Life has become so busy that very few photographs are being made at home anymore, especially if you discount the images being made for Facebook and other such web communities. This is the moment when they are perched ready to fly off into their own lives.

University or work is just around the corner, and it won’t be long before they are moving out. Whether it is just around the corner or to the other side of the country, now is the time to capture a family portrait and to stop time still, if only for just a moment.

16 years

All grown up and driving lessons just around the corner, at sixteen, the world is a fascinating place that is to be experienced and enjoyed.

Friend networks are important and what Mum and Dad want becomes less important! Again, getting them involved in the process is a great way to motivate the sixteen year old. They will definitely have an opinion about how the photography session should unfold, and how the images should look at the end. By now they have been exposed to a vast amount of imagery, and they have very definite views on what is good and what is not. It is through the portrait sessions that we do for this age group, that we manage to keep up to date with what is in and what is not.

End of Financial Year is just about upon us and I have had a couple of businesses make contact to update the wall art around the office.

 Beautiful images on the walls at work makes for a pleasant and calming work environment, and we have a huge collection of images to choose from. Local Launceston images, Tasmania, or somewhere exotic  from around the world, we have something for everyone. The first step is to get an idea of where the images will be going up in the office, the amount of wall space they need to cover, and some idea of the type of images you would like to look at. From there, we will curate a selection of images, and using some very nifty software , we can show you the images, on your office walls , to size, so that you will have a very clear idea of how they will look up on the wall. There are a range of different materials  and framing options available, including traditionally matted and framed prints, acrylics, canvas and a super high gloss option, printed onto metal, that looks amazing with the right image. While the selection process and production can take a few weeks at this time of year, you can decide which Financial Year you want to bill this in, so whether you are using up budget from this year or taking advantage of the new budgets for next year, we can organise it so that you can start the next 12 months with a great  space to work in.  

 The pre-teen years where busy schedules and growth spurts go hand it hand. The influence of friends is becoming more important and there is a growing sense of independence, however there is still times when hugs, kisses and praise from Mum or Dad is all that they want.

 10 years

One of the best stages of life! Everything seems to be going okay, they are at peace with the world and themselves. A good time to be doing environmental portraits at home or the farm, including their hobbies and interests and perhaps even their best mate. At this stage again, we will look at both sibling and family portraits as well as a range of individual studies which will add to the rich history of images that we have produced up to now.

 

12 years

Both parents and children have to adjust to the influences of school, and it is a bitter sweet period for the parents as you realise that your child now has a part of their life in which you are not involved on a daily basis. They are learning new skills and wanting to use them, and it is much easier for us, as your photographer, to build a relationship and to capture those special expressions and moments.

At this stage, we ask the parents to take a step back so that the photographer has a chance to engage with the child in one on one conversation. Once this is happening, all those emotions and expressions are never far behind.

 

5 years

If you have been following our Stages of Life program, it has been two years since your last visit, and there have been many changes in your child. The very structure of their face is starting to change as the round baby face gives way to a more angular, grown up look. They will be losing their baby teeth soon, and their mature willing-to-please demeanour means that we can attempt one of our classical portrait studies. Less candid and printed onto our beautiful stretched canvas, this session echoes a tradition of portrait painting that goes back through the ages. Visit any of the great art galleries of the world and you will see a whole genre of portraits made at around this time in a person’s life. An artwork that will be enjoyed for many years to come and which will be handed down as part of the family history.

This is the stage that parents remember most vividly - for both the good and the bad! Independence is the key motivating factor. They want to walk by themselves, feed themselves, and they want to chose their ownclothes, and nothing is going to stop them! Often this stage is complemented by the birth of another sibling into the family, and as the prospect of pre-school draws closer, you realise that your baby has turned into a toddler.

15 months to 18 months

Never far from Mum or Dad, and still a bit insecure about meeting new people, a toddler is into everything. The contents of Mum’s purse is never safe, and appears hat they have mastered all of the TV remotes - something that you still need to come to terms with yourself! No button is left unpushed and a computer keyboard is the ultimate prize. Switching between full bravado and snuggling clinginess, at this age, the relationship between Father and child has been cemented. Whether it is the rough and tumble of hugs and wrestles, or the giggles of playing private games, Dad’s strong arms are a placeof refuge and safety.

two years

Two candles on the cake and your toddler starts this stage mature, calm and co-ordinated. Their understanding of language has developed and they can let you know what they want. Rituals are starting to develop, and everything stops until you can find their favourite cup! Any old teddy bear won’t do and you better not leave it at a friends house or you will be doing a late night dash! Most of the time they want to please you and are starting to understand concepts like time and sharing - even if they aren’t that good at it just yet. They are full of emotion and expression, and they have an opinion which they are not afraid to share with you. Portraits in the park or at a favourite location, with parents, siblings, cats and dog are ideal at this age.

