Profiles

Q: How long have you been taking pictures?
A: "How long taking pictures seriously?" you ask. It's not serious business, it's fun! I was a journalist who picked up a camera to do photojournalism. I did freelance work for newspapers and magazines, then I moved on to shooting television documentaries. As much as humanly possible I picked subjects that were of great interest to me.


Bills, Bills and More Bills

And, of course, over the years your interests change. When I began making docos, what I wanted to do most was to travel and have adventures. The first doco I worked on was in Papua New Guinea on a search to find a tribe in the Highlands that had had very little contact with whites.

The next was the climbing of Ball's Pyramid, a 550-metre spire jutting out of the sea near Lord Howe Island. I've worked on other TV docos about caving and whitewater canoeing in Australia and PNG, sea-kayaking in PNG, mountaineering in New Zealand, cross-country skiing, scuba diving and sailing.

As I grew older and wiser, my interests grew wider and wiser, and I started making wildlife and indigenous culture documentaries. I did these as co-productions with channels such as the ABC, BBC, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, ZDF Germany, NDR Japan and ORF Austria.

When shooting the docos I always had a still camera close to hand. I would get what I could on stills -  though it was a bit frustrating because the movie footage always had priority.

I've grown wiser again and now I'm re-discovering still photography (digital is making it a fascinating journey). The weight of still cameras and their tripods, compared to Super 16 film cameras, also makes the journey lighter.

Q: Do you remember your first photograph?
A: I took my first picture very late in life - when I was about 15. I borrowed a camera and went to Taronga Zoo. I couldn't believe my luck. All that raw material there to photograph, presented in front of me and no one wanted to charge me any money to take photos! But nobody paid me any money later for the photos, either.

Q: Your favourite camera and lens?
A: Canon - first the 10D then the 5D, now the 5D Mark II - they just keep getting better. My favourite lenses? For the BIG picture: Canon Zoom 20-35mm. For more pictures, rather than big pictures, the Canon Zoom 35-350mm. This lens is heavy but, for a lens with lots of millimetres, it's done lots of kilometres.

Q: Which photographers do you particularly admire?
A: Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams and Frans Lanting. If I was marooned on a desert island for a year and could choose only one photographic book, I'd take a big one of Cartier-Bresson's. He was the master observer and recorder of human behaviour.

Q: Three photography books that have influenced you?
A: I'm more a book grazer than a reader/digester, so I don't really have three favorite photo books. I like to look at many books and many photographs.

Q: Photographic websites you recommend.
A: Same applies as with books. However, I've been to www.luminous-landscape.com more than most others. I enjoy searching for other photographers' websites to find images that sing to me.


I first saw Camel Rock from the air when I was flying down the coast with a friend in his light aircraft. We were impressed with the rock, so we circled it to get a better look. It was less than half a kilometre from the shore and immediately I knew it would be worth going back to get a good landscape shot of it. We got a GPS reading and back home I located it on maps – not far from Bermagui on the south coast of NSW. I drove back there in the summer of 2006. I had a hunch it would be good in the early morning light, even though it would be back lit. I checked sunrise time which was 5.45. I made sure I was there at 5 to find the right camera position. The first rays of the sun were obscured by cloud but as it crept above the horizon it lit the cloud that was scattering higher in the sky. It was still quite dark, so I needed a long shutter speed. But this is what I wanted for the effect of making waves look like mist. I settled on 3 sec., which at 100 ISO gave me an aperture of f22. I was using a Canon EOS 5D, with a Canon EF 20-35mm zoom lens.

Contact details
Best way is via my website www.garysteer.com.au email or phone 02 9557 0823

Gary's work on show
Frameworks Lightwave
Recent work capturing impressionistic photographs of the sea and the way people use it as a playground.
An outdoor gallery by the Manly Art Gallery and Museum, 27 Mar. - 30 Aug. 2009

Brunswick St Gallery, Fitzroy, Melbourne . This will be with two others, a photographer and a painter, on a theme of landscape and nature, with a title yet to be decided. 28 Aug-10 Sept 2009