Whenever I travel overseas I always muse about how little history Australia has compared to the rest of the world but that’s because I live in suburbia and forget that driving just an hour or two inland is like travelling back in time. It makes me wonder how many tourists miss out on country town Australia by never leaving the beaten track.
There are plenty of stunning coastal destinations within easy reach of Brisbane but when I need a fix of the country I head to the Southern Downs region; an area that contains the perfect mix of history and nature.
From Brisbane, take the Cunningham Highway towards Warwick. Admittedly the drive is a little dull for the first hour but picks up around Aratula which is a great place to stop for some local produce and a bite to eat. Shortly after you’ll enter Main Range National Park as you drive up Cunningham’s Gap through the Great Dividing Range. There’s a number of hikes of various lengths around here, but as I always tend to visit in the warmer months I prefer to appreciate the mountainous scenery from my air-conditioned car.
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View from Cunningham's Gap[/caption]
I tend to always visit the region during summer so I can photograph the sunflowers but with many outstanding outdoor locations the cooler months would be more pleasant for exploring. There’s a variety of ways to spend your time in the Southern Downs region so here’s a few of my favourites to pick and choose from. Click the map for exact locations.
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Mount Marley lookout, Stanthorpe[/caption]
Girraween National Park:
Being a photographer I try and seek out unusual landscapes and Girraween National Park, 30 mins south of Stanthorpe, certainly ticks my boxes. Situated in the Granite Belt the landscape is primarily rock with huge boulders in impossible formations, walking tracks and waterholes. We visited in summer but apparently in the cooler months the place is alive with wildflowers. There’s also camping options if you’re that way inclined.
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What’s your favourite thing to do in the Southern Downs?
Wandering through a field completely alone yet surrounded by flowers as tall as a man who whisper in the breeze to the sky above, ablaze with colour. Watching sunset from the middle of a sunflower field is one of the stranger, yet loveliest things I've done.
The blooming of the sunflowers in the Southern Downs region is an event on every local photographer’s calendar as there are few things more picturesque than rows upon rows of the biggest, brightest flowers raising their faces to the sky. The places to spot them are around the areas of Warwick and Allora but they can be tough to find as they only bloom for a month of two throughout summer and only if conditions are prime.
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Without doing the proper research you’ll probably find yourself like me on my first visit, driving along Warwick’s Sunflower Route expecting to be surrounded by fields of gold but finding only fields of green. My best advice is to check in regularly with Warwick QLD Visitor Information Centre’s Facebook page from December to March and once they announce the sunflowers are in bloom wait until people start posting their own photos to the page so you can hone in on specific locations. If you’re really keen there are a number of Brisbane Photography Facebook groups full of sunflower seekers who’ll be sure to offer advice.
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The three best locations I’ve found (based on ease of entry and safe areas to pull over) are:
The mean sky gave me an F-[/caption]
It’s always recommended to get the farmer’s permission before you go tromping about in the fields but in all honesty I found it difficult to know which properties to approach and just tried to be as respectful of the flowers as possible. I definitely recommend taking gumboots as the ground can get squelchy if there’s been rain about and be prepared for bees and flies aplenty. Being the height of summer also remember the hat and sunscreen; I came away burnt after only twenty minutes.
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The gumboots I've had in my car for 5 years finally came in handy.[/caption]
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'There Was' by Charles Blackman[/caption]
If I haven’t mentioned it before my favourite artist is Charles Blackman and, in particular, his Schoolgirls and Angels series. He manages to imbue his simple paintings with this lonely darkness that I just adore. And it’s a theme that all my favourite art pieces seem to have in common. Lonely darkness.
Anyway, recently I learned how to make a photo of day look like night. It’s really simple. Basically you drop your exposure and blacks and add an overall blue tone, but for some reason I’d never been able to figure out how to do it, and not for lack of trying. Sometimes the simplest Photoshop tricks completely elude me. But now I finally have the tool I need to create my own lonely darkness.
