About

I spent 2024 settling into the Brookvale studio space and painting full time. By years and I had completed eight major works of my own, as well as commissioned pieces and a number of smaller paintings. Along with original works I also began selling prints of my work and shipping them around the world.

I made the move into a dedicated studio space in Brookvale, NSW, where I can draw, paint, photograph and generally create anything I want.

Graduated from UNSW A&D with degrees in Philosophy and Fine Art.

Finalist in the UNSW A&D Jenny Birt award for painting. (Just a side note, this surprised me as the work selected was a charcoal drawing. Lesson here is not to take art prizes too seriously)

Still studying full time and very happy with how things were progressing

I received a second Deans List Award for Academic Excellence at UNSW

‘Old Clothes’ - Finalist in the Northern Beaches Environmental Art Prize

Deep in the COVID-19 pandemic I spent my time studying and drawing

I received the Deans List Award For Academic Excellence at UNSW

During the summer break from university studies, I decided to try and learn to draw a little. You can read more about that journey (here)

When COVID-19 hit, I was studying full time. Everything moved online, and financially things got a little odd with freelance work so I put all my efforts into study and things worked out okay.

One of the options open to me was to get back into some more study. I had said many times that when I retired I was going to do a degree in fine art as it was something I applied for when I finished school, but never went ahead with. I still wanted to do it though so my wife convinced me to just apply and see what happens. As I also have a strong interest in philosophy and politics, I decided to apply for a dual degree program which covered that as well. When I received my acceptance letter, I figured the only thing left to do was to take the time and just go and do it.

I began study in the second half of 2019.

I also worked on a podcast about different approaches to photography.

I continued to work as a creative freelancer and started considering exactly what I was going to do next. Over the summer I learnt to kitesurf. Shortly after, I fractured a vertebra (surfing not kitesurfing). Whilst sitting very still for a few weeks allowing things to heal, I booked a month long kitesurfing trip in Sri Lanka for later that year.

Solo exhibition of Nereids series at No Vacancy Gallery, Melbourne.

Still trying to rehab the knee, and having a lot of time that I otherwise didn’t have (because I wasn’t surfing), I delved further into my sketchbook of ideas and started working on a few.

After witnessing a scene on my local beach of plastics being thrown into the sea for fun, I decided my next project would be ‘Thinking Plastic’. This incredibly complex underwater set build opened a lot of doors for the kind of photography I wanted to do going forward.

The lease expired on our premises in Manly where the gallery was.

This initiated much consideration about what it was I wanted to pursue next. At first I was convinced this would be to simply find another gallery premises and keep moving forward in the same direction. However, after a conversation with my wife one winter evening while we were walking along the beachfront, we decided that it was quite nice not having a seven-day-a-week retail business to look after. My freelance work was going well and online sales were sound. So we both decided then and there to take a little time and re-evaluate our future moves.

I spent some time during May in Tasmania photographing waterfalls

Knee injury! I took a tumble in the surf and was out of action for a while. It was an ACL rupture and reconstruction. The time off was a blessing. It gave me opportunity to think, to figure out what I wanted to do next.

One of things I really wanted to complete was the underwater nudes series I had been working on. In August I flew the team to the Solomon Islands, chartered a catamaran to take us to the most spectacular locations with the clearest water and finished photographing my underwater nudes series, “Nereids”. The Solomon Islands trip was the culmination of several years work with over 20 models. Learning to work with models underwater was a special kind of challenge and one that I think resulted in some of my best photographic work.

I was asked to judge the My Sydney photographic prize.

In January I flew to PNG with the aim of coming home with just one photograph: I wanted to get an image of a surfer, in a barrel, at night. I designed and built a custom flash rig by wrapping a flash in bubble wrap and glad wrap. I then harnessed it to a mate and told him to paddle out in the dark and catch a wave. All the while I was swimming in the channel with the camera. It was incredibly difficult but the results were something spectacular.

  The rest of the year my photographic schedule was:

February - Cambodia

May - Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Later that year I organised an exploratory surf and photographic trip to one of the remotest regions in the Solomon Islands. It was something I will never forget.

The gallery was going great, but I wanted to do more. I started feeling very locked into the format of a blog and the style of photography was getting constrictive.

I wasn’t sure exactly what format my new direction was going to take, but I knew I wanted freedom to move and I didn’t want to have to produce content five days a week to satisfy advertisers and an audience that wanted entertaining. Eventually I just made the decision to stop what I was doing and start a photographic journal instead of a daily blog.

My travel schedule for this journal looked something like this for the year:

January - Bougainville, PNG

February - New Ireland, PNG

April - Southern & Central Atolls, Maldives

May - North Male, Maldives

June - Maldives, photography and video production for Donovan Frankenreiter concert series

July - Heron Island, Australia

October - New Zealand

November - Manus Island Province, PNG

There was a pattern developing here, another year with another strong travel schedule.

