Melbourne
Victoria
(61) 417 103 033
Photographer - Writer
I never thought I could change the world with my photographs.
I only ever thought that by letting the world change me, an interpreting that change, I might be able to tell a story.
The hope was that people would get something from the story.
Bringing a photograph to someone, to tell a story, can be as complex or as simple as the story you wish to tell.
Photographers should want to tell a story, even if that story is just a fleeting emotion.
Bring passion to your story. If you wish, try and bring beauty to people.
Or if you need, lift the scales from their eyes.
Sometimes the shot is there for the taking, sometimes you need to wait, sometimes it needs to be stalked.
Then there are times like these where you can't quite believe you are actually seeing what you see.
The world is a truly surreal place...
The beauty in design is that it is everywhere. Nature, urban decay, the physical form.
Beauty is everywhere.
I hoped that this did actually say Hong Kong.
This shoot pre-dated The Matrix.
I think I saw Trinity before the Wachowski Brothers.
Sometimes the story is all the more enjoyable when you make it up yourself...
In life, I often find that my perspective on things is developed by where and how I look at things.
To understand better the perspective of a child, look at it both with a child's wonder and a child's height.
The ordinary becomes monstrous in scale. Life screams by, when it doesn't see you. Reality changes...
The incongruity of the subject when seen from a different perspective informed much of what I tried to do as a photographer.
This was probably more true when I photographed architecture. Some architects loved what I did, what I saw, in their designs.
Others, not so.
The truth of the image, the success of what I was trying to say, for me was when I brought interest to a design detail or changed a perception about a building just by looking at it differently...
That defined success as a photographer.
Petri Miniotis, adidas Asia Pacific, 1990's
When I started as a student, we learned about film, about chemistry, about art and technique in a darkened room. As my business grew, after a rough and hungry start, I spent more time than I can remember standing in a darkroom, working prints into something that resembled my imagination.
The strange thing about technique (and the funny thing about life), is that you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to be perfect, to control everything.
What success I have found occurs when you let go of the desire to control and embrace freedom.
Then, you have to have fun...
...and more fun.
So much of what we try to do is crippled by the urge to be cool, the desire to be respected by peers.
Most of what we say we enjoy in life, what we aspire to do and work so hard for, is to have fun.
Have fun.
I love the idea of trying to capture an emotion, just as much as I like the idea of trying to describe music and how its nuance and subtlety leads to epiphany.
Time will tell if ideas like these are successful. If they aren't, then it isn't because the music is bad or the emotion invalid.
It might be that I still have some work to do...
The simplicity of the everyday, the structure of the things we take for granted,
can become something entirely different when we look at them anew.
Finding the beauty in the every-day can be the photographers greatest tool. Take time.
Technology dominates us.
The sharpness of a lens, the size of a file, the speed of a download.
I still try to seize the opportunity in photography to not be pin sharp, not be perfect, but to be true to an emotion.
When I write, I listen to the principles espoused by Ernest Hemingway,
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
Having said that, all photography is a lie and all writing is filtered through the perspective and the prejudices of the writer; and the person giving the information.