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‘The Stars are Falling’ was initially inspired by an episode of 'Angel' I watched long ago that featured a storyline where the sky rained with fire. It got me thinking about the moment of peace the world would experience when everyone looked to the sky wondering what was going on, before everything erupted into chaos. With all that has gone on in 2016, political upheaval, the deaths of so many icons, as well as personal struggles such as losing my job, alienating friends, and reaching a plateau with my art, it’s impossible to ignore that everything is changing. All of which has manifested in this image, ‘The Stars are Falling’. I started the year with an image that symbolises rebirth, ‘Metamorphosis’ and I feel as if this new image metaphorically completes that “circle of life”.
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Metamorphosis[/caption]
The rooftop in the image is from the bakery of my favourite restaurant, ‘Harvest’, in Newrybar and was photographed during a road trip I took exactly a year ago. The ‘meteor’ is a stock photo sourced from Unsplash and is attributed to NASA. The girl is, of course, a self-portrait, photographed, as usual, in my backyard.
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Happy New Year and here's to 2017 and whatever it shall bring. :)
For me every new year is a chance for reinvention so with 2017 on the horizon I have been going through a period of deep self -reflection. 2015 was the year I became an artist and I built a portfolio of 40 pieces that I’m very proud of. 2016 was the year I spent most of my time on marketing that body of work and as a result I only created 12 pieces. It has been a year of highs and lows; a year where I started to make money and gain recognition for my work but also, somehow, had no time to create art.
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I’ve learnt so much about the art world—mainly that art is consumed differently from its hey-day in the 80s and yet it’s still trying to operate on an antiquated gallery-focused model. I’ve learnt that the art world, particularly in Australia, is divided between traditional and subversive and my work doesn’t fit into either box.
The Internet has given artists the opportunity for wider reach but it’s also flooded with competition so I’ve spent the majority of my year learning about arts marketing and implementing different strategies with limited success. I’ve seen so many fellow artists become marketers and educators – setting up online courses, mastering email marketing funnels, trying to make their work go viral – all in the hope that they’ll begin to make serious money from their art but in the process they lose the essence of what it is to make art. I don’t want this to happen to me. I signed up to be an artist, not a teacher, not a marketer.
So I’ve decided to stop buying into all this arts marketing crap and getting caught in the nets of people trying to capitalise on artists and instead focus on the things that make my heart sing.
The one useful thing I’ve learned is to picture exactly what I want my life and my business to look like and then work towards that goal every day.
This may surprise you but my ultimate goal is to travel and either get paid to do it or live off a passive income. In fact this line has been in my bio since day 1: “My dream is to travel around Australia creating photographic art in rural and iconic locations.” While I have been taking baby steps towards this goal, mainly through my travel Instagram account (@hayleyrtravels), it’s unlikely anyone looking at my art would even know this about me.
That’s why in 2017 I want to launch something new. My four passions are photography, travel, art and writing, in that order, and so I’m trying to create something that combines all four. I don’t know exactly what it will look like and the experimentation process has been really hard because it’s a whole new way of thinking and working, and I’m the kind of person who gets frustrated if I’m not good at something right away. It feels weird to be back at the drawing board but I know if I keep at it something will come together eventually.
The things I am working towards are:
As I learnt from my 2015 Exposing Illusions project I am a better artist when I have a project. So this new project will involve art pieces inspired by travel. I intend to create much more simply, art that takes hours instead of weeks, because I long for the wilderness and need to stop spending so much time at a computer.
I plan to sell prints and products made from my work using an online distributor at a price everyone can afford in the hope that these sales will fund future travel. I will also sell limited edition feature prints created by a professional printer at a higher, more collectible, price point. I will market this work to commercial, travel and stock agencies in the hope they see value in what I do.
Naturally this all terrifies me. Deep down I’m convinced that I will only ever be mediocre no matter how hard I try. But I need to try regardless.
For now I ask for your patience while I create this project and your assistance to help me fine-tune it. I’d like you to be my test audience and will ask for your honest feedback on various components. I’d love for you to be my champions, helping me get the word out about this project. I know that it will be a long journey to my end goal but I’m excited about all the things I will learn on the way. Come for a ride?
Lately I've spent a lot of time staring at mountains and experiencing that feeling--you know the one--that is a mix of awe and wonder, interconnectedness and insignificance. There is no word for this feeling in the English language, or maybe any language, but it feels a lot like joy, or at least a kind of enchantment. When the clouds clear or the fog rises revealing a rainbow or a snow capped mountain and there you are to experience this rare and beautiful moment as woven by the elements, well, perhaps it would be an injustice to try and contain it in a single word.