 

three years

This is the age of make-believe and roleplays and having photographs taken at this stage will be an adventure. It can be an unpredictable age, and it is important to come to the photography session with your mind open to the possibilities. A three year old’s version of how the day should progress can be very different to an adult’s, and it is important to relax into it so that you are ready to capitalise on the moments that are presented rather than being fixated on some pre-conceived outcome.

the first year

In the first year, time seems to speed up and slow down all at the same time. Days roll into one amid late night feeds, day time sleeps, and an amazing number of nappy changes. Every day there are ground breaking moments: the first smile, the first sleeping through the night, first steps, words, and teeth. Let us capture these moments that are the initial stages of a journey of a lifetime.

Newborn to 4 months

Quiet moments just sitting and watching baby sleep, the delight in their eyes when they see your face, the amazing strength with which they can grasp you finger. Beautiful, quiet moments, captured in black and white, which will capture forever just how tiny this little person was. In years to come, you will look at these images and shake your head in amazement as you pick up size 13 basketball boots that are lying around on the bathroom floor.Capture the closeness and security they feel when being held by Mum and Dad and marvel at the contrasts in size and texture. This is a fleeting moment that is passed through all too quickly.

6 months to 9 months

It’s amazing what 6 months can do! No longer the snuggling, helpless baby, atthis age life is lived at full pace - with lots of naps!!Bright eyes and personality in spades, they have a full time job exploringthe world that surrounds them. Babies at this age don’t exist in the world bythemselves, and Mum or Dad are never far away. We like to show this in ourphotography, and sometimes parents are just represented, perhaps just aprotective arm or a helping hand. It is also the perfect opportunity to makesome beautiful, soft impressionistic portraits of Mum and baby together.

12 months

The first year has zipped by, and a cake with a singlecandle is the first of many more to come. A moving target full of energy and personality, with a clear idea of what they want, and when they want it! This is the perfect age for a candid environmental portrait in your home. This gives us the opportunity to make images that capture them in a time and place, and in years to come, where ever you end up living, these images with automatically transport you back to this special time.

 

the portrait experience

 

Because Philip Kuruvita Photography is a small, personal and exclusive studio, right from the start you’ll be dealing directly with the people who will be photographing you. We believe this is essential. From your initial enquiry, whether it be by phone or email, you will be treated with dedication, warmth and respect. From the time you start your portrait experience you’ll be consulted at every step by Philip,Vicki or Sam who have over 30 years experience in running a successful photographic studio.

 

the portrait consultation

The first step in the process is a complimentary portrait consultation. You can sit down over a hot cup of coffee or a cool drink and Philip can share some ideas with you and help you plan your photography session. You will be able to discuss the different options and styles available, ideas on locations, what to wear, etc. He will also cover the range of products available, the pricing structure and our client-friendly payment plan so you will have all the information you need. Philip will then book an appointment for your photo session. Payment of the session fee is payable when booking.

When you think about it, we only have about 15 summers with our kids before they start to want to go off with their friends and create lives of their own.  while we want them to grow up and become independent,  we will look back on those years as a tight knit family with fondness and a touch of nostalgia. It certainly makes you realise that it is important to make the most of these special years and to capture some of the joy and laughter that you share. for many of you, time is nearly up, and as the kids start to think of jobs and university, time together as a family gets harder and harder to orgainse. As we enjoy the last days of this summer,  now is the time to organise that family portrait that you have been talking about for so long - I know this because a week wouldn’t go past without someone coming into our studio and saying that they have wanted to do this for so long, but with kids at school, before and after school sport and busy weekend, it has always been push down the list of things to do  The long warm evenings that we are having at the moment are perfect for portrait shoots after work, the light is great, and its nice to take a  bit of time to be together as a family. Soon the leaves will be falling off the trees and Tasmania is at it’s most beautiful. Stunning scenery, Autumn colours and the cooler weather makes for the perfect combination when it comes to family portraits, and once the kids have gone off to work or  uni for the year the house will still be filled with the warmth and laughter that you shared on that day