January - Malaita, Solomon Islands

February - Oahu, Hawaii

June - Fiji

July - Fiji

August - North Male, Maldives

October - Fiji

Very similar to 2011, I was pretty much away every few weeks, photographing full time, blogging 5 days a week and loving every minute of it.

February - Fiji

April - Maldives

June - Banyak Islands, Indonesia

July - North Male, Maldives

August - Panaitan Island, Indonesia

October - New Zeland

November - New Ireland, PNG

As mentioned, I was traveling a lot to photograph. 2011 looked something like this:

February - Lombok, Indonesia

April - Malaita, Solomon Islands

May - Chile

June - North Male, Maldives

September - Mentawai Islands, Indonesia

October - New Zealand

December - New Ireland Province, PNG

I took the plunge and opened a gallery in Manly, got married and started travelling a lot to photograph for the gallery.

The next few years are a blur of amazing times with regard to being able to travel to so many of the world's most incredible destinations, starting with a trip to India in November with a team filming a surf documentary.

My saltmotion blog had taken over. I was now running it full time, photographing for it every day and it was turning into quite a decent small business.

I had a string of commercial photography clients and my saltmotion blog was getting some serious traction. I was living in Bondi and travelling every few weeks to surf.

I met a girl and moved to Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

The past 10 years of my photography career had been about exploration, travel and living life. I had always known that a career in photography was where I would eventually settle. Now that I was back in Australia, the time seemed right to really give it a solid nudge. I was working a few odd jobs, teaching diving and doing some study. I was also assisting other photographers in the fashion world.

I saved some money and invested it straight into photography equipment, set up a studio and started a photographic blog documenting my surfing life. I called it saltmotion.

Back to Australia to ‘get real’ about life… yeah yeah whatever. It was around this time that I made the switch from film to digital, Yep, I hung on to that 35mm emulsion on plastic for a long time… I also started working in Photoshop again, which I had not done in a few years.

I arrived in South Africa with what I thought was enough money to last about six months. My plan was to travel around and see the country. The day before I arrived the Irish pound went from 5:1 to the rand to 20:1 – I was fuc*ing sorted! I bought a car on arrival and travelled around surfing in one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

Side note, eventually the car broke down and died… So, I stayed put for most of the time, living, working and surfing in the spectacular Eastern Cape region.

Side, side note, there are very few surviving photographs from this time.

I got a job working in a SCUBA shop in Dublin and managed to teach a bit of diving while I was there. I saved a bunch of cash in a year then flew back to Australia for a few weeks to see my family before getting on a plane to South Africa.

Side note, sometimes concert tickets tell a better story than a photograph ever could

Getting scared of the British winter, I booked a ticket to West Africa and spent a while hanging around in Senegal, The Gambia and Mali. I travelled overland to Timbuktu, then onward into the desert, by camel.

I spent new year's eve in Senegal then hung around on the beaches of that amazing coast learning to juggle. Money started to run low so I flew back to London with the plan to move to Dublin.

I left Lord Howe Island to go and see the world. I’d saved some money working for the previous two years, so I packed a backpack and flew to the USA.

From the USA I travelled solo through Mexico, Guatemala and Belize before heading back to the USA and onward to London where I planned to get a job and make some more cash to keep this travel dream alive.

I arrived in London a few months before the turn of the century and went straight to the address of a house that a guy in a bar in Guatemala had given me. I paid five pounds a night to sleep on the couch, got a job that led to another job that led to managing a pub with a mate. I saved some money and planned to head off travelling again.

Around September 1997 I took a job for one month on Lord Howe Island teaching diving. That one month posting turned into two years. There was no way of processing film on the island. You had to post it back to the mainland and wait for them to send the prints back to you.

In my final two years of high school, I had been handed the keys to the darkroom (yep, this was long before digital) and I had also turned my bedroom into a darkroom (I’m not sure how healthy it was to be sleeping in a room that housed all those chemicals). I also started assisting on my first professional photography jobs, weddings, products, anything…

I finished school in 1996 and, after a quick celebratory surf trip up the coast, I started working full time in a dive shop on the Northern Beaches.

Side note: I applied to university to go to COFA and study art. I eventually began this degree in 2019!

By the age of sixteen I was the dedicated photographer at my school, covering sports, drama and a host of other bits and pieces.

I also started working weekends in a local dive shop, not long after this I had access to the first underwater camera I got to use. I remember the first roll of film I put through; the results, were terrible…

At 15 I took a SCUBA diving course and loved it. Diving and photography go together really well. I was hooked.

By 14 my grandad let me play with his Canon SLR, full manual mode. Now you're talking… I started photography classes at school and soon it was all I was doing.

A few years later I was able to upgrade to a  35mm point-and-shoot camera. It had a few features I could play with, how cool is that!..

I obtained my first camera when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I took it on a school trip to the Snowy Mountains in Australia during the summer. The camera was a ‘point-and-click’ cartridge film jobby with one button. The results were terrible, but hey, I loved it.

Mostly learning to be a human, colouring in, playing with blocks and other similarly blissful activities.