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Staring at mountains, Hooker Valley, New Zealand[/caption]
I travel to find these moments and I photograph to try and immortalise them, but much like words, there is no medium on earth that can accurately convey the experience.
This is what my image 'Enchanted' came to be about but as usual it did not start out that way, and as usual it ended as an image of a character interacting with nature, as the majority of my photos do.
A lot of photographers who create the kind of art that I do have a very simple formula which is:
a) a basic setting that isn't important to the story
b) a moody sky
c) a character
d) something interesting happening to the character
e) an overall colour tone, desaturation and overlaying of a texture
My work has been getting too complicated and time consuming of late and arguably has suffered for it (or at least, I have) so I wanted to simplify things by creating an image using this formula. Without any plan I threw on a wig and a dress and posed for the camera, dancing, swishing, jumping and it was fun and freeing but probably not recommended because it's difficult to come up with a concept after the fact. I chose the final pose because it was the most pleasing to the eye, but it was a challenge to work with because she's observing, not interacting and that made it hard to put her in a story.
The mountains were photographed from a train in Scotland and have been on my mind as a potential scene for forever and a day. Because she's observing I had to give her something interesting to observe and I liked how the mountains complemented the colour scheme of her hair and skin. The clouds are from the original mountain scene but combined from a number of different shots. It was at this point seeing the scene become the story that I ditched the formula and yet again indulged my subconscious desire to run off into nature.
She is standing on a stormwater drain mainly as a way of making her the correct perspective, but also, don't you find you like to climb things to get a better view of pretty scenes?
I added the rainbow because I wanted to create one of those rare and beautiful moments I talked about earlier. An epic mountain is one thing but an epic mountain with a rainbow is exactly the kind of scene that makes you experience that exquisite feeling there is no word for, but feels a lot like joy.
FOOTNOTE: Two days after writing this post we had a stormy afternoon and with it came the closest, brightest double rainbow I've ever seen. As the neighbours came outside to view it it was a lovely to see so many people enchanted by the moment.
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Detail of image - final touches with the oil paint filter to make the image resemble a painting[/caption]
Last spring I created the image, 'Dance of the Jacarandas' to celebrate the month when my city turns purple, so after a trip to Japan earlier this year it seemed appropriate to make a companion cherry blossom themed piece for release this spring. I'm thinking of turning this into a regular series and am toying with poincianas, wattle or bougainvillea next, so if you know of any good spots ...
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A cherry blossom sighting in Japan (my mother can't be trusted with my camera).[/caption]
It's embarrassing to admit, but back in my university / goth years, on the 1st of Spring I would dress up as the spring fairy, buying fresh flowers and weaving them into a wreath, and if I felt brave enough (because clearly playing dress ups was not already brazen enough) I would give out floral gifts to strangers (there is photographic evidence of this but it's such a terrible shame that I can't currently find it). If this series is any indication I guess I still like to play dress ups and celebrate spring.
To my surprise cherry blossom trees are actually quite tough to photograph. For one, they are totally inundated with people. They bloom for approximately 11 days once a year so if you blink you'll miss 'em, which of course means everyone wants to experience them in person. We were on a regular commuter bus in Kyoto and as we drove past a cherry blossom tree, EVERYONE took out their phone cameras and started snapping away. Some companies even pay an employee to sit in a park all day during hanami (cherry blossom viewing) reserving the best picnic spot for when they all finish work. The Japanese also have this astounding ability that, while it may seem as if there's no one nearby, as soon as you point your camera at something at least one person will appear and stand in your way for as long as it takes for you to give up and move on. It's uncanny.
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Keage Incline, Kyoto: I got totally lost at Nanzen-ji temple looking for a waterfall and found this instead.[/caption]
Secondly, Japan has become quite polluted. On my previous two visits this wasn't the case so I'm sad to say it is now. I love photographing overcast scenes because colours become deep and saturated, even sunny days bring blue skies and lots of contrast, but pollution? It does no favours for anyone.
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Philosopher's Walk, Kyoto, and the most boring type of sky.[/caption]
Lastly, cherry blossoms come in a stunning array of colours and varieties but the majority of them are this wishy washy pale pink colour that just blends right in with the polluted sky and looks kind of mucky.