32 years seems like a long time, but it has gone by in a flash! That's how long our studio at Upton Street has been open, and during those 32 years , we have photographed so many people in Launceston that we though it would great to go back through our archive and rephotograph some of our past clients.One of the joys of running a photography studio is that you get to record families as they grow. Over the years that we have been operating in Launceston so many families have passed through our doors, and we regularly get second and even third generation clients .Then and Now is a book project that matches current images with ones that we took. 10, 20 or even 30 years ago. We started before email was thing, so for the early years, we have some fax numbers on file, but they are of little use any more, so if you are a past client, or know some past clients, get in contact with us, we would love to say hi, and included you in this little piece of Launceston history.Weddings, commercial jobs, school leavers , family portraits or my Faces of Launceston project . If you have been in front of my camera at any stage during the last 30 years we would love to hear from you.The first step is to register your interest. If you can give us details of when you were last photographed, we will be able to find your old images, and we will then be in contact to organise a new shoot. There is no cost involved for the shoot, as past clients you never pay for session fees, and there is no obligation to buy any of the pictures , however if you are interested in seeing the images from your shoot, we will give you studio credit $100 to use towards updated images for your home.We need a minimum of 40 participants to create a stand alone book, and we are investigating the options for creating personalised dust jackets so that your family can be in the cover of the book . if for some reason, there is not enough interest, the images will still be included in our annual studio book.I am really looking forward to re-engaging with our past clients and seeing how their families have changed.https://tave.com/.../questionnaire/25cd02a4bc928e84e15d8442

Childhood is a very loose term!  Anywhere from 4 years of age through to driving lessons!

 This is when life gets busy and having regular portraits sessions is at its most difficult. This is why we offer a system where we can contact you at set intervals just to remind you that another year ( or two) has passed since we last made pictures. By now there is often other children on the scene, and if you thought having one child was time-consuming…Both parents and children have to adjust to the influences of school, and it is a bitter sweet period for  the parents as you realise that while you used to know absolute everyone about your child’s life,  your child now has a part of their life in which you are not involved. They are learing new skills and wanting to use them, and it is much easier for your photographer to build a relationship and to capture those special expressions and moments. At this stage, we ask the parents to take a step back so that the photographer has a chance to engage with the child in one on one conversation. Once this is happening,  all those emotions and expressions are never far behind. Five years if you have been following our Stages of Life program, it has been two years since your last visit, and there have been many changes. The very structure of their face is starting to change as the round baby face  gives way to a more angular, grown up look. They will be losing their baby teeth soon, and their mature, "willing to please" demeanour means that we can attempt one of our classical portrait studies. Less candid and printed onto our beautiful stretched canvas, this session echos a tradition of portrait painting that goes back through the ages. Visit any of the great art galleries of the world and  you will see a whole genre of portraits  made at around this time in a person’s life. An artwork that will be enjoyed for many years to come and which will be handed down as part of the family history.Seven years  Bridging the gap between childhood and  the next stage  of life -youth,  this is a sensitive age where strong bonds are formed with siblings . A relationship portrait that explores these emotions will provide a range of great images, of the individual children and of their relationships with each other . This can be done in the studio, at home or in the parks and gardens around the city. Any hobbies or passions such as music or sport can also be included.  It is also a good time to create an up to date family portrait

Dawn at  Mesa Arch  in Canyonlands National Park in Utah. The arch is an amazing natural stone arch perched at the edge of a cliff with vast views of the spectacular landscape in the distance. The hardest part about trying to photograph scenery like this is the sheer vastness of the image. The view goes on and on, and trying to make sense of all the elements is quite a challenge. I was travelling with my friend and fellow photographer  Peter Eastway having both been speakers at the Wedding Portrait Photographers International conference in Las Vegas.  We arrived in the dark, the carpark being about 1 km away and set up waiting for the first light the break over the horizon. Never having been there before, we only had our calculations to work out where we were expecting the sun to rise, and set up our cameras using our best guess. As we would be photographing directly into the rising sun, I knew that the window of opportunity to get a decent shot would be very narrow, and that as soon as the sun was fully up over the horizon, the scene would be rendered flat and uninteresting. Our only chance would be to capture the image at the very start of the sunrise. It is nice when you think about a shot before hand, make a plan, and everything works out pretty much the way you thought it would. The light was great, and lit up the landscape to highlight the mountains, and rock structures in the distance, and brought out the texture on the canyon floor. The light hitting the underside of the arch and the rocks below it caused the whole structure to glow and I was very happy with the shot. There was the usual flurry of activity, trying to get as many variations as possible before the light flattened out, but on this occasion, the initial image that I made was the best one. This image looks amazing printed onto a high gloss metallic paper and is available in our Art print gallery here:

