. I kept my film cameras, just in case. In fact, I only began to sell them off early in 2010. Nonetheless, with digital photography, workflow sped up and costs fell dramatically. The photographic process was revealed anew as a sheer joy for me. By 2009 digital camera technology had advanced to enable photography at high ISO ratings with little noise. This combined with full‑frame 12.5 megapixel sensors and the ability to shoot nine frames a second opened up creative avenues for wildlife photography in low light — a whole new world could be explored!
In early 2010, I took time out to review my work and consider my future behind a camera. My decision now is to move to the highest megapixel ratingmedium‑format digital camera to reconnect me to the detail in my images, particularly of landscapes, that I have missed since putting film aside. With this move, I am setting out to re‑photograph Australia’s diverse and spectacular landscapes, all with my old friend of the sixties and seventies — the Hasselblad camera system! This tim there will be no film, just a wonderful big, pin-sharp digital file. I can hardly wait. So join me on my websites and blog as I travel, and I will share them with you.
In 2009, with my publishing company’s library containing 800,000 celluloid images and 100,000 digital images, I decided to establish a prepress facility to handle colour management for CMYK reproduction. I wanted the company to control the entire creative development process, from photography, design, editorial, colour management and prepress. The only thing we do not do ourselves is print the publications. Costs have reduced enormously. Hand in hand with digital technology came something else that has made a dramatic change to my life — the internet. Anyone with the will and a few hundred dollars can now create images and share them with the online world. What a wonderful way to share your photographic creativity.
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Steve Parish: 50 Years Photographing AustraliaSteve Parish, OAM, has been photographing Australia for more than 50 years. He started his remarkable career photographing marine life in Australia's coastal waters. In the years since, he has spent much of his life travelling Australia, capturing the land, its wildlife and its people in spectacular images. |
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Australian WildlifeAustralia, the continent time forgot, is among just seventeen countries regarded as the most "megadiverse" places on the planet. Millions of years of isolation have led to the evolution of unusual and unique creatures known only to this southern island continent — creatures that have shocked and intrigued scientific circles for centuries. |
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