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Pale flowers, Philosopher's Walk, Kyoto[/caption]
The two trees used in my final image were both photographed at Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo on the first day of our trip, right before cherry blossom season had actually begun. They have thicker flowers and are a rarer rich, pink colour which is quite lovely. If anyone knows what type of sakura these are, I beg you to tell me so I can buy one. The other elements that make up the final photo are included below.
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I had the photo all ready to go but my Mum pointed out that the hedges didn't have any fallen flowers on them. It's these kinds of details that really make a composite believable and is why getting a second opinion is so important. (And also why I then had to spend an extra day on the image.)
As with 'Dance of the Jacarandas' I created a brush out of a cherry blossom to paint some falling blooms into the scene and then added some more petal shaped brush strokes. Falling cherry blossoms are quite lovely and to experience them is like being caught in a soft, warm snowstorm. I have a video of what it's like featuring my mother being delightful but I can't figure out how to post it with Wordpress so check out my Facebook instead.
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Sakura Photoshop brush[/caption]
And then of course, there's me, photographed as usual in my backyard using an op shop parasol and an eBay dress. I really liked this pose but there were some problems with it so I photographed it again a few days later, only to decide that I preferred the original pose afterall.
You can see more of my travel photography (I'm not up to Japan yet but I'll get there eventually) at my travel Instagram account @hayleyrtravels where I post a photo daily. Sayonara!
There are some honeyeaters that flit about my house feeding on nectar. A few years ago one of them got trapped inside the house and after it eventually tired I scooped it up in my hands and set it free. After that I began to imagine a story where the little bird came back each day offering gifts.
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I, of course, grabbed my camera first.[/caption]
About a year later it happened again. Again it tired and again I set it free. But shortly after I heard some twittering at the front door. I went to look and found a family of honeyeaters flying about, tweeting like crazy and one flew right up to my face before flitting away. It probably meant nothing but I will forever believe that the family were trying to thank me for saving the trapped bird.
Not so long after, a magpie started hanging around the house. It seemed to have something stuck inside its mouth so it let me hand feed it, and sometimes I would throw food in the air and it would fly up to catch it. When I sat outside on the patio it would sit on the back of the chair opposite me. This continued for a week or so before it (hopefully) flew off to his next destination.
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Image courtesy of my father[/caption]
I mention these stories because, clearly, I am Dr Doolittle. (I am! And I won't hear otherwise!)
This image, 'The Woods Welcome', is the second in the two part 'Wildflower' series, and follows on from 'Where She Wanders'. That sure is a lot of W's.
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In my first post about the series I mentioned how it was inspired by the urge to 'get back to nature' that many of us have. But it was also inspired by the nurturing instinct that humans have towards animals and our desire to humanise wild things.
I'd always intended on incorporating animals into my work but I first wanted to make sure my compositing skills were up to scratch and, let me tell you, cutting out animal fur is definitely a challenge (but still not hard as my damn curly hair). I'm currently working with this method which is the best way I've found to cut out hair/fur, although it's unfortunately still not foolproof.
The image is primarily composed of photos from Japan. The deer was photographed at beautiful Miyajima, the rabbits at Ōkunoshima (an island full of rabbits!!!), the background bamboo scene at Tenryuji Temple gardens in Arashiyama and the flowers at Kyoto Botanical Gardens. I photographed myself in my yard and the bird at Notre Dame in France.
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Like 'Where She Wanders', ‘The Woods Welcome’ is a limited edition print of 20. The cost of $200 (Australian dollars which converts to approx $150USD and 110 GBP) includes free shipping worldwide and a 5% donation to the RSPCA. It measures 10.9 x 25 inches excluding border and is printed on fine art archival paper. Prints are individually signed and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
Purchase here.
Recently the opportunity to do a newborn photo shoot literally fell into my lap - when my neighbour handed me this doll and suggested I use it in a photo. Made by Reborn Baby Central, it's delightfully creepy so how could I resist?
It sat in my room for a few days mocking me with its lifelikeness and I had to continually check that it hadn't opened its eyes while my back was turned. But eventually I grew fond of the damn thing and so I decided to photograph it as if it were a newborn (or in this case, reborn) baby. I enjoy the work that newborn photographers do but I sadly lack whatever maternal hormones are required for baby-rearing and so being able to do a baby shoot without unintentionally hurting it, upsetting it, or getting pooped on was immensely appealing. People that are parents, I salute you.
