The Shot Page 3
The section itself was a dungeon, a little office and darkroom under the Victoria Barracks just down the road from Lang Park. Terry’s rank (WO2) the highest NCO position short of regimental sergeant major and he was in his early thirties when I started under him. He stood around six feet tall and was a very good water-skier, so he always had that tanned, outdoorsy Aussie look about him, which was a funny contrast to the dark cellar we were based in. He was not only my mentor, showing me all the tricks of the photographer’s trade, but he was my employment trainer: he set my exams and marked me for proficiency.
These were special days, when I worked harder than I ever had before, trying to soak up everything about this amazing profession right down to how you hold the camera. I had my first photograph published in 1991. It was of an army officer with a plaque, for the army newspaper; a standard PR shot, but it got a run. I did it the way Terry told me to: know the story you’re trying to tell, frame the shot in your head before you take it, take control of your picture. I would do it differently now, but I see in that shot the basic elements of the young professional. So, no Walkley, but I was happy. I’d got my start.
When you’re starting in this business, a camera is a camera – they don’t seem that different from one another. But I saw that Terry stayed current with technology. He read all the literature and kept up with the suppliers, and I carried that outlook through my own career. The gear we used was pretty indicative of kit in the early 1990s. Our 35mm SLR was the Nikon FM2, with an MD-12 motor drive. We used Ilford FP4 and HP5 film, on thirty-six-frame rolls. During my time in the army, the SLRs were only ever Nikons. For portraiture we had a Hasselblad 500mm CM camera, with the 6x6 square negative, and we had to be handy with a Linhof Technika 4x5 field camera used for aerial photography, landscapes and army marketing shoots. And our flash units were the Metz.
Terry taught me how to make pictures, about depth of field, the ‘thirds’ composition rule and lens selection. And then you add the variables of light, time of day, movement and so on. The beautiful pictures that readers take for granted are a result of many decisions and I loved learning what those decisions were, even if it took me a while to master all the nuances.
One of the things I had to get out of my system was my love of a wide-angle lens. Every photographer has a comfort zone that they have to push out of if they want to be a professional, and mine was a close-cropped picture with a wide-angle lens. Some photographers like a bit of distance but I liked to be in people’s faces and talking to my subjects. That instinct would serve me well in another career, with the Sydney tabloids, but as a young journeyman I had to vary my repertoire and Terry got me shooting the same scene in different ways. That’s how I developed a career-long habit of going into a gig with at least two camera bodies over my shoulders. One would have the 28mm Nikkor wide-angle lens, and the other would have a 70–200mm zoom lens (the strength of that zoom depending on the shoot and the set-up). Terry would say, ‘Get in and do your close-ups but then make sure you get me a variety of pics.’ He taught me to always get a saver picture – the set-up picture you take first- up so if everything else goes wrong you have that one saver pic. That trick saved my hide on more than a few occasions.
When Terry got the new Nikkor 20mm lens in the office, he knew he had to hide it from me. I loved that 20mm – it was the most close-up and personal lens a photographer could use at the time and it totally suited my style. Yep, I was developing a style.
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Terry tried to encourage my energy and confidence while developing me as an all-round photographer. I can’t have been easy – my energy levels were very high in my early twenties. One of the best things Terry did was calm me down a bit and insist I frame a picture in my mind before I took it. I didn’t know what he was on about when he first said it, but as I became more aware and practised I understood that this was probably the main difference between a professional and a hobbyist. When you shoot for a readership – not for yourself – you have to capture an image that tells a story, so the image has to have context and information relevant to a person who simply turns the page and looks at the picture. When the photographer’s picture and the journalist’s words work together, there’s nothing better. Just as the writer has to include everything that’s relevant to the story, so does the picture. It isn’t enough to be pretty or whimsical or arty, even though all of these things are great in their own ways. When you take photographs for a readership, you have to know what you’re shooting before you shoot it, which means you have to frame it in your mind. The habit Terry got me into has become a part of my life, and these days I see the shot before I’ve taken it; I know the shutter speed and the aperture, and the lens, the foreground, the background and where the subject is composed in the frame and how the subject interacts with light, environment and other subjects. But that’s all just technical detail. Mostly, I’ve got a clear idea of what story the picture will tell. This is something you learn.
Don’t let anyone tell you they’re a natural photographer. It takes a lot of work and many mistakes, not to mention good teachers, to get you going. At least, it did for me. Terry Dex worked me hard and held me to a high standard – he didn’t want crappy work being sent from his darkrooms. I really picked up that ethic: every time you send out your work, it’s a chance for someone to say you’re great or you’re shit. It’s up to the photographer. You’re only as good as your last picture.
I was lucky to be a photographer in the army. Each arm of the ADF trains its photographers for a specific task. Back in the 1990s, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) used imagery as analytics, but the army needed all-rounders and news-gatherers. An army photographer can be out and about with a patrol, sent up in a plane or taken out in a boat. But the images – once cleared by the hierarchy – might also be sent to newspapers as a PR tool. So army PR organised internships with media outlets to ensure the photographers not only had the technical ability to take imagery for the generals, but knew how to shoot material that could be printed on a front page.