The number one question we get at our portrait photography studio is "When is the best time to get family portraits done?" Such a simple question that is just so difficult to answer! Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and allows us to see things so clearly, the only problem is that when it comes to family portraiture, by the time you are looking back, its too late! You can’t get newborn pictures of a one year old, and even at 1month, your baby has changed so much from those first few days. We have put together a guide that will help answer that original question, and give you some things to think about when you come to deciding when to schedule your shoots.  The first Year in the first year, time seems to speed up and slow down all at the same time. Days roll into one amid late night feeds, day time sleeps ,and an amazing number of nappy changes. Every day there are ground breaking moments: the first smile, the first sleeping through the night, first steps, words, and teeth. I believe that there are 3 main shoots that you can consider in this first year. It might stemlike a lot, but the change in your baby is so great in these initial stages, with their body totally changing from a helpless little ball, to sitting and finally standing and walking and talking.  Newborn - 3 months Quiet moments just sitting and watching baby sleep. The delight in their eyes when they see your face, the amazing strenght with which they can grasp you finger. This is the perfect age for our Newborn Shoot. Beautiful, quiet moments , captured in black and white, which will capture forever just how tiny this little person was. In years to come, you will look at these images and shake your head in amazement as you pick up size 13 basket ball boots that are lying around  the bathroom floor. We aim to capture the closeness and security they feel when being held by Mum and Dad and marvel in the contrasts in size and texture This is a fleeting moment  that is passed through all too quickly. This is not a time for images of your baby smiling at the camera - it might happen, ( but that could also just  be wind ! ) These images are about the relative size. How tiny she was in Dads hands or how he snuggled into Mums shoulder. 6 months - 9 monthsIt’s amazing what 6 months can do! No longer the snuggling, helpless baby, at this age life is lived at full pace - with lots of naps!!Bright eyes and personality in spades, they have a full time job exploring the world that surrounds  them. Babies at this age don’t eist in the world by themselves, and Mum or Dad are never far away. We like to show this in our pictures , and sometimes  parents are just represented , perhaps just a protective arm or a helping hand. This is the perfect age for our relationships portraits. It is also the perfect oppourtunity to make some beautiful, soft impressionistic portraits of Mother and baby together. 12 months The first year has zipped by, and a cake with a single candle is the first of many more to come. A moving target full of energy and personality, with a clear idea of what they want, and when they want it! This is the perfect age for a candid environmental portrait in your home. This gives us the opportunity to make images that capture them in a time and place, and in years to come, where every you end up living, these images with automatically transport you back to this special time. This portrait session  should include a relaxed family portrait in your home, with cats and dogs and all the wonderful things that make a house a home.

A visit to Canberra is always a great experience for a photographer. Not only do you get to feast your eyes on numerous exhibitions and architectural works, but you also get to play with your camera a lot! A visit to the National Museum of Australia has so much to offer. The building and the surrounding grounds are full of architectural angles and interesting juxtapositions so the longer you hang around, the more you see. Whether it is 50,000 years of Indigenous heritage, the story and artefacts of colonial settlement or just a look at Phar Laps heart this place has it all. In an internal courtyard, the  Garden of Australian Dreams is a wonderful subject to photograph. It is hard not to think about Jackson Pollocks Blue Poles ( which we saw at the National Gallery ) or of Jeffrey Smart and his very precise paintings of traffic signs. The square white box in the centre of the garden represents the Australian dream of home ownership with its own palm tree, and the floor is covered with maps of regional areas. This image is one in our Artprint gallery and looks amazing printed as a large square.