I did a little research into newborn photography techniques and learnt that with the right props, a shallow depth of field and some basic compositing skills it's not such a tricky thing to do. Although I'm sure the actual difficulty lies in trying to keep a real life child asleep or amused.
There are a number of Photoshop tricks newborn photographers employ, like reducing skin redness, selective blurring and skin softening and I thought it was hilarious that this doll is so lifelike that it has red skin patches, wrinkles and discolouration that I needed to retouch just like a real child. I've also discovered how to use Photoshop's mixer brush to retouch skin which is my new favourite thing.
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Actual background and before skin retouching[/caption]
Naturally, being a vampire baby I then had to do some fancy Photoshop work to give the images a dark twist. I have tried to do this tastefully as someone pointed out that people may take offence. I genuinely hope this isn't the case and that these images can be enjoyed for the lighthearted fun they are. Let me know your favourite!
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When I was small we lived in a house that backed onto undeveloped land and so the neighbourhood kids and I would grab our bikes and head off exploring, making up creation stories and brushing shoulders with snakes and wild brumbies.
When I was a teenager we lived in a house that backed onto rainforest and so my friends and I would head off exploring, climbing mountains and swimming in undiscovered waterfalls.
Perhaps because of these experiences or perhaps because a part or me is just a little bit 'wild', these days whenever I'm driving through the country I feel the urge to ditch my car and run off into the wilderness to befriend the animals and be at one with nature. But I'm not much of a camping fan and I really hate the cold so I have to quell my Disney-esque urges and just keep driving. Instead I decorate my house in a style that can only be called 'woodlands' as evidenced by this peek at one of my bookshelves.
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Mind the mess - perhaps I should have dusted first ...[/caption]
But this is why I love creating photographic art. Because now I can be the girl who wanders the forest wooing the flora and fauna, and yet still stay warm and dry.
'Where She Wanders' is the first image in the two part 'Wildflower' series. The second will be released in coming weeks. Trying to match the colours of the two images while still making each scene look realistic has been immensely challenging and has taken me nearly two months to complete, the longest I've ever worked on a piece, and most of that was just spent refining colour.
The poses for the images were photographed in my studio (backyard). The background bamboo scene was photographed in Japan at Tenryuji Temple gardens in Arashiyama and the deer in Nara Park. The grass came from Stonehenge and the birds from Notre Dame in France as trained by the fabulous Bird Man. The flowers came from a number of different locations after much experimentation to find those that fit.
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It shall have pride of place among my woodslandy decor, acting as a reminder to always nuture wildness.
'Where She Wanders' is a limited edition print of 20 that will go on sale on July 10, 2016 at 9pm (AEST). The cost of $200 (Australian dollars which converts to approx $150USD and 110 GBP) includes free shipping worldwide and 5% of each sale will be donated to my local RSPCA. It measures 10.9 x 25 inches excluding border and is printed on fine art archival paper. Prints will be individually signed and are accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.
Purchase here: https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/ExposingIllusions from July 10.
“Like a wild flower; she spent her days, allowing herself to grow, not many knew of her struggle, but eventually all; knew of her light.” - Nikki Rowe
Recently I was asked by some work friends to create a special birthday commission. The gentleman subject, Russell, is a golf fan and world traveller so I knew straight away that I wanted to create a unique piece that combined his two passions. Sadly a trip to Europe wasn't in the budget so I had to use scenes I'd photographed previously for the background. But since the majority of the scenes I had in mind were captured from a moving train I was unsure what angle I'd need to photograph Russell from to make him fit realistically.
To get some answers I first chose a bunch of possible scenes and then scoured the web for photos of golfers taken at different angles to see which fit the best. As you can see in the example, the first golfer looked the most natural, followed closely by the third and as it turned out, these golfers looked the best in EVERY scene regardless of the angle the original scene had been photographed at. Curious.
But what angle had THESE golfers been photographed at? Without access to this information I had to take a stab in the dark and guessed that both were taken from waist height with the camera straight on - but looking at the original images they appear to be photographed at quite different angles. Even more curious.