At the PR section I was taught videography on the old – but high-quality – Betacam SP systems. We worked to the same standards as television network crews, and we were also trained as sound technicians. We were trained as video editors, able to ‘cut and crunch’ footage and sound together, with titles, and make basic programming. We practised with the PR officers, interviewing them, taping them and then cutting it into a package that might be supplied to a television network. Again, the focus was on the story, not simply the images and sound.
In these early days at Victoria Barracks I had the enthusiasm of a big puppy and the dexterity to go with it. I was hard on my gear. Really hard. To this day, I’m no better. I get engrossed in what I’m doing, I act quickly and I see my gear more as a tool than as something to be worshipped. Terry used to wince at the dings I’d put in the bodies and lenses. He was talking with a sales rep from Nikon one afternoon, and the rep was boasting about how tough the new camera bodies were. Terry said, ‘We’ll see how tough it is. If it can survive Ramage, it’ll survive anything.’
I started to wrap a lot of my gear in duct tape, to keep Terry happy. Mainly the edges of the bodies and lenses. This doesn’t avoid damage from a major whack, but it does stop all the nicks and scrapes. It was a good habit to get into because as I amassed my own kit over the years, I’d always duct-tape it. That not only keeps it working in harsh environments, the fact that it’s in good nick also enhances the resale value when I’m ready to trade in. Here’s another tip for young players: for some reason, customs officers the world over barely look twice at camera gear that’s plastered in duct tape. It probably doesn’t look valuable enough – the same reason duct tape keeps the thieves away.
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During my time in Brisbane, I was madly in love with Sheree, a very pretty brunette who worked in the jewellery trade. She was the younger sister of my neighbour in Brisbane and right from the get-go, when we first
met in 1988, we just hit it off. After eighteen months of dating we moved in together in Toowong and then, after living together for a while, we married in 1991 in a church in Maryborough – her family were Queensland cane farmers. She was twenty-one and I was twenty-three, and using the income from her job and my lance corporal’s wage we bought a plot of land in the Brisbane suburbs and built an AV Jennings home on it. Twenty-three is considered a bit young to marry these days, but it was a straightforward decision for us. I had a profession and a woman I loved, I had a job and a house. Life was pretty good.
4
Out and About
Luck stepped in again in 1992, when I’d been a photographer for less than two years. The Australian Defence Force had its Kangaroo 92 (K92) exercise coming up and I was given the chance to photograph it with a crack outfit organised from Canberra, the Media Support Unit (MSU). K92 was a joint Australia/US ground-air-land simulation of an invasion of the Northern Territory, the largest exercise Australia had been engaged in since World War II.
Terry and I and another photographer, Warrant Officer Barry Buckley, went to Darwin and covered K92 with the navy and air force guys, and a large contingent of army PR people flown in from Canberra. I’d been a little sheltered in Brisbane and I hadn’t seen the defence system as a class structure until we were all together like that. There were twenty-five people in the Media Support Unit and it became very clear that the journalists were the officers (captains and majors) while the photographers and videographers were NCOs (corporals and sergeants). I was struck by how some journalist officers took their rank to mean that they were superior people, whereas others used their rank to drive people to get the best stories and coverage. It was an eye- opener: for some people in this amazing business called the media, it was all about their status and their perceived place in a class structure. For me it was about the work.
There were other officers in my new media world who were driven by excellence. One was Brigadier Adrian d’Hagé – then head of Defence PR – who raised the Media Support Unit with the ultimate goal of it becoming a permanent unit. With d’Hagé in charge, it was an exciting time. As we prepped for K92, the word came down that d’Hagé had a million-dollar budget for the exercises, and he had to spend it tomorrow. Who cares if that story was true? What it meant for us was lots of requisitions to make sure we had all the gear for the job. The budget was well used, and Barry Buckley came to the fore. Buck, as he was known, had been in Vietnam and as a WO1 was the highest-ranking photographer in the Australian Army. He was a classic grey-haired warrant officer who took shit from no one, especially not a bright-eyed mischief-maker like me. But beneath his stroppy demeanour was a tolerant, encouraging person who covered my arse more times than I deserved.
Buck was great on the tools and he built three mobile workrooms for K92, converted from large caravans. The mobile darkroom was a dual-axle, air-conditioned caravan for the photographic crews. It contained three beds, fridges, cooking facilities, chemical storage, a wet process area for Jobo colour processing of negative and transparency, and processing for black-and-white negatives. The doors were sealed, so the whole caravan became the darkroom, and it had a five-hundred-litre water tank on the back so we were self-sufficient. Another, camouflaged, caravan contained the video editing desks, and a third – the MTV – had all the satellite communications gear, so our images and packages could be transmitted.
The three caravans were driven to Larrakeyah Barracks in Darwin by the army’s transport corps, while four of us in the media support team travelled in a Land Rover with a trailer on the back. It took us a week to make that drive from the freezing cold of Canberra to the tropical warmth of Darwin.