In my last blog entry, I talked about the fact that I feel very lucky to be able to pursue my hobby of photography while at the same time being able to have another part of me that can do photography on a commercial basis to an extent that we have been running our studio for the last 30 odd years with no other form of income other than what we make from photography 

 If you talk to any photographer in the world, the vast majority of them will tell you that they started with a hobby, which grew and morphed into a business. If you have the kind of mind that analyses a business to see how commercially and financially viable it is, your don’t come up with photography as the answer! Its a left and right side of the brain thing and I have the creative side ( I think that is left, but you would need to ask a right sided person to be sure) The hardest thing about developing your hobby into a business is that in most cases, you need to make a choice, and you end up losing your hobby to the business. Whenever I get people dropping into the studio looking for career advice, I warn them that taking photographs as a business is nothing like taking pictures as a hobby , and that they need to look very seriously at whether they really want to give up this wonderful pastime in favour of a business that is ever changing and more and more challenging each year. It can be done, I am a case in point, however you need to have a clear vision of how you expect to make all the bits work together in a way that suits you. I have always said that I don’t have a work life and a home life, I just have one life and I try to cram all the various bits into it as best as they will fit. This image  of David is a good example. It is a portrait - I make  portraits for a living, but it was taken as part of my Behind the Garage Door book that looked at some of the amazing cars that are hidden in garages around Launceston. The portrait also overlapped into my Faces of Launceston project that I have been shooting for the last 25 years ( this one went on display at the Automobile museum along with others from the car book ), and also ended up framed in the subjects home. So in some ways , this one portrait touched so many of the different things that I do. For the book and the exhibition, I took a series of images of the cars that were being included.  This one is a 1964 Porsche 356 SC which were produced from 1963 to 1965 with 1964 being the peak production year when about 4000 were made. Purchased new in Germany in 1964 by a United States serviceman, the car returned to the States with him at the end of his tour of duty. About the year 2000 it was imported into Australia by a company specialising in used Porsches, and has since competed in a couple of Targa Tasmania rallies. It is without doubt one of my favourites from the book. The car has beautiful lines and is such a beautiful object in itself. It’s not a car I could drive as my daily commute, I need something bigger that I can get into without having to manoavurer myself into the seat, and something that can take my gear and a bit of knocking about, but I can certainly admire it from afar. To get this shot using the brutalist architecture of Henty house as a background, we needed to position the car exactly, as the concrete walls were only just big enough to contain the car. At the time David had a very sore leg, and I felt bad making him climb in and out of the car on  number of occasions just to shift it a few inches one way or the other to get the positioning perfect.  You can read all about this beautiful car in my book Behind the Garage Door available here: http://bit.ly/PKPbooks

Seems like only yesterday, but it was in fact 6 years ago that I ventured out on a dark morning somewhere in the middle of Tuscany. We were staying in a small medieval  hill town which have views out across the valley, and after a splendid dinner in a small restaurant I planned out my shoot for the next morning.  There was a small castle on the top of the hill, and I had worked out a location about half way down the hill from which I figured I could get a nice shot of the castle.  The next morning I left in the dark and proceeded towards my chosen spot only to find that the road had been blocked and a detour was in place talking me right around the other side of the hill.  With no knowledge of this side of town, and my shoot plan out the window I started looking for something to photograph. The sun was coming up and I really didn’t have much time to play with, so I stopped at the local cemetery to see if there was a picture to be had - there wasn’t, but on my way back to the car, I decided to look over the edge of the hill, and was presented with a series of images that took my breath away.  The sun was creating some great colour in the sky and there was a low rolling mist that we had not seen before ( or after for that matter ) . The only thing that you don’t get to experience through this image is the doof doof music that was coming from across the valley as the people at the all night rave welcomed the morning sun.  From up on the hill, there was a great panorama of views and by zooming in with a long lens, I was able to create a series of images that were very pleasing to me.  This is probably a good time to talk about the fact that all of this type of photography that I do  is pretty much ego-centric , I shoot the images that please me, and while I am always surprised and delighted when other people love the images so much that they want to hang them in their homes,  in the first instance , they have to please me.  I feel very fortunate that I can make my living taking pictures for people. Whether it is a family portrait, or a commercial product shot, most of my working life consists of working to some sort of a brief. I have been lucky/worked hard to ensure that the people who commission me understand that they are asking me for more than just the loan of my camera, and that they want and need me to use my judgment and eye to create images that , hopefully, are more than they dared to imagine.  So when I go on holidays and am shooting in my role of hobby photographer, I want the images to be purely for my own enjoyment.  I think that the minute I start trying to make images thatI think people would like to buy, I will not only be less effective in making good images, but I will also lose the joy of having a hobby that I really love. This does not stop me from gaining just a little bit of extra joy if people decide that they would like to buy a copy of an image for their home! We actively encourage this, you can see some of the images that we have for sale in our Artprint gallery bit.ly/KuruvitaArtPrints This gallery has just a tiny selection of images, which we are  constantly adding to, so if there is something in particular that you are looking for, from Tasmania, Australia or from around the world,   send us a quick email, you never know what we might have. While the mist hung around for a while, the next half hour was spent making some of the best images from that trip, and as the morning light gave way to daylight, I felt like I had taken the images that were on offer that morning. With the sun streaming in I decided to head back, and came face to face with this beautiful deer just enjoying the morning sunshine. When I got back to our accommodation, Vicki was still asleep, and was woken by a hyper excited and happy photographer. 

