It reached the point where photography was more to me than just a hobby. Exactly what it was to me was harder to define. I moved my photography work to the site Filmic Media. There’s a long but enthralling story of my photography journey below but essentially, I’m always looking for portrait subjects, whether they be portraits of people or portraits of houses or portraits of cars, land, objects, anything. “I picked the camera up and I’d been drowning and the camera was air and it was life.”

Contact me if you have a portrait idea.

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The senior photographer couldn’t be stuffed. It was late on a Friday afternoon, I was a cadet journalist at a newspaper, I had a story to get to and it needed pics. The photographer was meant to drive me there but he was ready for beers and so instead he handed me his Nikon film camera and in two minutes flat he taught me the exposure triangle and then packed me on my way. I got the story. I took the pics. I held my breath as the photographer then disappeared into the darkroom to develop the roll. I was 19 and journalism was my journey. I was a word man. He came back, dropped a couple of black-and-white 8x10s on my desk and said, ‘You’re better at photography than you are at journalism.’ I left that job and went to another newspaper. It had a darkroom and a darkroom technician but no senior photographer. I had to take all the pics for all my stories; I covered rodeos and football and politics and cake competitions and fires and car crashes. These pics went on the back page and the front page and on all the in-betweens. I loved this job. It was the best job I ever had. I moved to another job though because you have to keep moving, the next story, always chasing. In the hurry and in the ambition the pictures fell away. Then one day a long way down the road my daughter asked me if I had a camera and there was one somewhere but I didn’t know if it worked. I went for a walk to test it out. I took photos of horses and trains and pubs and houses and a five minute walk became two hours. Then I tried to take a picture of my daughter. It was a good photo, not great, not pin sharp. My daughter is important to me. I looked at this photo and my breath turned short and the dam of regret and wrong turns was breached and suddenly I was drowning. I picked the camera back up and it was air and it was life. I thought, I’m not good at this, but I have to be. I have to capture people, properly, in essence, their essence.

Filmic Media is that. That journey, that dam, that air. It’s the need to create portraits, perfect portraits, telling portraits, whatever that means, whatever that is, whatever that takes.

That web address again: www.filmicmedia.com.au.
Campbell Mattinson, Filmic Media.