I’m a photographer based in Melbourne Australia. When I started my career I trained as an Artist. A real one. You know, the kind that paints and draws. Over a period of time I began to get frustrated with the length of the process involved in creating an oil painting so I explored alternatives for a while including ink based drawing. Despite having numerous solo and group exhibitions over the years I felt the paint on canvas art lacked a something I couldn’t pin down…

Which brings me to photography, sort of. I’m the sort of person that carries a camera with me wherever I go. First in the 80s it was a typical ‘point and shoot’ 35mm film camera, then in the 90s a 35mm film SLR, then in the early noughties a phone camera. Yeah, great, a phone camera. The basic idea for all of these cameras was to record things I saw and feed it back into my art. Once taken and used I didn’t think much more of those photos and more often than not they were discarded or deleted. Then I got a DSLR. Then I got another one, and another one, and fancy pants lenses and other bits and pieces (including a growing collection of 35mm film SLRs and two vintage 120 medium format film cameras) and well…

Before too long I was taking photos with the intention of taking the best photograph I could. I was looking for new and original ways of seeing things, exploring was to develop and edit the images and busy finding my own voice. I still made art, but less of it. Then I hit Melbourne after an absence of several years and I found a full throated voice like the roar of the MCG on Grand Final day.

So here I’ll talk about some of the photographs I’ve taken, both film and digital, and the reasons why I did so. I won’t talk about camera gear, exposure settings and that stuff because there’s plenty of that already on the Internet already. Okay I might mention the vintage cameras a bit, but that’s just because each one of those old beauties has it’s own unique character that imparts a soul to the image that is lacking in modern cameras.

If you've managed to read this far and want to find out a little more, have a specific request or wish to enquire about licensing images for commercial purposes you can contact me directly and we can start a conversation.

Cheers

Gary Parkinson