I don’t know if it is because I have two daughters of my own, and I miss the little girls that they were, but I really love all the things that are going on in this picture. You can see the connection, you can see the tenderness and the sense of fun, and you know that this is an image that will resonate for both of them for many years to come.  Flower crowns and squishing noses are not things that last forever! All too quickly they grow up and before you know it the discussions are about work and mortgages and renovating the house. Don’t get me wrong, is all great, and I am thankful that we can still have great conversations about the things that are important in my girls lives, but this picture makes me feel nostalgic - and its not even my family! Imaging how this will work for this Dad when his daughter is 30! People come to us for family portraits for a variety of reasons. It is a way to have their family and loved ones close to them even though the realities of a busy, day to day life may mean that they are sometimes physically apart. They come to us so that we can generate a sense of belonging for their children - there is nothing like seeing beautiful pictures of you and your family in the centre of the family home , and to hear everyone who visits your home saying nice things about the pictures of you and your family to build a sense of pride and self worth in a young child’s mind. They come to us in an effort to build a connection to family, capturing memories, and preserve a particular time in their family's history, so as to leave a mark and to create ongoing history for future generations plus it’s fun!  That is a really important point, because if your family portrait session is a time when everyone is really present, and as a family you have a really great time together, the images become a memory trigger to that shared experience and the fun and the laughter and the sense of love and belonging will all come flooding back, regardless of how long ago it happened.  Time moves on, kids grow up and leave home, parents grow old  and pets live their lives 7 times faster than we do. Fnding time to organise everyone for a photo shoot, justifying the expense, knowing what to ask for or what is possible and feeling anxious that somehow you will be tricked or forced into buying something that they don't want, or can't afford are all very valid reasons why people say to us that they have been meaning to do this for years, but just didn’t get around to it. We understand that, and have developed a system that will guide you through every step of the way, answer all your questions ( often before you have formulated them for yourself) and give you the final say in every decision you make. We start with a consultation in our studio where we will show you all the options, and give you a price list  to take away with you so that at no stage are there any surprises ( no one likes surprises! ) At the end to the day we want to help you achieve you goal of having beautiful family portraits in your home that will warm your heart for many years to come.  To start a conversation and to find out a little bit more about how your ideas might be put into action, contact us and let's have a chat!

Every cook book that we make produces at least one recipe that somehow becomes a staple in our house. A recipe that is easy to do and which produces amazing results that never fail to surprise and delight anyone who tastes it. The recipe that has really taken my fancy from our latest book Island Catch, Seafood of Tasmania is one from the Tasmanian Divers Group and is a recipe for Dried Roe Scallops

 A very simple dish that has a beautiful twist. The first thing that you need to do is remove the orange roe from your scallops and dry them out until they are brittle. You can do this in a covered pan over a low heat, in an oven or in a dehydrator. it can take 1-1.5 hours for them to dry, but once dry they can be crushed into a fine sand. This dried roe powder has an incredible intense flavour which really lifts the dish. Once you have dried the roe and crushed it as fine as possible, you add crushed garlic, chilli, basil, olive oil, butter and lemon juice, mix it all together and cook your scallops in it for 6-9 minuets. Garnish with fresh basil and a squeeze of lemon and tuck right in! Ingredients12 scallops, including shellscrushed garlicchilli, finely dicedbasil, finely dicedolive oil2 tbsp of butterjuice of 1 lemon Dried Roe Scallops |serves 4 MethodRemove scallops from shells, clean and separate roes.Place roes in a pan over heat with lid on to dry out roes. This may take approximately 1-1½hrs.When roes have dried, crush as finely as possible.Add crushed garlic, chilli, basil, olive oil, butter and lemon juice and mix together.Add scallops to roe and butter mix and cook for 6-9 minutes.Remove from heat and serve on some of the discarded scallop shells.  We cooked these on an open fire on the rocks after diving for the scallops (we had the dried roe powder pre prepared ) The scallops had been in the water less than an hour ago and the flavour exploded in your mouth. If you like scallops you really should give this a go. This recipe and heaps of other great adventures for your mouth can be found in Island Catch available here https://kuruvita.com.au/index.php/shop/category/21-books 