For a couple of weeks we followed the forces around the Top End in our Land Rover, our stores and tents in the trailer on the back. It was rough going, and by the time K92 was over, I didn’t need to see the inside of a Land Rover ever again in my life. But it was an ongoing education, learning how to get the shots when there was so much dust around and the light could be very harsh. When a convoy of vehicles comes through, you have a small window before the dust shrouds everything; same with a helicopter exercise. And if you get on the wrong side of the sun while the dust is rising, you could be shooting a whole roll of nothing. This was an invaluable experience when you consider that I ended up doing so much work in combat situations.
In those days, shooting on negative and transparency, there was no way to check. There was no ‘review’ button – a convenience that a whole generation has grown up with. I also developed my ‘anticipation’ style of action photography that would serve me very well in newspapers. When you’re photographing groups of soldiers and they’re getting on and off choppers, in and out of Land Rovers and talking on radios, you don’t get to ask them to ‘walk this way’, or ‘can you do that again, mate?’ Not only can they not hear you, but they’re tired and thirsty and they might just tell you to fuck off. So I’d have to think it through, be where the soldiers were going to be. I made it a mission to second-guess their movements, to work out in which direction they’d be running when they got off a helicopter and just make sure Corporal Ramage was waiting with his camera.
I was also developing an instinct for what photographers call the set-up, which is a picture that tells the story. If you do a proper set-up, no one picks that it was actually staged. During those two weeks in the north of Australia covering K92, I was on the lookout for a set-up picture that would hopefully get a good run because it encapsulated what K92 was all about: a picture that told the rest of the army that soldiers were on exercises in the Top End. I had noticed the tanks as they crossed the numerous rivers and I thought that setting would provide the first part of the picture. But I wanted something else: a human dimension that put the soldier’s life in the forefront. I managed to talk a tank crew into stopping their vehicle mid-river, and then I grabbed one of the soldiers. I got him to take off his boots, and one of them we filled with water. The picture I made – which got a really good run in the army newspaper – featured the soldier sitting on the front of the tank, pouring water from his boot. It was all staged, of course, right down to the look on the soldier’s face. If you look at the picture you see a spontaneous antic during a military exercise, but it was all in my head long before I sourced the tank, the soldier or the boot.
This is another tip for young photographers: you must communicate with people. You have to earn their trust and take control. The soldier in my tank picture wasn’t just sitting there holding a boot filled with water; I had to find him, prep him, get him onside and make him understand that this would make him look good (which it did – his unit loved it). It took some talking and selling and it never would have happened without the spiel. Some of my better-known pictures are set-ups: the picture of the digger walking with a young local in Somalia, and a similar picture from East Timor which ran on the front page of The Daily Telegraph. Both are set-ups with the added bonus of looking spontaneous. A big mistake made by hobbyist photographers is to think that the job is about passive observation of a found object. It’s not. Hang around with a pack of newspaper photographers for one day and you’ll notice them constantly talking to their subjects, cajoling them, corralling them into a better position, calling out to them so they look at the camera.
I really developed this skill while covering K92. If you don’t engage with soldiers, get in their faces and let them know what you want to do, they just ignore you and get on with their jobs. So it was an exhausting couple of weeks with long days out in the dust and heat, catching rides on helicopters, Land Rovers and tanks. But the hardest work was all the cataloguing and filing, which dragged on for weeks after K92. The army needs every negative and print, and every SP tape, catalogued, and it’s the photographers who have to do it. It’s not so bad when you go out for a half-hour gig. But we had hundreds of rolls of film shot at K92, most of them on the brand-new F4 cameras supplied by Nikon before the exercises started. They were a nice bit of gear and nota
ble for the in-built motor drive and a few bits and pieces that made for easier shooting.
As the youngest, I was assigned most of the filing work when we got back to Brisbane. And while I was sorting these hundreds of rolls of film, I had this idea: There’s so much material here – someone should make a book out of it.
That idea would have its day, but right then I had to slow down a bit.
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Some of the best advances in my career occurred out of the blue. For instance, why I was tapped for the mission in Somalia.
During a phase of my life when I’d discovered my profession and calling, a dynamic duo in Canberra were remaking the way Defence did public relations and media. They were Brigadier Adrian d’Hagé, who would succeed in having PR become its own corps, and his star recruit, Ms Lisa Keen.
Lisa was a very smart, very confident woman who was perhaps seven or eight years my senior. She’d been brought in from the private sector by d’Hagé to shake up Defence PR, and direct its work towards mainstream media needs. She was in charge of the Media Support Unit out of Darwin at K92, and I guess you could say our stars aligned: she was having to deal with all these sexist old photographers and officers, many of whom were resentful not only of a woman being in charge over them but a woman who was really good at her job. At the same time, I was enthusiastic, hard-working and open to any new idea or suggestion. I’d work fourteen-hour days, I’d take any job, I was developing my own ideas and I’d contribute to her briefings, not just sit there and roll my eyes. And because of the way Terry Dex ran things at Brisbane, I was already accustomed to anticipating commercial media needs and sending them our pics.