Stories

The volunteer organisers of the massive Daylesford Foto Biennale this year bettered the impressive inaugural festival in both scope and size.

The against-the-odds success of the inaugural Daylesford Foto Biennale is the latest in a string of initiatives by respected commercial photographer, AIPP life member, and recently installed local ratepayer, Jeff Moorfoot.

Unlike its hard edged, high contrast counterpart in Australia, the Golden State’s sunshine often has a kind of warm, enveloping quality that seems ever so subtly to open up the shadows and soften the highlights. Perhaps it’s something to do with the cold Pacific Ocean which every summer creates dense fogs along the coast for weeks at a time. Or maybe it’s the ever present photochemical haze created by car exhaust and, in some cases, the vegetation on California’s chapparal clad hills. Whatever the particulars of its origins, it is an ideal light for landscape photography.

Photo Review was privileged to be able to interview Mr Masaya Maeda during our visit to Canon’s headquarters in the Shimomaruko area of Tokyo on 8 February. At the time of the interview, Canon had just announced total consolidated net sales for 2010 reached almost 3707 billion Yen and represented growth of 15.5% over the previous year.

Contact, Photographs from the Australian War Memorial Collection is a powerful collection of some 200 images drawn from The Australian War Memorial’s collection of 900,000 photographs of Australians at war. Written and assembled by the AWM’s Curator of Photographs, Dr Shaune Lakin, Contact is not just another collection of stodgy official war photographs. Instead it sets out to illustrate how photography was used both to record and portray Australians at war.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is ø¢â‚¬Ëœshould I buy a digital camera now, or wait until the prices drop some more?’. There is no short or easy answer to such a question. Instead, one has first to find out in some detail what sort of photography the potential digital camera buyer thinks they want to do. Then you need to know the state of their computer hardware and finally, what sort of budget they have to work with. At every stage you have to be asking yourself if analogue photography could deliver a better cost benefit ratio. Taking someone through this process gives one a real appreciation for the challenges facing the sales staff in Australia’s camera stores.