 I had seen these  vintage boxing gloves hanging on the wall at my Osteo’s rooms and thought it would be good to make an image.  Josh let me borrow them and I went searching for a wall that reminded me of an old time boxing gym ( The kind of place a young Rocky would have been comfortable in)  Luckily , Launceston has a number of options, and I found a suitable background to make my image. I love it when a single image can build a picture in your minds eye. Can you feel the place? The smell of sweat and lineament, the sound of a leather skipping rope twirling through the air and  someone on a speed bag setting the tempo. Shafts of light streaming onto the central ring, and a sense of hard work and melancholy all rolled into one. Frank was Josh’s grand father and a part of him lives on in this picture. I have made large prints of this image, and the bigger it is the better it looks. Shot on a medium format 50megapixel camera, the cracks in the leather and the patina on the walls really help tell the story of a bygone age.

Between the ages of 8 and 15, we lived in Sri Lanka, where , at the time, there was no TV, so going to the cinema to watch the latest movies out of Hollywood was a regular part of our weekly routine. The movies that we all were most excited to see were the westerns. The Good The Bad and The Ugly,  in fact anything with Clint Eastwood, Chatos Land with a non speaking Charles Bronson, John Wayne, Allan Ladd, and so many more. So it was with much excitement that I finally visited Monument Valley. I had been speaking at the WPPI conference in Las Vegas, and at the end of it, my friend and fellow photographer Peter Eastway and I hired a car and set off to explore the 4 corners region around Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado   This one area of Navajo land was the set for so many of the epic Hollywood blockbuster westerns that I had grown up with. It had all the elements that the movie executives thought were required to set the scene, and in the process helped form a very clear picture in the minds of the world of how the American west looked during the time of Sitting Bull, General Custer and the Wells Fargo stage coach ( I can imaging it now tearing up the road, chased by a band of Indians on palomino ponies with the horses at full gallop and the wheel looking like it might fly off at any second! ) We arrived before dawn ( as all good photographers should!) only to find that there was a gate and an entry fee and worst of all, the office didn’t open until 8am, long after the light was of any use for photography.  Luckly for us this had obviously happened before, and waiting patiently at the gate as this lovely Navajo guy with a van who offered to take us in via his village and give us a tour of the area.  The asking price was fair and we had an amazing tour of the area, along with expert commentary. The images we got were just what we had hoped for so much so that we decided to hire him again the next day, start even earlier and get to some of the other stops in this great landscape.  John Ford Point, named after the famous western movie director gave us a stunning  sunrise, and it was so obvious why they should want to shoot movies in this wonderful location.  For all the pictures that I got over the 3 days that we were there, the enduring memory for me is a moment when I found myself all alone in this landscape. The van and guide where down by the road, Peter had wandered off to photograph something and I looked around and all I could see was the desert, the rock formations and the clouds above me. At that point, I realised that recording everything on my camera was going to be impossible so I put my camera down, lay flat on my back in the cool sand, and soaked in the  experience. 

some days you just need a picture that makes you smile every time you look at it!  there are so many aspects of this image that I love, the fact that we were obviously trying for a straight studio portrait of everyone looking at the camera, looking relaxed and happy, and the fact that somehow or another, I don’t remember the exact details, but the giggles snuck in and that was the end of it! The two older kids on the ends are doing their best to hold it together and look at the camera but you can tell it is going to be a lost cause. In the centre, things have already  collapsed into fits of laughter, but through it all you get to see the real relationship that exists within this family. As I shoot Black and White, choice of clothes colour is not as important as the tones ( Light or dark ). While I don’t want everyone to be dressed identically, we need to avoid having 4 people in dark and just one person in light ( unless we are trying to make them stand out in the group). We also want to avoid big patterns, stripes and logos, so your Hawaiian shirt is probably a not go unless you all have one. At the end of the day, I want the clothes that you are wearing to melt into the background and not compete with those beautiful expressions and the interaction between the people in the photograph