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Now I totally lack the skills to confidently look at a scene and guess what angle it was photographed from, but I needed concrete answers before the client shoot! So I did this little compositing experiment. I stood in my backyard and photographed myself at all different angles so that I could overlay each person onto my scene and figure out which fit best. This way I'd know exactly how to photograph my model. It's also a handy reference guide when looking at the work of other photographers to compare the horizon lines and figure out what angle it was shot from. Genius! I've added a link to the end of this post so you can download and use this tool too. Although keep in mind that it's not foolproof because distance and camera tilt are also important factors.
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Free compositing tool[/caption]
So based on my original guess I added the waist height example into my scene and, WHAT?, it didn't fit! Yet it turns out, the one photographed at thigh height was a match. So now I could confidently photograph Russell from this angle and have him fit my scene. Brill!
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Waist height example on left, doesn't fit as well as thigh high example on right[/caption]
Photographing Russell was a delight and zooming around the golf course in his buggy was a tonne of fun. I spent about an hour photographing Russell using various locations and poses but it was actually the 13th image I shot that ended up being the winner because the pose was the most natural.
To create the scene I used three different images of grass, 1 lake image, 3 photos of mountains and 5 images to build the sky! The ball was photographed wizzing along the ground and the geese just happened to fly over as we were shooting.
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I did have a problem with moire in Russell's clothes, which is the flaring you get in patterned fabric (and coincidentally also happened in the dress I'm wearing in the examples). And because of this I learnt that there's actually a moire reduction slider hidden in Lightroom's adjustment tools. Who knew?
So now I have one happy client, one happy photographer who got to hang out on a golf course and learn some new things, and hopefully one happy blog audience who now have a handy compositing tool which you can download here. :)
Whenever I travel overseas I always muse about how little history Australia has compared to the rest of the world but that’s because I live in suburbia and forget that driving just an hour or two inland is like travelling back in time. It makes me wonder how many tourists miss out on country town […]
Wandering through a field completely alone yet surrounded by flowers as tall as a man who whisper in the breeze to the sky above, ablaze with colour. Watching sunset from the middle of a sunflower field is one of the stranger, yet loveliest things I’ve done. The blooming of the sunflowers in the Southern Downs […]
If I haven’t mentioned it before my favourite artist is Charles Blackman and, in particular, his Schoolgirls and Angels series. He manages to imbue his simple paintings with this lonely darkness that I just adore. And it’s a theme that all my favourite art pieces seem to have in common. Lonely darkness. Anyway, recently I […]
For me every new year is a chance for reinvention so with 2017 on the horizon I have been going through a period of deep self -reflection. 2015 was the year I became an artist and I built a portfolio of 40 pieces that I’m very proud of. 2016 was the year I spent most […]
Lately I’ve spent a lot of time staring at mountains and experiencing that feeling–you know the one–that is a mix of awe and wonder, interconnectedness and insignificance. There is no word for this feeling in the English language, or maybe any language, but it feels a lot like joy, or at least a kind of enchantment. When […]
Last spring I created the image, ‘Dance of the Jacarandas’ to celebrate the month when my city turns purple, so after a trip to Japan earlier this year it seemed appropriate to make a companion cherry blossom themed piece for release this spring. I’m thinking of turning this into a regular series and am toying with poincianas, wattle or bougainvillea […]
There are some honeyeaters that flit about my house feeding on nectar. A few years ago one of them got trapped inside the house and after it eventually tired I scooped it up in my hands and set it free. After that I began to imagine a story where the little bird came back each day offering […]
Recently the opportunity to do a newborn photo shoot literally fell into my lap – when my neighbour handed me this doll and suggested I use it in a photo. Made by Reborn Baby Central, it’s delightfully creepy so how could I resist? It sat in my room for a few days mocking me […]
When I was small we lived in a house that backed onto undeveloped land and so the neighbourhood kids and I would grab our bikes and head off exploring, making up creation stories and brushing shoulders with snakes and wild brumbies. When I was a teenager we lived in a house that backed onto rainforest […]
Recently I was asked by some work friends to create a special birthday commission. The gentleman subject, Russell, is a golf fan and world traveller so I knew straight away that I wanted to create a unique piece that combined his two passions. Sadly a trip to Europe wasn’t in the budget so I had […]
